Instructional Design and Technology

As  announced last month, IDT is  offering several “a la carte” workshops on Tuesday, June 4, Wednesday, June 5, and Thursday, June 6.  We’ve now hammered out the workshop schedule, and registration is open.

Sessions will include:

View the workshop program for session descriptions and locations.

Please visit our registration page to sign up for workshops.

I hope to see many of you at some of these sessions.  If you have any questions, please contact me (msmock at nmu.edu).

You may have read in the October issue of Campus that Verizon was donating several Android tablets to NMU.  The 20 Samsung Galaxy 2 tablets have now arrived on campus and are available for departments and faculty to check out from the CITE.  The tablets are to be used for educational use, and documentation of the projects for which they are used is required as part of this program.  Review these NMU Tablet Check-Out Guidelines for details.

NMU is a Campus Partner in MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching.  MERLOT is a gateway for accessing a wide range of open (free) educational resources that can be incorporated in your courses.  There are some upcoming webinars introducing MERLOT and providing information on how to best utilize it.

If you are interested, please register at the following site:  http://freeonlinesurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?sid=cghfqqpqueqo9qg1048261

If you choose not to register, you can join the MERLOT Team anyway at the following Collaborate site that will be active 30 minutes before the session:  https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/launch/dropin.jnlp?sid=vclass&password=W3TO2IRTRIPST20K3QQX

Sessions Currently Being Offered

MERLOT 101:  Tues., Dec. 18 – 4 PM Eastern/1 PM Pacific

MERLOT 101 will include an introduction to the MERLOT homepage, as well as an explanation of the Browse and Search functions to find materials in your discipline.

MERLOT 101:  Wed., Jan. 16 – 1 PM Eastern/ 10 AM Pacific

Special Session – Personal Collections, Portals:  Tues. – Jan. 29 – 3 PM Eastern/Noon Pacific

This session will demonstrate how to create a Personal Collection to save your favorite sites.  We will also explore some of our Discipline Portals, Community Portals and Partner Portals to show you areas you may not be familiar with.

MERLOT 101:  Thurs. Feb 14 – Noon Eastern/9 AM Pacific

MERLOT 101:  Wed. Mar 13 – 3 PM Eastern/Noon Pacific

Special Session – Using Content Builder: – Thurs., Mar 28 – 1 PM Eastern/10 AM Pacific

Content Builder is a MERLOT tool that you can use to create your own web page and website.  The website is then hosted on MERLOT and can be private or shared with the public.

MERLOT 101:  Tues., Apr 16 – 11 AM Eastern/ 8 AM Pacific

For instructors using NMU EduCat™, the following information pertains to the end of the semester.

1. EduCat Outage Planned 

   EduCat will be unavailable beginning  approximately 8:00 am on Thursday, December 20^th .  EduCat will be available again to everyone no later than 5:00 pm Friday, December 21^st.At the end of each semester, the course management system must be taken offline in order for the concluded semester’s courses to be archived. After archiving is complete, the courses on the server are reset, which removes semester-specific data such as course rosters, e-mail, discussion comments, and student submissions. Course elements that may be used from semester-to-semester (e.g., assignments, assessments, learning modules, course content home pages) are not affected by resetting.

2. Archived Courses 

   If there is anything you do not wish to be visible on the archive server, please hide the item(s) in your EduCat course prior to Thursday, December 20^th at 8:00 am.Archived EduCat courses containing student data will be made available in a read-only mode on the archive server shortly after the course backups, archives, and maintenance have been completed. Instructors and students have access to archived EduCat courses for a period of 2 years at https://archive-educat.nmu.edu/ .

3. Winter Course Requests 

   If you would like to use EduCat for any Winter courses, please remember to complete course requests at http://myweb.nmu.edu/faculty if you have not already done so.  Note that the CITE will be closed from December 21 – January 1, and we will not be processing requests during that time.  If you need a new course created and plan to work on it during that time, be sure to request it early this week.

4. CITE Hours 

   Week of January 2-4:  Wednesday 10am-5pm, Thursday 10am-5pm, Friday 10am-3pm
   Week of January 7-11: Monday – Friday 10am-5pm
   We will resume regular hours on Monday, January 14^th.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Look for “NMU – Instructional Design and Technology” on Facebook. In addition to the posts from this blog, you will have access to posts from the NMU EduCat^TM blog and episodes from our video tutorial podcast all in one location.