A Few Pre-Christmas e-Learning Items

If you haven’t already done so, take a look at the upcoming workshops for December. You’ll find a complete listing at http://e-learning.mohawkcollege.ca/, in the announcement channel of the splash page. Mostly these sessions are targeted to users of FirstClass and WebCT, but this year we’re making a call to those who would like to see some different topics. Possible sessions include:
-Introduction to Blackboard CE (our successor to WebCT 4.1)
-Constructing Surveys in LimeSurvey (our upgrade to PHPSurveyor)
-Creating Better Images for Your Presentations and the Web

If these sessions are of interest to you, or if you have an idea of other sessions that you’d like to see offered, please send a message to e-Learning@fred.mohawkcollege.ca.

With our FirstClass (FRED as you know it!) network continuing to grow, we’ve just added 20 additional ’sessions’ (licenses) to expand our full complement to 120. This will really help ensure that you’re able to connect when you need to, especially at peak times in the evenings. As well, we’ve purchased licensing to allow us to run (and experiment with) FirstClass ED, the education-focused extension to FirstClass. As we learn more about this platform, we’ll inform you here.

A final comment about FirstClass: in January, we’ll be disallowing any user who attempts to login with any Client older than version 8.3. Over the years we have allowed any version to connect, while hoping that users would voluntarily upgrade (from  http://fred.mohawkcollege.ca/, under Clients). We’re now at a point where we need to force the issue in order to ensure a strong and reliable system. So- spread the word: upgrade your Client and be sure that your students do, too.

As you may already know, we were running a (somewhat unsuccessful) test installation of WebCT 6, the successor to our current production platform 4.1, between January 2006 and summer 2007. This platform has since been replaced by Blackboard CE, Application Pack 2, which is running on a much better application server. We are very encouraged by this platform and are looking forward to running a few test courses on it in January 2008.

Posted by Andrew

Add comment December 3rd, 2007