itcss-instructionalsupport

Building on positive faculty and student feedback from comparative product evaluations during 2010-11, Wharton Computing has selected the Instructure Canvas LMS as the next-generation replacement for course web sites, assignments and grading activities currently performed using webCafé.

Canvas Instructor Resources The link above will take you into a public Canvas course with access to online documentation and video tutorials maintained by Instructure Canvas and their partner institutions.

Interesting article. I am seeing a trend for truly defining an eportfolio to be a web-based application that belongs to the learner.

Online, on demand access to one textbook (~$19/month) costs more than online, on demand access to every major movie, TV show, and song produced in the US in recent memory ($7.99 + $9.99 = $17.98/month). Really. One textbook costs more than the entire output of the film, television, and music industries combined.

"This wiki was created by Utah Valley University's Innovation Center and is collaboratively authored by Utah higher ed institutions as part of the Instructure Canvas statewide LMS project, hosted and supported by the Utah Education Network (UEN). "

In a few slides, he'd spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines, and certification. While Thrun admired MIT's OpenCourseWare-the university's decade-old initiative to publish online all of its lectures, syllabi, and homework from 2,100 courses-he thought it relied too heavily on videos of actual classroom lectures. That was tapping just one-ninth of the equation, with a bit of course material thrown in as a bonus.

How badges and portfolios collide.

I believe this is the analytics platform mentioned in the demo this morning.

"Salt Lake Community College, in connection with the Utah System of Higher Education Consortium, is adopting Instructure Canvas as its new learning management system. Canvas will replace Blackboard Vista as the system for hosting online learning activities and course content. All courses currently hosted in Blackboard Vista will be moved to Instructure Canvas by July 1, 2012."

For millions of students worldwide, free, open courseware provides a window, if not a front-row seat, to top university classes. The formats are as varied as the people who tune in. Some consist mainly of lectures recorded on iTunes, while other courses seek to replicate a classroom experience by offering study groups, computer-graded tests, and weekly assignments. And while you might get a badge or certificate showing you mastered the material, you generally won't get direct interaction with the professor, who may have recorded the lectures a few years ago. Here is a look at five introductory economics classes: four through open courseware and one in a traditional classroom.

"Welcome to Howard Community College's student training site for Canvas, our new learning management system! Most likely, you will have a course in Canvas in the next few semesters, so we have created this site to explain the main features of the system. Here you will find a module-based training approach, so feel free to peruse each module as needed. In the future, you can use this site as a resource for questions about using Canvas in your courses."

"Not familiar with LTI? Basically it's like Facebook apps or Google widgets for LMSs. The tutorials page shows how to configure LTI tools in supported systems. There's also some handy extensions to LTI that you can learn more about on the extensions page. Tools with a gray label under their configuration xml support LTI extensions that won't work in all systems. Currently LTI extensions are only supported by Canvas. "

"For instructors who are currently teaching courses on Instructure Canvas, the following content package is available to download and import into your course."

Visit this page often to keep up-to-date on the transition and to find resources to help you learn and use Canvas.

"VSU partnered with Flat World Knowledge, a start-up publisher that produces exclusively written e-books with "open" content that can be modified by professors. In a trial with 14 business courses, students would be required to pay $20 and receive a Flat World e-book and digital learning supplements. (The university and a local grant have been covering the cost, so far.)"

Disrupting Ourselves, The Problem of Learning in Higher Education

Great article by Randy Bass. There is a reference to the eportfolio model that C2L is starting to create. He also aligns eportfolios and PLE's. [E-portfolios, or Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), or whatever they are named-as something that enables students to weave these connections back and forth across the formal and experiential curricula-will be an essential element of our response to this disruptive moment. Randy also mentions the emerging discussions about learning analytics.

Textbooks By Course | New & Used Books, eBooks, Rent Books Help your student body save big on textbooks. Create a completely free textbook exchange to let students trade books to each other.

"the best chance to make an immediate and meaningful impact on the price of textbooks is to facilitate the merging of traditional and free content, allowing instructors to include exactly what is necessary, and freeing students from the rigid and expensive traditional offerings from academic publishers. In this model, "book" costs are lowered regardless of output format. If we are cognizant of ways of merging different types of content in order to get the biggest academic bang for the buck, we must also be mindful of methods to access this content; to break it apart, to "disaggregate" it from the traditional bounds of textbooks and to present it to students in an effective manner."

Warning: This is a vendor perspective...

"The university president has expressed interest in the idea of exploring mechanisms for professors to publish textbooks online, and to receive appropriate academic credit for it," Mr. Carey said.

"Papertrell is a cloud-based, feature rich, book-app platform built specifically for publishers, authors, content owners or anyone to convert books into stunning, interactive apps that run across multiple devices. "