In This Issue

1. Think-In 2006
2. Centra Community
3. Pilot Tools
4. AO Studies

Blackboard Course Requests

If you are interested in having a Blackboard site created for a course that you are teaching this coming Spring please request those sites at the following link.

http://core.ecu.edu/vel/ITC/
courserequest.htm

This is the same link located on the Blackboard login page.

DE Contingency Plan

As with any technology, Blackboard and other Internet based course delivery systems have the potential for technical problems. See the DE Contingency Plan to prepare for potential downtime or service interruptions.

New Fall 2006:
DE Orientation Website

The DE Orientation will take students step-by-step through the process of how to get started taking classes online. As students work through the orientation they will discover answers to questions such as:

* What is Distance Education?
* Who is my advisor and how do I contact him/her?
* How do I access course material?
* How do I get an email account and a DE Student Card.

http://author.ecu.edu/cs-acad/DEOrientation/index.cfm

Attention:
This semester all Distance Education Students received a bookmark with helpful links.

Academic Outreach
East Carolina University
ecuao@ecu.edu
www.ecu.edu/academicoutreach

Teaching with Technology 2006:
A Think-In of Best Practices

On November 9^th, Academic Outreach hosted the second annual Teaching with Technology 2006: A Think-In of Best Practices. This years’ Think-In featured 29 laptop poster presentations presented by 42 different faculty members across the ECU campus, as well as faculty from Beaufort, Cape Fear, Carteret, Edgecombe, and Nash Community Colleges. The presentations were divided into three tracks: Social Use of Technology, Effective/Efficient Use of Technology, and Innovative Use of Technology.

Think-In presentations varied and included such topics as the use of discussion boards, online communities, collaborative learning environments, podcasting, and tips for streamlining the DE experience.

Think-In attendees evaluated the faculty presentations and a winner was chosen from each track. Congratulations to the following winners:

Social Use of Technology:
That Human Touch – Learning New Skills through Web Based Tutorials
Leonard Trujillo, School of Allied Health Sciences
Tara Jeffs, College of Education

Effective/Efficient Use of Technology:
Using Open Journal Systems (OJS): Creating a Peer Reviewed Online Journal
Katherine O’Connor, College of Education
Terry Atkinson, College of Education
Sue Steinweg, College of Education
Courtney Maness, College of Education

Innovative Use of Technology:
The Design and Use of Multimedia Modules for Teaching Business Modeling and Problem Solving
John Kros, College of Business

A complete list of presenters is available at the Think-In website: http://www.ecu.edu/academicoutreach/think-in2006.cfm

In addition to faculty presentations, the following departments had poster sessions describing faculty and student support services offered: Academic Outreach, Division of Continuing Studies, Information Technology and Computing Services, Joyner Library, and the New Faculty Orientation Program.

If you were not able to attend the Think-In this year, you can see a sampling of the presentations in each track, as well as last year’s Think-In winners on the Think-In webcast: http://www.ecu.edu/academicoutreach/think-in2006.cfm. Thank you to all Think-In presenters and participants for making Teaching with Technology 2006: A Think-In of Best Practices a success!

Join the Centra Community of Users Today!

Centra provides a new experience in distance learning for ECU students and faculty by providing audio, video, file sharing, and collaboration. It is easy to use and faculty and students using the software have been very excited to actually “talk” to each other. It provides an element that is missing when students are accustomed to a face-to-face class. Centra is a webconferencing software solution that is administered byAcademic Outreach. It is being used successfully within all the colleges and for courses in: Nursing, Safety, Decision Sciences, Education, Technology and Computer Sciences.

AO has been able to secure an unlimited license for Centra users which means anyone is able to schedule a class online. We would like to set your class up for the Spring semester and introduce you to the power of Centra. You will receive one-on-one instruction, help with your first few sessions, and your students will receive assistance as well. Please visit: http://ecu.centra.com for more information.

Sharon Collins, John Southworth, and a team of students will work hard to ensure that your session runs smoothly by attending your event and assisting with any technical problems.

Contact Sharon or John today if you would like a Centra account or already have an account and would like to set up your classes. Also, please feel free to use the new online form at: http://falcon.aos.ecu.edu/aotools/Centra/Request_form.htm.

Sharon Collins John Southworth

collinss@ecu.edu southworthj@ecu.edu

328-9126 328-9089

Learning Technologies Available this Spring:
Confluence, Moodle, Open Journal Systems, and Sakai

Academic Outreach (AO) is researching and testing learning technologies that can be used to enhance distance education courses. AO provides the initial infrastructure, technical, and pedagogical support necessary so that interested faculty can integrate this technology into teaching and learning. At this time we are inviting faculty to participate in any of our pilot projects. For more information on each learning technology, visit the Pilot Tools web page http://www.ecu.edu/cs-acad/academicoutreach/pilottools.cfm and contact the pilot project manager.

Current pilot projects include:

Confluence: Collaborative software, usually known as a “wiki”, which allows users to freely create and edit content using any Web browser.
Contact: Ginny Sconiers

Moodle: Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. It is currently housed on a server in AO. Please check out Moodle on: http://eagle.aos.ecu.edu/moodle or http://www.moodle.org.
Contact: Sharon Collins

Open Journal Systems: OJS is a journal management/publishing software that can enable your department to manage and publish scholarly journals online. OJS assists with every stage of the refereed publishing process, from submissions through to online publication and indexing. Through its management systems, its finely grained indexing of research, and the context it provides for research, OJS seeks to improve both the scholarly and public quality of referred research.

OJS: is open source software made freely available to journals worldwide for the purpose of making open access publishing a viable option for more journals, as open access can increase a journal's readership as well as its contribution to the public good on a global scale. It is currently housed on a server in AO and available for use.
Contact: Sharon Collins

Sakai: Sakai is a course management system (CMS) similar to Blackboard. An open-source software management system designed for faculty and students to use in teaching and learning. It is currently housed on a server in AO.
Contact: Biwu Yang

Academic Outreach Research Studies

This Spring Academic Outreach will be conducting two studies, Social Presence in Distance Learning and the Discussion Board. Both studies are designed to enhance communication and interaction among distance education students and their instructors, which should ultimately improve the online learning environment for our faculty and students. A brief description of each study is below.

Social Presence in Distance Learning

Social presence can be defined as the sense of being and belonging that students have in a course. Research currently states that social presence improves student satisfaction with online courses. The goals of this study are to verify that these results are consistent with our DE population and identify specific strategies that create and develop social presence. This Fall we conducted the pilot study and we will begin the second phase of this project in the Spring 07 semester. For more information about the Social Presence in Distance Learning study, please contact Ginny Sconiers at sconiersg@ecu.edu.

Discussion Board Study

Academic Outreach will be researching threaded discussions in the Spring of 2007 in order to develop effective and efficient strategies for their use. Participants in this study will be given a workshop that targets a specific strategy that they will then apply to their course.

Requirements to participate in this study are:

Teaching 2 online courses in the Spring of 2007 in Blackboard.
Currently using the threaded discussion tool.
Time committment: pre and post online survey and a 2 hour workshop that will be scheduled around midterm of the Spring 2007 semester.

If you have questions about the Discussion Board study, please contact Matt Long at longm@ecu.edu.

Happy Holidays from the staff at Academic Outreach!!