The October 2009 Patch to CoursePlus

CoursePlus was updated on Thursday, October 22, with some significant new features. The focal point of this release is the update to Quiz Generator 5, which brings CoursePlus in line with online courses at JHSPH in terms of what can be done inside of the Quiz Generator. Highlights of the new Quiz Generator include:

Multiple Choice Questions with Multiple Answers 

• Multiple choice questions can now require that multiple responses be selected by the student. Partial credit can be awarded if the student makes a partial set of correct matches, or you can require that all responses be selected correctly in order to get credit for the question.

Rich Text Editor for Essay Question Answers 

• Students now answer essay questions using a rich text editor so that they can create numbered or bulleted lists, add text formatting, and have at their fingertips basic word processing tools while they create their answers.

Revamped Quiz Setup Screen and New Options 

• The quiz setup screen has been simplified and reorganized to make it easier to see how your quiz is set up. 
• Post-quiz screen and email notification options now have a preview tool so you can see what students will see after they take a quiz. 
• You can choose to have the full set of student responses to a quiz emailed to you as soon as the student submits their answers to a quiz. 
• You can now display custom instructional text after the students submit their answers to a quiz. 

Answer Key Changes 

• Students who took the quiz now see their answers inline with the correct answers in the answer key.
• You can specify a minimum passing grade which the student must achieve in order to view the answer key.
• You can let students see the answer key before manually graded questions in the quiz have been scored.

Special Permissions Changes 

• You can specify that specific students get more time than others to complete the quiz. 
• You can specify both dates and times when you grant special permissions to take a quiz.

Scoring Changes 

• You can change the score of an automatically scored question. A history is kept of all changes made to question scores. 
• You can opt to give all students full credit for a question, even if students originally got that question wrong. 
• Scores for each question and the overall quiz score can be exported to Excel. 
• You can recalculate an individual student's score on a quiz, or recalculate the scores of everyone in the class. 
• When a question is removed from a quiz, all scores are automatically recalculated.

Changes to Emailing Results 

• You can set up the quiz so that results are held until you decide that the results should be sent to students. 
• You can send or re-send results to individual students, multiple students, or all students in the class from the same page.

There are many other changes to the Quiz Generator. You can see a complete "What's New" list when you access the Quiz Generator in your CoursePlus site.

The other significant addition in this release is to the Online Library. The Online Library will now automatically display a simple movie player for any .flv (Flash video) or QuickTime (.mov, .mp4) movie file which is uploaded to the Online Library. Previously, if faculty or editors uploaded a Flash video in to their Online Library, most students could not play the file. That's because Flash video requires some kind of Flash movie in which the video is played back. Flash videos won't play back on their own, and require a special player. The Online Library now takes care of this for you.

Keep in mind that although the Online Library now has enhanced video playback capabilities, it is still the responsibility of the individual who uploads the video in to the Online Library to secure copyright clearance before posting the movie to the Online Library.

If you have any questions or feedback about the new features in this update to CoursePlus, please let us know!

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 10:38 AM - Categories: CoursePlus

Another PDF Annotation Tool Available for Full and Part-Time Students

Last Spring, JHSPH Information Systems announced that they had acquired a site license for PDF Annotator, a tool that lets you annotate (write, draw, highlight, and otherwise mark up) PDF files. This is a really useful tool if you're trying to take class notes digitally or otherwise doing collaborative work using PDF files. Unfortunately, PDF Annotator is only available for the Windows operating system. Those of us using a Mac could use Preview, an application built in to the Mac OS, to do basic PDF annotation, but Preview lacks many of the features of PDF Annotator.

Recently, JHSPH Information Systems announced that they have acquired a site license for PDF Pen Pro, an equivalent to PDF Annotator for the Mac. This makes this tool available for free to all full- and part-time students, faculty, and staff here at the School. If you aren't enrolled in a degree program at the School, or aren't School faculty or staff, you can't take advantage of this site license.

For more information on acquiring either PDF Pen Pro or PDF Annotator, please see this page in the my.jhsph.edu portal. Remember: you have to log in to to the my.jhsph.edu portal using your JHSPH email account credentials to view this information.

Posted by Brian Klaas at 4:17 PM - Categories: General | Online Courses | Course Tools | CoursePlus

What Happened to CoursePlus on October 12 and 13?

In case you didn't notice (and you probably did), CoursePlus was unavailable for a short while on Monday, October 12 around 1:30pm and Tuesday, October 13 around 10:30am. Each outage lasted about 25 minutes. We recognize that any outage of CoursePlus, particularly during the day, is an inconvenience for many students, faculty, and staff. While we can't guarantee 99.99% uptime of CoursePlus, we do take these outages seriously and want to keep downtime to a minimum.

The reason that there was an outage on both of these days is because there was a misconfigured Google Search Appliance running on the JHU network that was bombarding CoursePlus with hundreds upon hundreds of requests, not stopping to request information from CoursePlus when it should have, endlessly consuming server resources until the server didn't have any more resources to allocate to the Google Search Appliance requests. We've spoken with the administrators of this Google Search Appliance, and they recognize that the appliance was malfunctioning. Our expectation is that they have fixed the operation of their Google Search Appliance, and we should not see this problem again.

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 3:31 PM - Categories: CoursePlus

How to Record Audio from Your Desktop Tutorial Posted

The Center's team of Web documentation and audio production specialists have been hard at work developing a new tutorial which shows you, in simple and clear steps, how to record audio from your desktop. If you're a student who needs to record audio for a class assignment, or a faculty member who needs to record a lecture in your office or at home for posting in to CoursePlus, this tutorial is for you.

The tutorial covers the whole process, from downloading the right software, to making sure your microphone settings are correct, to editing mistakes out of your audio, and generating an MP3 file for posting in to an online course or CourePlus Web site. There's even a handy microphone tester with troubleshooting information along side, which can be used not only for recording audio from your desktop, but also for testing out a microphone for LiveTalk.

The tutorial is composed of text, images, and video demonstrations. There's also a handy PDF reference guide available for those who want to print the complete set of step-by-step instructions for all phases of the recording process.

If you have any feedback about the tutorial, we'd love to hear it!

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 6:06 PM - Categories: Online Courses | CoursePlus

Reminder About Data Storage Policies for JHSPH eLearning Sites

At the start of each academic year, there are usually questions about the length of time which files in the Online Library or student submissions to the Drop Box and other eLearning tools are kept. The CTLT's data storage policy is as follows:

• Files in the Online Library are kept for three academic years. Therefore, a file in an Online Library for a course which was offered in March, 2006, is deleted from CoursePlus on June 1, 2009, at the start of the new academic year. A file in an Online Library for a course which was offered in September, 2008, will not be deleted from CoursePlus until June 1, 2011.
• Files submitted to a Drop Box are kept for two academic years. Therefore, student submissions to a Drop Box for a course which was offered in March, 2006, will be deleted from CoursePlus on June 1, 2008, at the start of the new academic year. Student submissions to a Drop Box for a course which was offered in September, 2008, will not be deleted from CoursePlus until June 1, 2010.
• LiveTalk archives are kept until the next offering of the course.
• Data collected and stored in a database, which covers all non-file-based data in CoursePlus and online courses, is kept for five years, after which time it may be permanently archived.

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 10:10 PM - Categories: Online Courses | Course Tools | CoursePlus

CoursePlus 101: Simple, How-To Videos for Faculty

Starting this month, this blog will become host to CoursePlus 101 — a series of simple, how-to videos for faculty who want to learn more about the various features in CoursePlus. These demonstrations will each be under 5 minutes and each show how to accomplish one task within CoursePlus.

A lot of faculty are using CoursePlus to supplement their on-site courses from the School. Many, though, either delegate working on their CoursePlus sites to their TAs or administrative assistants or use CoursePlus for a single purpose, such as posting files in the Online Library. CoursePlus has a lot more to offer, and our hope is that through this series of short, video introductions, you'll learn more about those features and will begin to take advantage of them.

If you would like to be notified of when new CoursePlus 101 videos are posted, click on the "RSS Feed" link at the top of this page to be updated via your news reader, or enter your email address in the box to the right to be notified via email.

As always, your feedback is invaluable, so please feel free to leave comments about any of the videos that are posted. If you need technical support for CoursePlus, though, please be sure to contact the CoursePlus Help Support Center!

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 9:28 AM - Categories: CoursePlus 101 | CoursePlus

CoursePlus Access Problems on 4/22 and 4/23

Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, April 22, students and faculty who were not logged in to a computer on the JHSPH network began experiencing problems accessing CoursePlus. This includes those who attempted to access over the public wireless network at the School, or via Welch Library. Students and faculty who were logged in to computers hard-wired in to the JHSPH network did not experience any access problems.

The cause of this problem was a network misconfiguration for the CoursePlus server. The CoursePlus site was fully available without any issues to those not affected by the network misconfiguration. CTLT and Information Systems staff identified and isolated the issue. Full access to CoursePlus, regardless of the network from which it was accessed, was restored at 11:06am. We will continue to monitor the situation and post any additional updates here, should they be necessary.

Our sincere apologies for the frustration caused by this access problem!

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 11:39 AM - Categories: CoursePlus