CTAAR Newsletter
New Media 2008 Summer Conference, Princeton University
The New Media Consortium of educational institutions, museums, and technology companies held its annual summer conference this year at Princeton University from June 11-14.
Please visit our wikis for conference programs, streaming video and audio keynote addresses, notes, session information, and other great links:
Joe's conference wiki
Marcie's conference wiki
Fall 2007 SIRS Data Available
The Student Instructional Ratings Survey data for the Fall 2007 semester is complete, and the reports are now available to students at our SIRS web site:
Log in with your NetID.
Because of privacy laws governing student records, we do not publish the SIRS results for Teaching Assistants on the web site. Full reports, inculding the TA results, were distributed directly to department chairs. Teaching Assistants who have not received their own reports through their department can contact our office at info@brokenaddress.rutgers.edu please replace "brokenaddress" with ctaar.rutgers.edu.
NEW Office 2007 Workshops
CTAAR is now offering workshops in Office 2007 for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. (Access 2007 will follow) New Office 2007 features will be demonstrated, including the new "ribbon" interface. Additionally, we will discuss the new file formats and compatibility with prior versions. These workshops will be held at the new Davidson Hall PC Lab on Busch Campus, room 172-A. Please visit the CTAAR workshop calendar to register and view detailed workshop descriptions.
Kansas State Video - Communicating with Students Today
Students in a Kansas State University anthropology course put together a video essay that highlights how students communicate, how that impacts their studies, and the challenges that the 21st century brings.
The video illustrates some interesting points about how to communicate with students; it also serves as an example of what is possible using collaborative tools like Google Documents or Sakai.
You may also view a higher quality Quicktime version (97 Mb).
The video was created by Michael Wesch and 200 students in his Intro to Cultural Anthropology course. More information is available on the Digital Ethnography blog.
"Designing and Assessing Core Curriculum" December 4, 2007
"Designing and Assessing Core Curriculum" will be the topic for luncheon discussion on Tuesday, December 4 in room 411 Rutgers Student Center with Bobbi Owen, Professor of Dramatic Art, Senior Associate Dean of the Office of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts & Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Please join us for lunch and discussion!
Register at: http://ctaar.rutgers.edu/council/register
Dean Owen oversees a range of academic programs, scholarships, and services for undergraduate students. Among them are Academic Advising, Academic Services, the Honors Program and the Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence, First Year Seminars, Student Academic Counseling, Undergraduate Curriculum, and Undergraduate Research. These programs involve all aspects of undergraduate academic-based life at Carolina including:
* the new general education requirements that were effective for entering first year students beginning in Fall 2006
* orientation for new students, efforts to improve retention and increase the graduate rate at UNC-Chapel Hill
* the QEP (Quality Enhancement Plan)
* Making Critical Connections, that was developed as part of the recent reaffirmation of accreditation process.
SIRS Spring 2007 Results Available
The final reports for the Spring 2007 Student Instructional Ratings Surveys are now available to all faculty, staff and students at http://sirs.rutgers.edu/. Log in with your NetID and password.
Because of privacy laws governing student records, we do not publish the SIRS results for Teaching Assistants on the web site. Full reports, including the TA results, were distributed to department chairs earlier this summer. Teaching Assistants who have not received their own reports through their department can contact us at info@brokenmail.rutgers.edu please replace "brokenmail" with ctaar.rutgers.edu.
Harvard Report on Teaching
An article in the New York Times on May 10 highlights an effort by a Harvard University to reemphasize teaching and learning, resulting in a task force report published in January.
From the Times article, Harvard
has issued a report calling for sweeping institutional change, including continuing evaluation and assessment of teaching and learning, and a proposal that teaching be weighed equally with contributions to research in annual salary adjustments.
You can read the article at the New York Times web site (registration may be required) and the Harvard task force report is available on their web site: Compact to Enhance Teaching and Learning at Harvard.
Special RefWorks Workshops on May 4, 2007
There will be two special hands-on RefWorks training sessions offered on Friday, May 4, 2007 at the Scholarly Communication Center of Alexander Library. RefWorks is a web-based bibliography tool and database manager that is free to the Rutgers community.
RefWorks: Tools for Collaborative Research 10:00-12:00
RefShare is a new tool in RefWorks that provides users with a quick and easy method of sharing their research with other Rutgers users and students, and globally with any researcher who has Internet access. This workshop will explore how to make folders sharable, how to transfer research information between RefWorks databases, how to access and view the shared databases via a customizable central web page (such as posting class reading lists), and how to grant access to shared bibliographies by posting a URL, which then can be e-mailed.
RefWorks: Special Topics 1:00-3:00
This workshop will address specific topics in RefWorks for users in the Rutgers community. New features (such as RefGrab-It and the ability to hold attachments) will be discussed and demonstrated. RefGrab has the ability to insert citations from references found in websites. This session is intended to be a hands-on session to address questions from people already using RefWorks.
In addition, The Center for Teaching Advancement and Research Assessment (CTAAR) now offers monthly hands-on Basic RefWorks workshops. Please refer to the CTAAR Calendar of Workshops to register.
Further information about RefWorks, including; setting up an account, on and off-campus connection, bibliographic stylesheets, and using electronic resources, can be found at the RU Libraries RefWorks Information Page. An extremely useful publication for new users is the RefWorks Quick Start Guide.
Please contact Marcie Anszperger at (732) 932-7466 or mja@brokenmail.rutgers.edu please replace "brokenmail" with ctaar.rutgers.edu if you have any questions.
WebCT to Sakai Migration
OIRT has announced that the tool to automatically move content from WebCT to Sakai is ready to use now.
Please contact Joseph Delaney at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching (732) 932-7466 if you want to move your course. At them moment, either CAT or OIRT staff will work with you to ensure that the migration works correctly.
Within a few weeks you will be able to automatically migrate your course material using a web page, without assistance. Of course, assistance is available if you want, and OIRT has hired student staff to do some of the grunt work; just ask if you would like assistance.
See the CAT WebCT page for more information.
New University Graphics
University Relations has announced the availability of the new "Rutgers Visual Identity System", including graphics that can be used by departments for updating their web sites.
All university departments are expected to eventually use the Rutgers Visual Identity System and adhere to its guidelines. Information about the Identity System can be found at http://identity.rutgers.edu/
The Center for the Advancement of Teaching will incorporate the new materials into our workshops on Dreamweaver, web design, and Photoshop, so if you are just getting started or just want to learn how to integrate the new templates into Dreamweaver, please sign up on our workshop registration page.
For convenience, here are the links to graphics. Be sure to read the guidelines before using them, and you will need to log in with your NetID to download the files:
Web-ready graphics for all campuses
High quality logos for print or image editing (not ready for web use)
OIT Planned System Outage
OIT will be upgrading a central data storage device on Thursday, November 16, from 3:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M.
As a result, the following systems will not be available during that time, since they depend on the device which is being upgraded:
- WebCT
- Sakai
- Eden (including student e-mail)
- RULink (calendar and e-mail)
- RAMS (mailing list for courses and official notices)
- Mailman (general mailing lists)
There will be additional service outages not listed here (please contact OIT for more specific information).
Please keep in mind that this will affect your ability to communicate with your students via e-mail or by web site, even after the upgrade is finished there will probably be a delay while backed-up e-mail is delivered.
CASTL Grant Awarded to Rutgers
[Reposted from the Carnegie Foundation news]
Carnegie Selects Participants for New Program to Improve Undergraduate and Graduate Education
Stanford, Calif., September 2006 — The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) has selected 87 higher education institutions or networks of institutions to participate in a program to improve undergraduate and graduate education.
The CASTL Institutional Leadership Program is a three-year partnership between Carnegie and selected colleges, universities and higher education organizations with a strong commitment to the careful examination of teaching and learning. Participants were selected for their ability to influence work in 12 areas, ranging from assessment and accountability to undergraduate research.
“Through this program, Carnegie acknowledges the important contributions of institutional leaders and advocates while encouraging the development of new forums and structures supporting scholarly investigation into teaching and learning,” said CASTL Director Richard A. Gale.
All selected institutions have developed and implemented innovative strategies to strengthen teaching and improve student learning on their own campuses. Through participation in the Carnegie program, they will be expected to collaborate with other institutions to further examine that work and expand activities in those same areas.
Guidelines for participants are intentionally flexible to encourage institutions to define for themselves the nature of present work and future goals. Benefits of participation include access to an online workspace, regular convenings, representation on the Carnegie Web site, and shared resources.
Program participants will gather for the first time on Nov. 8, immediately preceding the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) annual conference in Washington, D.C. For more information visit www.carnegiefoundation.org/CASTL.
Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center with a primary mission "to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education." The improvement of teaching and learning is central to all of the work of the Foundation. The Foundation is located in Stanford, Calif.
WebCT and Sakai - Unavailable on May 17
OIRT is moving both the WebCT and Sakai servers, both will be turned off at approximately 8:00 A.M. on Wednesday, May 17. They should both be available again by two o'clock.
However, because of the way the internet shares information about the location of web servers, it may take 24 hours (in a worst case) for the rest of the world to catch up
with the change, so Sakai and WebCT may appear to be unavailable to people outside of the university until Thursday morning.
Podcasting is here, now.
The podcasting system in Scott 135 is ready to use now. Anyone teaching in Scott 135 can schedule a podcast by filling out the form at http://cat.rutgers.edu/podcast-test/. The form schedules the recording and creates the podcast URL that the students will use to subscribe to the podcast.
Once scheduled, simply go to the classroom, turn on the microphone and press the touchscreen controls to start the recording (the actual recording happens remotely; the touchscreen controls merely prevent the audio signal from leaving the room, giving the instructor full control of what gets recorded).
Our web server will automatically save the mp3 audio file, tag it with the name of the course and lecturer, and send it out on the "RSS feed," all within a few seconds of the end of the lecture. Students merely paste the podcast URL into iTunes, and that software will automatically check for new recordings at regular intervals, automatically downloading new ones and transferring them to the students' iPods (if they have them). Students without iPods can listen to the recordings on their computers or other mp3 players. The podcast URL can also be pasted into the "news" tool in Sakai, and the audio recordings will show up automatically in the course web site.
You'll find more information on our podcasting page, plus information on how to join the discussion on the benefits and drawbacks of podcasting.
New Roster System, New Student IDs
The University Registrar's office has updated the system for retrieving online rosters and reporting grades. The new system seems significantly easier to use. You can find information about how to use the new system at the Registrar's “REGIS” page.
In a related issue, the university will begin it’s transition to new student ID numbers in January. This will affect what information faculty and instructors will see in the rosters, and depending on when you get your rosters you may not have the correct numbers for reporting grades.
- Prior to January 22, 2006, rosters will have student social security numbers. These will become incorrect and should not be used after the start of the Spring 2006 semester.
- Between January 22 and February 13, 2006 rosters will have no student number.
- After February 13, 2006 rosters will have the new, correct student numbers.
The new student numbers will all be different from the student social security numbers, however they are covered by the same policies regarding student privacy, the posting of ID numbers and student grades. They should be treated the same as if they were social security numbers.
If you are unsure whether you have a student's new ID number or social security number, you can tell them apart by looking at the 4th and 5th digit of the number. All new ID numbers will have "00" as the 4th and 5th digit (for example, "123006789" is an ID number), but this will never be the case for a social security number.
University-run course web sites like WebCT, Sakai, and Blackboard use NetIDs (e-mail account names) to identify students and will not be affected by the change to the new ID numbers. However, FAS Gradebook uses ID numbers; If you use FAS Gradebook you must remember to use the new ID numbers in FAS Gradebook starting on January 22, 2006.