Tag: #carleton

Carleton CUBE Debrief

Meeting:

Debrief on Carleton’s CUBE pilot (online summer bridge program for quantitative skills)

On October 19, LACOL held a webinar with special guests Melissa Eblen-Zayas and Janet Russell from Carleton College.  In this one-hour session, Melissa and Janet shared their experiences running the first iteration of the ‘Carleton Undergraduate Bridge Experience’ or CUBE, a new online summer bridge program designed to support entering students with quantitative skills and reasoning.  Carleton’s creative approach to developing CUBE riveted the audience at the June LACOL workshop as the pilot was just getting underway.  Now in this “debrief” session, you can hear all about what went into running the program in the first round, how students responded, and the lessons that were learned.  The meeting was held in Zoom with ample opportunity for Q&A and discussion.

Special Guests:

  • Melissa Eblen-Zayas, Associate Professor of Physics and Director of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, Carleton College
  • Janet Russell, Director of Academic Technology, Carleton College

Related Resources:

Date:

Wednesday, Oct 19

Time:

  • Pacific: 8am-9am
  • Central: 10am-11am
  • Eastern: 11am-noon

 

Carleton’s Moodle Evaluation & Needs Assessment

LACOL

By Carly Born, Academic Technologist

moodle-eval-logoCarleton College has been using Moodle for nearly 10 years without having ever done a real evaluation of our use.  Recent data from our participation in the MISO survey suggest some dissatisfaction with Moodle on our campus.  And many current conversations (this Educause white paper is a great place to start) in ed-tech are centered around the changing role of the LMS or even whether an LMS is really needed anymore.  But how do we know? And how do we know what we need?

That is why we are taking a step back and trying to engage the campus on attempting to understand our use of Moodle on a deeper level. The Moodle Evaluation & Needs Assessment project is designed to answer this question:

Does Carleton College need to investigate new technologies to support the functions currently provided by Moodle? Before we can answer this question, we are carrying out an assessment to gain a  deeper understanding of the how we are using Moodle now, how we feel about it, and what it is that we actually need.

I’ve designed this evaluation project to try to assess Moodle from a number of different angles in order to get a more complete picture. There will be database diving, surveys and oh, so many focus groups!

Survey to assess the satisfaction with Moodle

Carly Born, Academic Technologist at Carleton College
Carly Born, Academic Technologist at Carleton College

A survey was distributed in March 2016 to all faculty at Carleton and also to staff who have logged into Moodle more than 5 times in the last year at Carleton.  A separate survey was also distributed to a representative sample of Carleton students.  I have some anecdotal information on general feelings towards Moodle, but it will be so much better to get some quantifiable feedback to specific features of the system.

Survey to assess the importance placed on features typically served by tools like Moodle

This is arguably more important than the questions about satisfaction, and is the heart of the needs assessment portion of this study. I’m hoping to get responses from everyone, even those who don’t use Moodle so that we can understand more about what it is that we need.

Database Diving

I am spending a lot of time up close and personal with the Moodle database. Moodle tracks a lot of information, and so I’m hoping to take advantage of that to understand our current usage patterns. Some questions I will be looking at include: Read More

Dr. Randy Bass speaks at Carleton about a future design for learning

LACOL

In the fall of 2015, Carleton College’s Learning and Teaching Center and Information Technology Services hosted Randy Bass, Georgetown’s Vice Provost for Education, and a leading thinker on innovation in higher education.  In this clip from his campus talk, Dr. Bass invites faculty to look proactively and efficiently at the evolving Liberal Arts landscape.

https://vimeo.com/140367009

According to Bass:

One of the most important things for any institution, especially ones that know that their survival isn’t threatened by the changes in the ecosystem, is to try to be a model of reinvention, to try to reimagine what it is that we most deeply value that is now existing in the world. The most important design question to ask is what kind of experimentation does an institution need to do so that institution can live fully in its time.

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About Carleton College

LACOL

Carleton_CollegeFounded in 1866, Carleton College is a small, private liberal arts college in the historic river town of Northfield, Minnesota. Best known for its academic excellence and warm, welcoming campus community, Carleton offers 37 majors and 15 concentrations in the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.

Carleton College is committed to providing a true liberal arts education, a curriculum that challenges our students to learn broadly and think deeply. Instead of training for one narrow career path, Carleton students develop the knowledge and skills to succeed in any walk of life.
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