Last night, I finished (most likely) creating WebCT courses shells for every School of Continuing Studies course held this summer.  They total over 100 courses.  So now, every Summer SCS course has a WebCT counterpart for use at anytime.  We have been doing this since the Summer of last year.  Overall, it is great for us to invest a block of time to create courses all at once instead having them spread out.  As well, it is beneficial to have all of the courses created ahead of time to give SCS the chance to create effective course materials and apply them in a timely manner.  On the flip side, I finished deleting 100+ Fall SCS courses (after the term is over, SCS backs up all of the courses for record keeping) and am finishing deleting old cohort cohorts.  Bartlett will be fresh and clean in a matter of days!

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From Heather:

As you may or may not know, our annual WebCT license key expires tomorrow.  As is always the case, they do not send the keys until a few days before and, as is always the case, the renewal process has not been a smooth one.  Our current status is that Bartlett (backup server) was rebooted due to a system malfunction and the key has been applied successfully.  The renewal information that we received for Chronicles indicated the wrong Host/IP address so it will not accept the renewal key.  Work order 453390 has been opened with “BlackCT”.  I will send a confirmation when I have successfully applied the renewal for the live server.

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At a meeting to discuss the findings of a university task force on teaching and career development, Harvard professors called student apathy for learning–expressed by classroom Web surfing and lack of energy–an “elephant in the room” contributing to a decline in the quality of classroom and general education at the university.

(Via Web Surfing is Elephant in Harvard Faculty Room)

When I’m not on the clock at CSP, I spend a lot of time reading and researchign about technology in the classroom, and community building collaborative tools. I even developed a WebCT course to teach the use of wiki’s, blogs, and podcasts in the classroom.

I believe this particular issue has two different solutions:

• Students do need to be held a higher level of accountability.
• However, classrooms need to become more interactive. There is no longer any need for information dissemination.

You actually can find anything on the internet these days. Students can find answers to any question on the internet with only a few clicks. What they can’t learn on the internet is how to think, how to interact with other thinkers, or especially how to develop their own thoughts. These are the types of experiences and education using collaborative environments in the classroom can provide.

When I do Tier 2 support, I always feel like I am Sherlock Holmes and I am trying to resolve a WebCT mystery.  Some support requests are easy to resolve, i.e. the ones that our auto-response resolves for the student.  These are “Blues Clues”-type mysteries.  Some support requests are not always resolved by the support form, mostly due to user error because they filled out the wrong information or are not using the correct terminology, but are still easy to handle.  These are “Nancy Drew”-type mysteries.  And then, there are one-of-a-kind whoppers where I am not even sure if the student is using WebCT, and if they are, what kind of system they are using.  These are “Agatha Christie”-type mysteries with an added bonus twist.  These are the ones where you need to do research, search forums, send e-mails, etc., to see if there has been anyone else who has ever encountered this problem ever.  They also tend to require print screens, multiple e-mail involvement, and a lot of time. 

Last week, we enjoyed/are still enjoying a whopper involving a student with an intricate home network and a healthy lack of work ethic.  Currently, it is up to them to provide us with some print screens that I assume will expose their procrastination and fibbery skills.  This morning, we already received a Nancy Drew level request which, after the correct terminology was deciphered, turned out to be an issue with a full e-mail account.  Now, we received a semi-whopper involving Internet Explorer behaving badly.

There tends to be one or two whoppers that we receive from the support form each week.  This does not include the internal requests we receive.  With that, I am lucky that I enjoy putting on the Sherlock Holmes hat and resolving mysteries.

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Remember sitting in 114 a while back impersonating a student in chat for a demonstration?  I have taken that demo and partnered it with a Discussion Board demo.  The goal is to give perspective students an opportunity to “sit in” on each of these very important elements of WebCT.

Currently, these demos can be found at:

http://concordia.csp.edu/WebCT/_Documents/_Captivate/_Students/dbdemo.htm

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My 30 minute meeting today evolved into 2 additional urgent meetings for today and at least 1 for tomorrow.  It never fails to amaze me how much there is to do and that the more you think you have resolved, the more you uncover that needs to be done.  Each piece of the puzzle has enormous implications for the system.  It speaks to the inability to rely upon a planned to-do list for your day; but it is also great progress in developing a cure for linear thinking.

I used to feel as if I spend all day in meetings. Whether they are formally scheduled in Outlook or “drive by” meetings (“Oh, Heather, since you are here…”), they are a constant. Recent studies indicate that meetings make you less intelligent, so this concerned me initially. Now, I have come to realize that these are vital conversations and opportunities to build relationships. As my relationships have grown, so have the number of relationship building opportunities.

Are there down sides? Certainly. My desk chair may be gathering dust, I rarely take a lunch unless it is a meeting, and I need to catch up on my e-mails on my personal time. However, I would not be able to answer those e-mails without the knowledge garnered from my relationship building. In fact, I wouldn’t even have those e-mails without having first gained the trust of those on campus. Relationships are the most vital aspect to being able to perform my role at Concordia. I suppose that this may make my chair obsolete and meetings a great thing.

I have not ever blogged before, so I appreciate the opportunity it may provide to build relationships in a new way!