MELA Meeting Minutes 2003 - 2017

purchase using their student loans, etc. As long as it is approved and used by the course. The expectations need to be clear up front. Jennifer also asked if students would be notified outside of just the comment within the enrollment tool, since sometimes students do not look at the comment information on their student profiles. Phyllis stated that they used Wimba for their foreign language courses and this was used for students to present for their final exams. We need to take opportunities for using technology to increase the quality of our online courses. Wimba is a great tool because the users and participants are not required to download anything; they are only required to complete the wizard. Christian asked that each school go into your administrative system and discuss possible options with their deans, for courses that would be good candidates for synchronous communication courses. Current they are working with Holmes to develop a pilot course that meets during a certain time everyday and uses Wimba technology. He would like us, as we roll out hybrid courses, to use this technology. Wimba is very supportive and is willing to volunteer some of their trainers. The Wimba upgrade is scheduled for August 10 th and will be available after a couple of hours of downtime. d. Professional Development Catalog and Enrollment – Terry Pollard provided the group with a course catalog and asked that those be given to faculty members across each college. The pamphlet provides a list of courses that are being offered, who should sign up for the courses, a list of course facilitators, and dates that the courses are being offered. We would like for faculty to self-register for these courses, by adding self registration in the Enrollment Tool. Enrollments will be sent up by snapshot and will appear ten days prior to the start of the course start date. They are working with Martha Lou for CEUs and contact hours for each course. LaMetrius, and several others attendees, were concerned about the fact that non MSVCC faculty would now have user accounts in the Enrollment Tool which would also give them access to other tools within the site, such as student registrations, etc. The recommendation was to provide a secondary self registration page, like that used for students self-registering for courses. e. Faculty ID – Christian Pruett. See Item IV. c. iii. f. Support Module – Christian Pruett. We are looking at a support module that would help answer some of the FAQs. For instance, you could have a single module for 24/7 help desk, Respondus, Wimba, library support, etc. Colleges said their open to the idea of Terry compiling all the support information in a single module, and having an exported module so they can add their own local college support information. Terry will export the module to each DLC for modification and deployment. g. Officer Elections – Jennifer Leimer. Nominations and elections will take place at the September 10 th meeting. The new officers will take office at boot camp. If you haven’t done so already, please think about who you would like to nominate. We will be electing secretary and vice president. Tish will take over as president at boot camp. h. Online Orientation – Terry Pollard. Would like to thank Sharon Hudson for her work on three tutorials to help students. The problem is that our students do not know how to navigate Bb. The eLearning group decided that four items needed to be built: (1) navigation, (2) grades, (3) discussion board, (4) assignments. If faculty would like to place this information in their courses instructions will be provided within the newsletter. This orientation is for Blackboard and can be placed in any Blackboard course. This is a simulation using flash files and were created using

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