IOL 2010 Call for Proposals Now Open

The sixth annual UT System IOL Conference seeks proposals for interactive   and engaging presentations related to changes and innovations in online education. Proposals that address the unique challenges and opportunities with the delivery, support, evaluation, and management of online teaching and learning are encouraged. The deadline for proposal submissions will be Friday, January 29, 2010. In addition to proposals by UT System faculty, staff, and students, individuals outside the UT System are invited to submit proposals using the online submission tool. For more information go to http://www.iolconference.org/callForProposals.aspx.

Proposals for preconference workshops are still being accepted, the deadline for that remains November 23, 2009. Please contact IOLconference@utsystem.edu with any questions you may have.

UTTC mp3 Podcast Player Released

We’re pleased to announce that UTTC has released a fully customizable podcast organizer and player designed specifically with educators in mind. The application has been released as open source and the files can be downloaded from Source Forge:

http://mp3playr.sourceforge.net/

The easily customizable podcast playlist makes organizing and sharing course lectures and supplemental audio presentations a snap. The fully customizable interface allows course developers and instructors to configure the mp3Player to reflect their school and department branding, and course graphic themes. The player organizes and presents the playlist in 3 customizable columns of information. By default, columns define podcasts by Group, Title, and Author. You can easily configure column headings to fit your content requirements such as multiple subjects, chapters, authors, historical contexts, etc. Students can then sort each column in ascending/ descending alphabetical order, as well as, arrange the order of the columns to organize the playlist to best meet their listening and study needs.

For the developer, the UTTC mp3Player is a Flex and Actionscript 3.0 application that has been released as a Source Forge open source community contribution targeted to course developers and anyone interested in a fully customizable Flex media player application.

Project Manager — Michael Anderson, UT System TeleCampus: manderson@utsystem.edu
Flex Application Developer — Brad Shaevel, UT System TeleCampus: bshaevel@utsystem.edu

Copyright Clearance Center

Each campus of the University of Texas System is now subscribed to the Copyright Clearance Center’s Annual Academic License (CCC Annual) for the academic year 2090-2010. The CCC Annual enhances each campus’ existing rights to make and distribute copies of materials to students. Each campus currently relies on a combination of library licensed materials, materials whose owners make them available freely over the Internet, and fair use. The CCC Annual adds to that body of materials and rights to use them the ability to copy and distribute materials owned by the Annual’s publisher participants, through online course management systems such as Blackboard, through electronic reserve systems in campus libraries, and through electronic and paper coursepacks, created both on and off campus.

Information about license benefits and obligations will be of interest to those who operate the services through which each campus provides digital and analog course materials to students. For example, if a campus delivers course materials using all three methods (course management system, electronic reserves and coursepacks), participants who represent each of these services should attend. Additionally, each campus will need to consider whether it wishes to extend the CCC Annual privileges to its area copy shops. The license permits this, but does not require it. So those on each campus who may be involved in making this decision will also wish to attend.

Two System-wide videoconferences about the Copyright Clearance Center’s Annual Academic License have been held. For those unable to attend, and because we now have a System CCC License Website, UT System has posted the presentation Powerpoint as well as other information of interest to those who will be involved in the management of the license on each campus. The website will be fully accessible on Friday from the OGC website at http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc. At that time, and afterwards, if you have any questions or comments about the license, feel free to contact Georgia Harper (gharper@austin.utexas.edu) or Steve Rosen (srosen@utsystem.edu. We will be happy to discuss your concerns with you.

Blackboard Maintenance Planned – Requires Outage, August 17, 2009

The UTTC Blackboard installation is scheduled for maintenance to install a minor service pack, which requires a 15 hour system outage. The UTTC Blackboard installation will be unavailable beginning at 11:00 p.m. Central time on Sunday, August 16 through 2:00 p.m. Central time on Monday, August 17.

This update introduces Firefox 3 as a certified browser and IE 8 a compatible browser.

For more information, visit the Blackboard Upgrade Information page.

BlackBoard 8: HTML Tags in Discussion Board Forum Titles Prevent Use of Discussion Board Display Order Drop-down Menus

When the title of a discussion board forum contains html tags such as <font></font> or other formatting tags, the display order drop-down menus used to reorder the display order of your discussion forums will not work.  If you ever experience, while trying to reorder the display list of your discussion board forums, that Blackboard is ignoring changes you make using the Display Order drop-down menus, then check the title of your discussion forums for any html tags.  Remove the html tags from the discussion board forum titles you want to reorder and the drop-down menus will work as expected.  Once reordered you can add the html tags back into the titles for formatting, but remember that if you ever need to reorder the discussion forum list again, you will need to again remove any html tags contained in the titles.