Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: assessments

  • Peril of Good Intentions

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    I ran across a friend’s Facebook post about parenting and related a description of a college psychology professor’s eugenics lecture. The reply was that eliminating the genes of less intelligent people seems like it could help improve society. This seeming promise is why it has been tried many times. Before the Holocaust shifted to genocide, it…

  • LMS Security

    This morning there was a flurry of effort to locate an article called “Hacking WebCT.” My coworker was able to locate it. We were disappointed.  The main points of the article were: Lazy administrators make compromising user accounts easy. Lazy instructors make getting questions for assessments easy. These apply to any LMS. So, here is some…

  • Off the Twitter Timeline: Icons

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    I laughed at reading this one. Dear Blackboard: If you include icons in your interface, they should f’ing well be clickable. Everyone but you knows this. jazzmodeus I thought this might refer to the new item icons. Jason works for Emory (doing instructional design) and taking classes at Florida State. Both use Academic Suite. So…

  • User Interface v. SQL Reports and Tracking

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    Blackboard Vista tracks student activity. This tracking data is viewed as a critical feature of Vista. Our instructors depended on the information until we revoked their ability to run reports themselves due to performance issues. Campus administrators can still generate reports (though some still fail). We doubt the solution to this is Blackboard improving the…

  • Everything to Everyone

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    This is intended to be a more thoughtful response to Laura regarding Course Management Systems and the need for innovation. Currently, Course Management Systems are bloatware. They got this way by trying to provide everything to everyone. One instructor wants a feature, the university presses for this feature, the CMS programmers put in the feature.…

  • RE 2007: GeorgiaVIEW Vista File and Content Sharing

    Harold Powers, Georgia State University Template Copy files in File Manager Learning Module – Only content pages and assessments are exported in a learning module. Other tools such as discussion, chat, urls, etc. are not exported.

  • RE 2007: Administering Sakai

    . Timeline: Oct 2006: Faculty committee selected Sakai over Blackboard Vista Jan 2007: Developed a roll-out plan. Jun 2007: Pilot Aug 2007: Production Still: Some classes still running on CE4.1, being phased out of use. Needs – no more than 5% of code custom written by GA Tech or professional services. Integration with Banner. Grade…

  • On the Fourth through Sixth Loops of Ready 2 Wear

    I really have to stop listening to the same song played over and over. It may affect my thinking…. We had another node crash due to the Sun JVM issue. Our start script failed to make a file in /var so the node did not become fully operational as expected. While waiting for those with…

  • Joke: Security Via JavaScript

    So, you are a teaching an online class. Students cheating naturally is a concern. How does one prevent them from stealing answers? Code in the online class system? Unfortunately, the makers of the learning management systems lag behind the creativity of cheaters. Plus, they can only control their systems. How do they enforce security in…