Instructional Technology Services (ITS) Meeting Notes
Up to Minutes | IT Services

  ITS meeting on 10/18/01

Number of participants: 25
Time: 1:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Eric Nathan: TTLC Administrator started the meeting by welcoming all the participants.

• Eric introduced new team members of TTLC. Karen LaFoy has assumed the position of Learning Technology Consultant replacing Shanaz Jessa while Shanaz has moved on to be the new IT Training Coordinator. Will Robinson has joined the team as User Support Specialist. He is physically located in the TTLC, but reports to Said Fattouh.
• Meeting minutes and agenda from last meeting are available on the web at: http://www.uhd.edu../index.html

Steve Casburn: Library Update.

• Faculty has off campus library database access available.
• Issue was raised about staff access and it was suggested that at this point it is handled on case by case basis.

Dr. Evans: Distance Education Update.

• Students taking online courses will be charged a distance education fee of $140.00 as of Spring 2002.
• Students will be notified of this when they register for their classes.
• Fee will be charged per course.
• This fee is also applicable to ITV courses.
• Fee will not be charged to the courses using WebCT as a tool to deliver their courses at present.
• There is some confrontation expected but cost effectiveness to students will be the line of defense.
• Charging online fee will also give us the ability to expand online course development.
• Funds received via this implementation will be handled by the Provost's offices.

Hossein commented that a definition of "Online" needs to be defined cleary especially if there is an additional fee involved. Dr. Evans replied that classes meeting 50% or more online is defined as "Online" which is an official Coordinating Board definition.

TTLC Update:

• Rhonda: Instructors planning to use e-packs with WebCT should let TTLC do a standard Quality Assurance check.
• There are always new concerns and potential problems with e-packs.

Dr. Evans asked if there is a trend to these problems or if there are any particular publisher with specific problems. Rhonda replied that so far it is difficult to pinpoint any particular publisher but some problems are persistent regardless of the publisher. She has put a list together of things to watch out for while considering using e-packs. It is available at http://uhdonline.dt.uh.edu under Faculty Resources.

Hossein suggested that faculty should talk and communicate better with publishers while evaluating e-packs for their courses. This will let publishers know what improvements/changes to make developing these contents.

Mark added that standard review time for an e-pack is about 1 week.

• Eric: Working on Campus Edition migration from 3.1 to 3.6. The key difference would be load balancing. New version will allow to split the load between two servers vs. one right now.
• Also, the new version is IMS, ADA compliant. Global calendar will be available as well.
• Will be looking for some volunteers to test it later in the semester.

Dr. Long asked if there would be an improvement on Grade calculation feature. Eric said not sure if there is anything different but will look into it.

• Online course evaluation was piloted this semester but there is some great concerns regarding the validity of the data.

• James: Touched base on ADA issues in distance education. He distributed a handout with some useful information (copies available in TTLC for review). Some of the key issues with distance education using WebCT is use of browsers, frames and online testing. Migration to version 3.6 should tackle some of the issues if not all.

Dr. Evans suggested that she would take some fliers with her to distribute to the other faculty members to bring awareness of this issue. Hossein suggested to let this be handled by Disabled student services as they are the ultimate authority on this issue. You do not want to put out something that is not in compliance with ADA. Also, there may be some legal issues related to this matter.

Will Robinson asked Lloyd if Closed Captioning is available for ITV courses. Lloyd responded that there has not been any request made for that as of yet. Also, this kind of equipment is fairly expensive to buy.

Eric suggested that may be we can invite someone from that area next meeting to shed some light on some of these issues.

• Shanaz: We are in the process of developing a training video per faculty request. The first video will deal with Basic WebCT. Depending on the demand and response, further videos will be produced.

Mark added that eventually these videos will be formatted into streaming videos, and possibly DVD/CD Rom. We will try to make it available in Spring of 2002.

.ITV update by Lloyd Matzner:

• In the process of finalizing ITV courses for Spring 2002. There has been a 30% increase in number of classes using ITV.
• 3 Saturday classes are being added.
• A total of 35 courses will be offered this Spring.

Dr. Evans added that there is a good market out there for Saturday classes. Face-to-Face classes have been pretty popular and now ITV is getting popular as well. Dr. Evans also showed her concerns regarding availability of ITV equipment for Ford Bend since there is a move scheduled to its new facility come this summer. However, it should not effect face-to-face classes. She will keep involved parties updated since this is still early in the process.

Dr. Key asked to get some help regarding availability and accessibility to Multimedia Carts for late afternoon classes. It is difficult for instructors to be pushing these carts up and down at night. Lloyd commented that there has not been enough demand to have an employee dedicated to this process.

Dr. Evans suggested that may be these carts can be kept locked up in the classrooms and can be removed the following morning.

Hossein added that we will look further into this matter and come up with some solution.

ACL issues - Update by Lucy:

• Introduced Georgina Georges as a new Lab Specialist. She is responsible for coordinating electronic classroom reservation and day to day running of ACL.
• Reminding faculty to use their security code to gain access to the electronic classrooms and make sure the classrooms are locked after they are done.
• Turn off the projector after its use as replacing the bulb takes a long time and also expensive.
• Handed out new training schedule. Available to all faculty, staff and students.

Demonstration by Mark:

• Mark introduced a product called Impatica. More information can be found at http://www.impatica.com
• An overview of how the application works. Basically, this application allows a user to put voice annotation to PowerPoint presentation. It does not require any kind of plug-ins or external hardware. It also compresses the file to be delivered on the web.
• The demo showed a presentation with voice annotation. Mark added the original file of 1.1 MG was compressed to 400k. Also the voice quality was not bad given the fact that a regular microphone was used for this process.
• It can be used with WebCT as a regular file.
• This is strictly a client side application.
• Will look into cost and other logistics.

Demonstration by Steve:

• Steve introduced an application called Imperata. More information can be found at http://www.imperata.com
• This application will replace Classnet.
• All software based. Much more useful.
• It will help eliminate lot of harware related issues with Classnet.
• Demo.
• Licence has already been purchased.
• It will be installed in TTLC first and will expand from there on. Spring 2002 is the targeted time frame for this process.

Open Discussion