Intelligent Agents in D2L

I have been teaching a class in Desire2Learn (MKT 595: Internet Marketing) as part of long-term study and comparison of Learning Management Systems (teaching in Blackboard, D2L and Moodle to explore the respective advantages and disadvantages of each system). My colleagues in SNL, SoE and SPS are doing the same. I had not posted about my experiments here, but have decided that I should. This week I decided to see how well Intelligent Agents could be put to use. Intelligent Agents are scriptable events that send out e-mails based upon a set of criteria. You could use them to send a gentle nudge to students who had not logged into the course for several days, or who had not completed an assignment before the deadline. This is a great feature, but I did not want to send students automated e-mails until I had tested things for myself. What I did instead was to create an intelligent agent that sent me e-mail as each of students completed milestone tasks. This highlighted some issues that I would have to work through: I received some spurious messages with this text: {term not found: IntelligentAgents.Shared.emailConfirmationBody} I am assuming that this is a mis-configuration on my part. I will investigate further….. My spam/junk filter quarantined some of the e-mail messages. This happened at two stages; externally from our Postini service, internally from Entourage/Outlook. I had to manually recover the messages. Based upon this information, I would use this procedure with Intelligent Agents: Create agents from a tested template. Ask students to add the Intelligent Agent e-mail address to their whitelist or address book (so that the e-mails would not be stopped by spam filtering). CC myself on the student e-mail. Overall, I am impressed with the feature. I just need to experiment with it more.

Engaging International Students in the Classroom

The Teaching Commons is offering an event that should be of interest to all faculty who teach internationally, or who have international students in their classes: Engaging International Students in the Classroom Garrett Grenz from the Office of International Students and Scholars is organizing a panel of faculty, staff, and students to discuss problems and strategies. This will be an interactive and informative session. The event is free and food will be provided; you can register online here: http://olmiisprd.is.depaul.edu:8080//DCS/mcp?p=8003RM803RM80000000 Day: Friday, November 13th Time: 2:00PM - 4:00PM Location: Lincoln Park Student Center 380

Now on Google Wave

Have started using Google Wave this morning. Will be messing about with Blogger integration later properly later. In the meantime, here is an embedded wave (hoping this works): You will need to be logged into Google Wave to see the embedded wave.

IPhone and Outlook/Exchange

Good news for iPhone (and iPod Touch) owners. DePaul University has instructions (and an automated configuration utility) that will setup Exchange/Outlook e-mail on your device. Instructions and the configuration utility can be found at http://iphone.depaul.edu I highly recommend that you backup your both your iPhone/iPod Touch beforehand along with your Address Book and iCal Calendar. The default settings assume that you want to synchronize Outlook with your address book and calendar – you may not want to do this.

Teaching Commons Workshops

DePaul's Teaching Commons is offering a series of Workshops. I think several of these may be of interest to Commerce faculty. Notable workshops include Darsie Bowden on helping students read effectively, and Garrett Grenz on engaging international students in the classroom. Workshops are free to DePaul faculty. More information and registration can be found on the website: http://teachingcommons.depaul.edu/events.html

MKT 595 - Online Class Started Wednesday

The online version of MKT 595 started on Wednesday. If you have been unable to login to the course, please get in touch with me immediately.

Twitter in Higher Education: Usage Habits and Trends of Today’s College Faculty

Faculty Focus has published a free report that provides some perspective on Twitter use in Higher Education. The PDF can be downloaded here: http://www.facultyfocus.com/free-report/twitter-in-higher-education-usage-habits-and-trends-of-todays-college-faculty/ The 20-page report used survey data conducted between July and August of this year. About 2,000 respondents completed they survey. The majority of the faculty who responded do not use Twitter in Higher Education (for varying reasons.). The report is well worth a look.