D2L Fusion Summary: Vinnie

“HEADLINES” 

 I had the opportunity to talk to the support guys at Fusion to discuss two issues I had been working.  This turned out to be a really good discussion.  There is an issue with the group settings not copying into live courses.  This requires instructors to setup their groups each time the course is taught.  This turned out to be a bug and the support team is going to be investigating.

The second issue is with quiz categories not copying over.  This issue has been identified and fixed in 10.2

 Dr. Alec Couros the keynote speaker provided a great presentation outlining where technology has been years ago and where it is today.  Students learn much different than we did, they will look at YouTube and other resources to solve problems or how to learn certain tasks.  As designers and developers we need to start looking at how students currently learn and not how it’s always been done in the past.

BEST SESSION OR MEETING 

We had a meeting with our Technical Account Manager and director of support and it was very informative.  We learned that we will be keeping our Technical Account Manager.  We had a great discussion regarding our Test Server.  They are going to copy all our third party apps and about 15 courses onto our test server.  The test server will then we upgraded to 10.2 and this will identify any issues that will occur.  This will be a huge benefit for the administrators of the colleges.

BEST THINGS I SAW IN THE EXPO

• D2L Binder app available in 10.1.  This app can used by students or faculty.  The app enables users to interact with pdf or office files to make annotations.  Files can be downloaded from Dropbox, Skydrive or the D2L Learning Environment.  Users can work on files online or offline.  Work can be sent back to the cloud
• Kaltura D2L Integration – The integration has been improved in 10.1.  Users can now upload and embed video from with the insert stuff menu.
• Kaltura app – They have an early beta app allowing admins, students and faculty to upload videos to D2L with the app.  Stay tuned for the app this fall.

BIGGEST SURPRISES 

·         Respondus monitor – Respondus integrates with lockdown browser to add webcam and video technology for proctoring students not present in the classroom.  Regis currently has 200 available seats with Lockdown browser.

·         I attended a session on delivering an environmental course on the Ipad.  The presenter said the IT department had to make some upgrades to the network infrastructure to support the increase in Ipad usage on the network.  This was surprising and makes me think if we need to make any upgrades to our network.

·         Uploading documents to D2L from the Ipad has been unavailable with the exception of pictures from the Ipad camera.  I had the opportunity to talk one of the support folks and he said the reason is how the IOS operating system is set up.  Apple would need to modify the coding in the operating system or an app would need to be developed.  The Samsung Galaxy tablet does not have this issue.

BEST IDEAS 

·         I attended a session on mobile and the use of apps.  The presenter provided us some development that I want to investigate to determine if its applicable for Regis.  The apps are Appcelerator and Sencha.  For experienced developers Jquery mobile is one that should be investigated.