Welcome to a new year!

Well between the earthquake and Tropical Storm Irene, our 2011-2012 year is already memorable!

The ID team has been hard at work this summer and we'd like to update you on some of the changes made to instructional technologies. Of course the biggest change is the completion of the migration to Bridges/Sakai as of June 30. All our summer courses used Bridges and the team offered 65 workshops from June through August, both virtually and on-campus, on a wide range of topics. In August we upgraded our version of Bridges/Sakai to 2.8 in order to improve the system as well as to add some new tools. One new tool that we know will be popular is the Sign-Up tool that will allow students to sign up for their own groups, field trips, office hours etc.

The ID team developed a robust Faculty Resources site within Bridges (viewable under the My Sites tab) that contains a wealth of information and tutorials about our instructional technologies. Check out the narrated videos for many of the Bridges tools under the Lessons link within the Faculty Resources site. We also developed a Student Resources site for students new to Bridges and posted instructions on how they can join this site on our gateway page. Both these internal resource sites supplement our external Instructional Design tutorial website at: http://departments.rwu.edu/id/instruction/resources.shtml. If there is something that you don't see that you'd like added to either of these sites please don't hesitate to send us an e-mail at id@rwu.edu and we'll do our best to create it.

We also upgraded our Panopto Focus Lecture Capture tool to version 4.0 in order to increase the options for editing videos. Having a site license for this easy-to-use video creation tool makes it an attractive addition for both faculty and students to develop multi-media presentations.

Elluminate Live! web conferencing continues to be the tool of choice for our distance faculty to offer synchronous class sessions with their students, as well as an option for offering virtual office hours, tutorial sessions and group brainstorming. Both faculty and students can create their own Bridges project sites and utilize Elluminate for group work and research collaboration, even with non-RWU colleagues. You can even bring in a virtual guest speaker to any classroom or Bridges site. This is a great cost-efficient way to enrich your classes without travel and hotel fees.

Turnitin anti-plagiarism tool plugs right into a Bridges assignment. This means that as students submit their assignments their files are automatically forwarded to Turnitin and an originality report is sent back to Bridges and stored with the student submissions. This can be a great educational resource in deepening students' understanding of what constitutes plagiarism as well as the rules for citing sources.

A new tool that we added last year was a site license for the Respondus quiz creator. This software will convert a Blackboard quiz bank or a publisher quiz bank into Bridges format and upload quizzes and exams directly into your course(s). You can also download this software onto your own computer and create your exams on your hard drive and then upload them to your course. This is a great solution if you find that your Internet connection is slow.

The fall schedule for training on all of these tools will be posted this week. We hope that one or more of these tools will help enrich your classes or advance some of your learning goals for your students.

It sure is an exciting time to be in higher education!