Instructional Systems Design

• Search the web w/Google Wonder Wheel! http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/technology/google-wheel/ & here: http://www.googlewonderwheel.com/ #

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If the title caught your attention, then chances are:

* you’re an instructor new to online learning or,
* you’re a department administrator seeking to draw instructors to online learning or,
* you’re an instructional designer helping instructors integrate technology into their teaching practices

At any rate, this series is aimed at illustrating how using an LMS – like Moodle – can assist you in transitioning your instruction to the online medium.

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So, where to begin? Let’s talk about what you already DO know: your syllabus.

Every instructor has a “plan” for what content they are going to deliver to their students, what tools and resources they will be using, and how they are going to assess the learning of their students. This is the all-powerful “syllabus”. The syllabus generally has passed some sort of accreditation body – be it the NCLB, the campus curriculum committee, a certification committee – whatever this accreditation body is, it means your syllabus has passed the muster for you to deliver and teach said content in the classroom.

So now – let’s go one step further: Your syllabus is your CONTRACT with your students. Yep. It’s a living, breathing document – it grounds you and your students and sets the expectations for the course. So, let’s make use of this document in bringing you to the online world.

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Hi folks,

I just had to share this! Quite often, the challenges of delivering audio/visual instruction include bandwidth, compression, format, and clarity of content – not to mention cost of software. Well, there is a great tool being offered by TechSmith: The Jing Project.

This tool is AWESOME! If you need to create content to deliver via streaming, this is the tool! It is available for multiple platforms – so no more arguments over PC/Mac. It is easily installed and it runs in the background – it’s there when you need it. It’s easy to use, has a quick instruction guide, and it stores your projects on THEIR servers so you’re not eating up your memory or bandwidth. Just click, create, and then link to the file from your site.  They provide you with 200MB of hosting space and 1GB of bandwidth a month.  That’s sufficient for hosting a few short video tutorials accessed by a class of say 20-25 student users a month.

I’ve never seen clearer screen captures and video-captures of my desktop. It’s AMAZING! So, check this out. They have stated that it is FREE for now (with free sign up), but may become a pay-for-use service later. However, they will provide you with a reasonable time window to allow you to make that decision and download all of your files prior to going to a for-fee service.

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I’m presenting at conferences again.  Here’s the latest:

Topic:  Moodle Site Administration: Bringing Together Technology and Usability (link to course)

Presented at:

• Online Teaching Conference at Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA on June 11-12th
• MoodleMoot San Francisco 2009 held at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, CA on June 17-19th

Access to the materials are freely available to the public.

For attendees of my presentation, I’ve two unique login credentials (choose one to login to the course linked above):

• Online Teaching Conference:
• username: otlconf09
• password: join

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• Moodle Moot SF:
• username: mmoot09
• password: join

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• Moodle Process note: When doing a Moodle installation, you should use 1 server and the processes outlined for backup/restore/reset a course. #
• Using two servers and backing up and restoring across servers, unless you’ve an enterprise MySQL installation and team, is bad practice. #
• Find out how the software was intended to work, how it actually works, and then apply this knowledge. #
• Restoring across servers is going to break links coded in Moodle modules unless the “add a resource” function is used at the activity level. #
• If you’ve already got courses built using an unsecure server and you switch to a secure server, the http will not translate to https. #

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If you’ve already got courses built on Moodle using an unsecure server and you switch to a secure server, the http will not auto-translate to https in all of your course links.  Moodle seeks out the root file path to swap out and update links when courses are restored – meaning it takes the “http://yourserver.com/file.php/###/” and swaps it when restoring courses.  But by default, if you switch to an https server, you’ll have to write a custom script to make the site properly update the file paths in all links.

Restoring across servers is going to break links coded in Moodle modules unless the “add a resource” function is used at the activity level.

Find out how the software was intended to work, how it actually works, and then apply this knowledge.