There is also a new Course Filter search box which allows you to search conversations by typing in the name of the course.  Coming in the next few weeks, the ability to sort conversations by users or group will also be available…and Instructure is not stopping there with improvements to Conversations….video replies and suggested recipients are next on their implementation list.

So continue adding your great ideas to the Community Feature Request Forum page and vote on other ideas to move them up the line!

Mark Your Calendar!  InstructureCon 2012 is now open for registration. If you’d like to show off what you’ve been doing in Canvas or just want to see what other institutions are doing, check out the details for this conference to be held in Park City, Utah on June 14 & 15.

1)   Course List

a.     Your Course Lists have been cleaned up and should now show ONLY the current term and any groups/committees you are enrolled in as a member.

b.     Your courses from the three previous terms (two that were imported from Blackboard and the past Fall term in Canvas) are available to you through your Past Enrollments. Click the View All Enrollments link located in the bottom right corner of the Course List for access.

c.      Scheduled for the 2/18/12 release is the ability for ALL users to Customize their course list. That removes the criteria of having 12 or more courses before customization is available. Customization will allow you to hide any courses you don’t want showing.

2)   Conversations

a.     It’s important to note that Instructure has designed the Conversations feature as a social media tool and not as an e-mail system. Therefore, messages sent show up in conversation form similar to what you see when you text on your cell phone. Because it is not an e-mail system, there is no place to put a title to your message and no place to review what was sent other than the conversation generated from it. Many of you are frustrated by this, as are others from other institutions, but at this time Instructure does not plan to deviate from the design of this feature. You can add your voice to the discussion by posting to the Canvas Community Feature Request page

b.     Instructure has implemented two changes to Conversations in response to requests: 1) A new filtering option allows you to start typing the name of a course so it automatically appears in the drop-down and will show only messages that pertain to that particular course, and 2) the ability to “star” the conversation (instead of label) and filter conversations by star.

c.      Scheduled for the 2/18/12 release: the term name will show when listing courses in Conversations.

Have questions or need additional help? Several options are available: You can always contact me directly at lames@umw.edu or contact any member of DTLT or Pam Lowery for personal assistance. Additionally, you can click on the Help button in Canvas located in the upper right corner of your screen to file a ticket with Instructure or contact the UMW HelpDesk.

In 2011, Instructure’s Canvas LMS was created and UMW became one of their early adopters. In fact, we are FIRST in Virginia! To view a recap of their launch year, watch Matt “The Canvas Community Guy” as he highlights features of the product:

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s coming in 2012? There’s a new look for the Gradebook! Instructure is phasing out the current gradebook for one that provides better performance. Opt-in to the NEW Gradebook by simply clicking on “Try out the new gradebook” located in the upper-right corner of your gradebook. You can toggle between the two views for now, but expect it to eventually default to the new look once beta-testing is done. We’ll also see changes that allow for more customization features from icons to API integration of third-party tools. Additionally, Instructure continues to work on their Analytics project which will allow for a more granular look at a student’s performance and improvements to Conversations and Calendars are on their “to-do” list. I’ll keep you updated as new and improved features and functionality arise.

What’s new for Canvas at UMW? DTLT will be launching a Canvas Learning Network and we’d like to invite YOU to participate. Details soon.

A few reminders as you prepare your courses:

1) Are you teaching more than one section of the same course and would like to have them combined into ONE course? Just send an email to either Pam Lowery or myself for assistance with that task ASAP.

2) If you’d like to copy over the content from a previous course to the current one, follow these directions – Copying Course Content

3) Conclude your Fall 2011 course. This removes it from both you and your students’ ever-growing Course list. You can still access your course by viewing your past courses history. Directions: Conclude A Course

4) Publish your course once your content is loaded. Your students will automatically receive a notification that the course is available once published. Directions: Publish A Course

If you need assistance or discover something not working as expected, let me know.

Have a great semester!
Lisa

Open courseware is not the only way online learning is going to change higher education. DeMillo observes that whereas the traditional college class involves the broadcasting of information from the professor to (doubtfully alert) students, blogs involve rich connection networks where students and instructors interact and share their questions and information.

In that regard, DeMillo points to a little-known school where there is great educational ferment: “At the University of Mary Washington, learning takes place in the digital spaces engineered by Jim Groom and his band of Edupunks. At UMW, learning takes place in blogs.”

And when highlighting the importance of a networked culture for the future of learning at institutions UMW is highlighted as a model. UMW Blogs provides more than open resources and lectures on the internet, it also enables the ability to interact and share ideas and resources that helps bridge the gap between institutions of higher learning and the web.

James Bacon, proprietor of the Bacon’s Rebellion blog that focuses on all things Virginia, not only gave UMW kudos in for it’s work with UMW Blogs in his post on the DeMillo book, but also points out what remains the most important lesson of UMW Blogs. The open publishing platform is not remarkable because it is single-handedly transforming higher education (such an assertion would be absurd), but rather it is how this platform embodies “the process of experimentation” that is still in its infancy when it comes to the future of higher education. To Mary Washington’s great credit, it has been on the bleeding edge of innovation in this regard for more than seven years. What’s more, I’m glad people are recognizing it as a vital investment in not only the institution’s future, but in a larger discourse around the future of educational institutions.

Image credit:  Ethan Hein’s “Hyperbolic orthogonal dodecahedral honeycomb”

Here are the number for UMW Blogs for all of 2011.

• 1,530,580 Visits
• 1,049,706 Unique Visitors
• 3,417,021 Pageviews
• 2.23 Pages/Visit
• 00:01:48 Avg. Time on Site

The stats never cease to mesmerize me, even though they are plateauing. But if you stop for a second and think about it, we have more than 1 million people looking at, using, or interacting with academic we’re doing at UMW. That is nothing short of amazing by higher ed standards for a school of our size, at the same time the scale is almost laughable for a moderately popular YouTube video.  That, for me, is both the amazing and depressing context for these numbers.

Traffic for Fall 2011 Semester on UMW Blogs

Which made me think, how does this compare to traffic from the Fall semester last year? So I did a quick filtering for traffic from 8/16/10 through 12/16/11 and what was interesting was how consistent the traffic was between the two time periods in terms of frequency throughout the week, over the weekends, etc.

Traffic for Fall 2010 Semester on UMW Blogs

What’s more, we had almost exactly 100,000 more visits and unique visitors this Fall than last–with almost 200,000 more pageviews. All of which seems to suggest traffic is settling in given that from Fall 2009 to Fall 2010 trafic almost doubled across the board in terms of visits, unique visitors, and pageviews.

Traffic for Fall 2009 Semester on UMW Blogs

The change in traffic this Fall in comparison to Fall 2010 was a more modest 20% growth in visits, 25% growth in visitors, and a little less than 15% in pageviews. I’m not sure what any of this suggest other than the growth in traffic on UMW Blogs seems to have stabilized a bit over the last year. And I think this has a lot to do with how much UMW Blogs has saturated UMW more generally. I think we would need significantly more students to see significantly more growth at this point. I think we are at a very sustainable moment in terms of hardware, software, and support. What’s more, UMW Blogs has also stabilized considerably given we have had next to no downtime all semester long, which is a first for us and a very proud day indeed.

We’re gonna update to WordPress 3.3 this Wednesday, and I’m pretty confient that will go as smoothly as all the other upgrades on UMW Blogs have been over the last two years. One more thing, we are back on Akismet after trying our hand with TypePad’s Antispam solution for a NY minute. We survived most of the semester with the Cookies or Comments spam solution, which worked surprisingly well, but we were starting to get spam complaints from faculty and students alike so we went back to Akismet. The reason we were resisting Akismet to begin with over the last year was because the quote us a ridiculous $900 a month for the service last December, but that has since come own to about $45 a month for the service ($550 a year) which is both afforable for us and well worth the peace of mind.

We talk a lot about livestreaming and broadcasting at DTLT. It has quickly become one of the core focuses of our group through projects like DTLT Today and the purchase of our own Kit. We made the proposal to the Teaching Center at UMW to have a kit that would allow us flexibility to go into a classroom and broadcast that action live, bring in folks from around the world to engage and interact with the students. Yesterday we got the first opportunity to do just that.

Professor Marjorie Och has led a group of art history students at UMW through the creation of an exhibit on Venice that is completely online. You can probably guess based on that URL that we helped them build it on top of WordPress with UMW Blogs and between the work they did and some tweaking we did to the Autofocus+ theme the site is gorgeous.

The opening of the exhibit was yesterday and Andy and I brought the whole setup down to the room to stream it live. I made the announcement on Twitter that we’d be broadcasting and even though there wasn’t a live chat involved with this particular project, I knew from feedback that folks were watching.

There was a problem with the blakbirdpie shortcode

Because of how great Wirecast is we were able to easily install Desktop Presenter on the instructor station and pull that in as a feed source for the video. The result is a mix of straight camera shots of the student’s presenting their work combined with a live view of them showing PowerPoints and displaying their sections of the site. You can catch the full video at their exhibit site at http://venice11.umwblogs.org/opening/.

What’s also great is that they’ve chosen to leave comments open on all pages of the site. This isn’t a static product that they’ve created, it’s an exhibit that invites discussion and they’ve kept that channel open. It’s a beautiful model for how a collaborative group project can come together and the students of UMW along with Professor Marjorie Och have much to be proud of. Of course I couldn’t let this moment go without talking a bit about it on DTLT Today yesterday so you can watch that for some more background.

Look for Tim Owens’ review of the mobile app on the DTLT Canvas page shortly.

Have you used the SpeedGrader on your iPad or mobile phone? If not, download the SpeedGrader app from your app store and log on to UMW’s Canvas using “instructure.umw.edu”.

Watch the latest Canvas product release screencast, addressing mostly with tweaks for geeks and the mobile app news.http://help.instructure.com/entries/20760408-12-10-11-release-screencast

Enjoy your holiday break to come and don’t forget to CONCLUDE your course once your grading is complete.

Do you spend your holiday break loading your content into next semester’s course shell? Well now you won’t have to!

Spring 2012 courses and enrollments have now been uploaded in Canvas, so you can get a jump on your course prep and spend the holidays being merry. Of course, “some of us” are natural procrastinators. Don’t despair. Canvas makes Copying Your Course Content from one semester to another a quick wink.