CTL Blog Educational Technology Updates from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

End of Access to AY2011-2012 Courses in CoursePlus

Per the terms of service for eLearning sites at JHSPH, access to CoursePlus sites for the 2011-2012 academic year will end with the start of the new academic year. Students enrolled in courses with CoursePlus sites have access to those sites for the current and following academic years. When the new academic year begins on May 24, 2013, access to CoursePlus sites from the 2011-2012 academic year will end because the 2011-2012 academic year will be two academic years in the past.

We strongly encourage students who have materials that they want to download from their 2011-2012 academic year CoursePlus sites to do so before this changeover. Once the new academic year begins, you will not have access to materials from 2011-2012 academic year CoursePlus sties, nor can the CTLT Help staff retrieve those files for you.

Posted by Brian Klaas at 12:21 PM - Categories: CoursePlus

Custom eReserves Link in Your CoursePlus Site

CoursePlus has long had the ability to add a quick link to the Welch eReserves system in the "Class Materials & Resources" section of your CoursePlus site. Did you know that you can provide a custom URL that points directly to your specific class in eReserves, rather than the main eReserves page for all courses?

When you set up an eReserves site with the Welch team, they can give you the direct link to the eReserves site just for your course. If you have that URL, you can add it to your CoursePlus site. Here's how:

1. Go into your CoursePlus site, and click "Class Materials & Resources."
2. Under "Link to eReserves," click "Edit."
3. Enter the link that the eReserves team gave to you for your specific eReserves site.
4. Click "Update."

Now when students click on the eReserves link in your CoursePlus site, they'll go directly to the eReserves site for your course. Remember that the button for "Link to eReserves" must be green, meaning the feature is turned on, so that students can actually see the link.

3 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 11:42 AM - Categories: CoursePlus

Changing to Video-Based Lectures

Over the past few years, students have increasingly asked if there is a way that we let them view online course lectures on their smartphones and tablets. Students are more mobile than ever, and being able to view course lectures on any device in any location is very important to them. Making this happen, however, has been a bit of a challenge. We currently provide lectures in a Flash-based format, which does not work on mobile devices.

Beginning in the summer term of the 2013-2014 academic year, we are going to provide lectures in online courses in a video-based format which will enable students on laptops, desktops, iOS devices, and Android devices to view course lectures. This video-based format will replace the Flash-based format that we currently provide. 

Switching to video-based lectures has a number of significant advantages:

• Students will be able to watch course lectures on desktops, laptops, iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) running iOS 5 or later, and Android devices (phones and tablets) running Android 3.1 or later.
• Students will be able to download the MP4 videos just like they download the MP3 audio. This enables them to watch course lectures on planes or in locations where they have no Internet access.
• Using the player on the class website, students will be able to speed up or slow down the playback of the lecture.
• In the near future, the video-based format will allow insertion of short assessments (quizzes) at appropriate points during lecture playback that assess whether students understood the previous material before moving on.
• As lectures are now delivered as simple video files, students will no longer have to pause lectures to play back videos inside of lectures. The videos will simply play on their own with no action needed by students.
• Instead of offering slides in 2/page and 6/page format, we will offer slides in a 1/page format so students can print them out as they see fit. This wasn't necessitated by the change to video-based lectures, but students have increasingly asked for this.

There are some things that will be going away when we make the switch to video-based lectures, however. Most of these changes have to do with switching from the interactive Flash format to the video:

• As lectures are now delivered as simple video files, there will no longer be a list of slides in each lecture section. This was a feature specific to the Flash-based format we previously used.
• As lectures are now delivered as simple video files, hyperlinks within lectures will no longer be clickable. Any links that students need to click on will be listed on the main lecture page for that lecture.
• The "Download all MP3s and PDFs" option will no longer be available. Each file must be downloaded separately (although there will be only one PDF per lecture, rather than one PDF per lecture section, reducing the total number of files required for each lecture).
• Internet Explorer 8 will not play the video-based lectures properly. Note that the Center stopped supporting the use of Internet Explorer 8 for accessing online courses in May, 2012, and you will not be able to sign in to online courses using Internet Explorer 8 starting June 1, 2013.

Finally, videos are almost always larger in file size than their Flash-based counterparts. To help limit the impact of this aspect of the change to video-based lectures, we will utilize Amazon's global CloudFront content delivery network to distribute the lecture files to students. Using CloudFront will significantly speed up the download and playback of the files. By putting files much closer to wherever the student may be on the planet, download times are sped up and playback of the videos can begin more quickly.

We're very excited about these changes and the new flexibility they bring to students in online courses. While we do have to give up some things, we think that the gains outweigh the losses by a significant margin. If you have feedback about these changes, we'd like to hear it!

3 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 10:05 AM - Categories: Online Courses

New Web Events posted

Our web events site has several new presentations posted, including our March Faculty Workshop: Engaging Students in Active Learning: The Flipped Classroom and Other Strategies.

Additionally, you will find:

• Greener Pastures: A Vision for Healthy Farming

• 2012 Daniel J. Raskin Memorial Symposium on Injury Prevention: The Politics of Safety

• Vaccine Day 2012: Vaccines and Society: Some Unexpected Stories

0 comments - Posted by Kathy Gresh at 3:32 PM - Categories: Web Events

Using the Rich Text Editor on iOS Devices

If you are using iOS 5.1 or later on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, we have a bit of good news for you: the rich text editor that we use in the course BBS, wiki, class email tool and Announcements tool now works on iOS devices! 

Previously, we had to provide a simple text box with no formatting if you were using an iOS device. This is because the rich text editor just didn't work on iOS devices. The group that makes the rich text editor recently updated it so that it now works on iOS devices, and we've added that version to the online course system.

If you're using an Android device, however, we don't have good news for you. The rich text editor still doesn't work on Android devices — although the new Chrome web browser that Google is building for Android 4 and later should work once Google finishes the product. We're keeping an eye on this so we can hopefully bring the rich text editor to Android devices soon as well.

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 11:54 AM - Categories: Course Tools | Online Courses

Upload Images Directly Into BBS Posts

If you've ever tried to insert an image directly into a BBS post, you know that you had to point to an image somewhere else on the Web. You couldn't simply upload a file on your computer directly into a BBS post. You could add a file as an attachment to your post, but you couldn't display it inside the BBS post itself.

That has changed. Starting today, you can upload images from your computer directly into the body of a BBS post in any online course. How do you do this? There's a new button on the rich text editor control bar for BBS posts that allows you to insert an image directly into your post:

Click this button, and you'll be prompted to pick a file from your computer to insert wherever the cursor is in the BBS post box. You can even re-use images you've already uploaded if you need to do that.

Enjoy!

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 9:34 AM - Categories: Course Tools | Online Courses

Major Updates to the Drop Box in CoursePlus

Just in time for the fourth term, the team in the Center for Teaching and Learning has added some major new features to the Drop Box in CoursePlus. Here's what's new:

• Students can submit files on behalf of a group. When a student submits a file to a group-enabled Drop Box, the student sees a drop-down list of all the course groups to which she is assigned. If the student is turning in a file for the group, she selects the appropriate course group from the list. When a student submits a file, all group members get an email confirmation of file submission, and the faculty view of the Drop Box shows that all group members turned in the file. Learn more about submitting for a group in the Drop Box.
• Timed Drop Boxes. You can now set up a Drop Box so that a student will only have a set amount of time from the moment they "unlocked" a Drop Box before they can no longer submit a file to a Drop Box. If you have an assessment where students need to work inside of a specific type of document (an Excel file or R script, for example), you can offer that document to students and know that students only have a limited amount of time to work with the document and return it to you via the course website. Learn more about this powerful new feature.
• Get notified about submissions after the deadline. You've been able to get email notification of all submissions to a Drop Box, but now you can be notified only after the due date and time of the Drop Box, if you want. Learn more about submission notification options.

The addition of these features brings the Drop Box in CoursePlus in line with the Drop Box in online courses, so you have the same options and opportunities available in each!

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 8:11 AM - Categories: Course Tools | CoursePlus