Attended Meeting:   Nancy Hellner, Kaatje Kraft,  Kathie May, Nicole Lohrbeer, Terry Ponder, Melanie Kroening, Donna Gaudet, and Peggy Johnson.

 

 

Most Common WebCT Problems

 

Melanie shared a list of the most common problems faculty are having with WebCT, along with anticipated fixes for them. See attached file.

 

Melanie also alerted faculty to the fact by the fall our  WebCT courses will no longer say "WebCT" on them. Because Blackboard purchased WebCT (they are one company now), they are dropping the WebCT moniker. You may want to change the references in your online course materials from "WebCT" to something like "Learning System".

 

By summer, WebCT gradebooks will automatically have a column added to them that shows the student's section number.

 

 

Pawdio (Portable Audio Files and/or Podcasting)

 

Donna explained that podcasts are syndicated audio files. They are pushed to you, rather than you having to go out and find the link. This is analagous to your receiving a magazine subscription each month at your home, rather than having to go to the store to purchase the magazine. The podcast will be automatically delivered to your computer once you have subscribed to it. These podcasts can be played on your computer or any MP3 player such as an iPOD (you can download the files to your MP3 player from your computer).

 

Audio files have more impact than reading the text.  However, you may decide you do not need to create podcasts for your students. Instead, you may want to create audio files and embed them in your course. Students would click on the link to hear them.

 

Donna illustrated the impact of audio files by playing Robert Frost reading his poem The Road Not Taken, versus reading the same poem online. You can hear Frost's reading at http://www.poets.org/audio.php/prmAlpha/F. To locate other audio files of poems being read, search http://www.poets.org

 

You can record audio files of your own by using the free software Audacity (available at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/, Directions for using Audacity are available on the CTL website at http://ctl.mc.maricopa.edu/_resources/helpdocs/how_to/documents/audacity.pdf

 

There are many podcasts available to you on the web, such as Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, lectures by Stanford faculty, or Adolf Hitler giving a speech. Donna has collected many of these resources on her site at http://del.icio.us/dgaudet/podcasting She recommends the deli.icio.us site for storing bookmarks that you can access from any computer with internet access.

 

You can read more about podcasting (and other topics) on the CTL blog at http://ctl.mc.maricopa.edu/blogcast/

 

Peggy Johnson