[ED-TECH] Ideas for your courses

Are you are designing your courses for this coming year? Here are two places to find ideas and materials.

 

The MIT OpenCourseWare site (http://ocw.mit.edu) has material for 900 courses on-line, including items such as lecture notes, problems sets, exams, and video lectures.  Check your discipline and see if there is anything you can use.

 

The Merlot collection of material (www.merlot.org) comes from a wide range of faculty members from many different institutions.  There are at least two items there from UM. (To find them do an advanced search for "miami" in the "Author's Email".)

 

Bill Vilberg

305-284-3949 (work); 786-218-3052 (cell); 305-255-9138 (home)

 

[ED-TECH] Photo Class Rolls available now

I was told "The link "Display Picture(s) For Entire Class Roll" was added to the faculty class rolls about a month ago" so it should be there right now, in EASY.  The photo class roll feature was requested in May and was implemented in June. Take a look. (Since I don't teach any classes I can't tell you exactly where it is, but it ought to be EASY to find, right?)

 

With all the MyUM work and everything I thought this would be implemented sometime this fall.  Kudos to Beth Hernandez and everyone else in IT for providing this service and doing it so quickly.

 

Bill Vilberg

305-284-3949 (work); 786-218-3052 (cell); 305-255-9138 (home)

 

[ED-TECH] MyUM to appear August 10th

Heads up!  The EASY system will become MyUM on August 10th, if everything goes as planned.  That is two weeks before the start of the semester, so you should have time to explore it before classes begin.

 

ADDRESS:  All the web addresses to EASY will still work after the switch in names.  They will just go to MyUM rather than the old EASY pages.  If you are updating your syllabus and have references to EASY, you might want to change the references to MyUM and give the www.miami.edu/myum web address.  (That is the easiest address to publish, in my opinion.)

 

FUNCTIONALITY:  Everything you could do on EASY will be available on MyUM when it is released.  Other features will be added over time.  One of those features, planned for the coming Spring semester, is a way for instructors to get a page with the pictures of all their students in a class.  Another added features will be collaboration tools for committees, departments, student organizations, and study groups.  Everything will be tightly integrated with our back-end databases, allowing for excellent security.

 

Bill Vilberg

305-284-3949 (work); 786-218-3052 (cell); 305-255-9138 (home)