The CTL provides faculty with the means to innovatively and collaboratively advance the process of education.
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Both faculty and students will have an opportunity to complete a basic survey about LMS systems in general and about our current LMS system.
We have invited each vendor (or 3rd party commercial support for open-source systems) to campus the last week in February. Each vendor will give two open demos (one in the morning and one in the afternoon) for all interested parties. Each vendor will also be asked to give a hands on workshop (2 hours) to our In Depth Faculty Focus Group. We will ask for feedback from all that attend the open demos. We will invite our colleagues (instructional technologists) at other schools in the district to also attend if they are interested. When possible, the Vendor Demos will be videoed and made available for those faculty and staff unable to attend.
Department chairs recommend 3-4 faculty in their department to take part in a more detailed analysis of the systems we are looking at. From the candidates, we will select (primarily based on scheduling) 10-20 faculty to be a part of an in depth faculty focus group that will attend the hands-on workshops by the vendors, will be provided with sandboxes in several systems, and will be given tasks to complete and will be asked for detailed feedback on the analysis they do independently.
Any interested staff and faculty member may visit an open lab session to have hands-on practice with each LMS system. With this more inclusive group we will request they go through a series of tasks in each system based on the highest priority and most used features and complete a survey during the process about the ease of use of each system.
We will also have a small group of students give us feedback on each system from their perspective. We would like a group of 5-10 students to go through a scavenger hunt type session in each system (i.e. take a quiz, turn in an assignment, post a discussion message, etc).
With the collaboration of IT we will conduct an in depth technical analysis of each system. We will look at things such as migration, cost, technical requirements, scalability, integration with our existing SIS system, integration with common tools such as Elluminate, Respondus, Softchalk, StudyMate, among others.
We will develop a brief survey to solicit recommendations / comments from other schools about each company and product.
We hope to have all initial reports, feedback, etc. prepared by the end of Summer I semester. A full report will bedeveloped and can be taken to all the stakeholder groups for their individual recommendations (MCC Online, Chairs, Faculty Senate, IT, CTL). Then the full report and all solicited recommendations from stakeholder groups will be provided to the administration for a final decision. Our goal is for the final decision to take place prior to November of 2009.
As with all current projects, cost and budget and personnel shortages are of the utmost priority when we make a decision of this magnitude.
Melanie Kroening & Jennifer Strickland
Center for Teaching & Learning
Mesa Community College
(480) 461-7331