CourseInfo takes off at Jefferson in a big way! At the end of August we had more than 30 courses taking advantage of the CourseInfo server. There are courses representing all three colleges, but at this time JMC is in the lead with 17 courses.
The workshops offered were not getting many participants, in part I hope because of how easy it is to use this product. The faculty who were in the workshops were usually working on their own courses within an hour or two. Email contacts with those going through the tutorial on their own found pretty much the same short time to learn this program and start on their own course. If you would like to have a workshop set up for your entire department please contact me, we'd be happy to work with you to do this. If you prefer to go through the tutorial on your own, the address to download the tutorial and examples files is listed at the end of this article. If you have any questions while working through the tutorial, please email us or give us a call.
Education Services will soon be sending all faculty using CourseInfo wallet-size support cards with phone numbers you may call for priority help. These numbers will reach a CourseInfo support person to help you between 8:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. Monday through Friday. The AISR Systems Division installed the CourseInfo server on a new Dell NT Server with redundant, swap-able hard drives. This machine is dedicated to CourseInfo alone and has not experienced any unscheduled downtime. In the short time since CourseInfo was installed the system was offline twice, for two software upgrades recommended by Blackboard.
Use the "pool" option to create your quizzes or exams. The pool feature will allow you to categorize and re-use questions in other courses you teach. Another great feature is that by putting your quiz items into a pool you can have the software randomize the presentations of questions and responses. If the number of questions in the pool is the same size as the number of quiz items, all students will see every item, but in a different order.
Related Links:
