The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
What a Drupal website for distance learning should be like? We will talk about technologies for students’ assignments, collecting statistics on the work done, functionality, Drupal modules, and distributions for its work.
Source: Drupal for e-Learning websites
Citing ‘zero lethal threat’ to students, Purdue works to reopen college for fall 2020 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/04/25/coronavirus-college-fall-2020-purdue-university-mitch-daniels/3018469001/
As schools and universities are shutting down around the globe due to COVID-19, many of us in academia are wondering how we can get up to speed and establish a stable workflow to get our podcasts, online lectures, and tutorials out there for our students. Open source software (OSS) has a key role to play in this situation for many reasons, including:
Every day, we do about 12 scheduled deploys. During each deploy, an engineer is designated as the deploy commander in charge of rolling out the new build to production. This is a multistep process that ensures builds are rolled out slowly so that we can detect errors before they affect everyone. These builds can be rolled back if there is a spike in errors and easily hotfixed if we detect a problem after release.
Deploys at Slack https://slack.engineering/deploys-at-slack-cd0d28c61701
This is an interesting look at how development is done at Slack. Weirdly, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t get away with this sort of iteration anymore because our community it’s relatively small and hesitant to change.
Once upon a time I did make changes on the fly to add new features or tweak the interface but now folks depends on us to maintain a certain level of stability as they learn about it teach the law. Of course it could be that as I get older I’m less tolerant of getting pinged about changes
Show HN: From Markdown to Video https://www.videopuppet.com/docs/script/
Videopuppet lets you use markdown, json, or yaml files that describe the video you want, with narration, to create videos. This has a many possible uses including straightforward describer videos and educational videos.
When the semester started who knew it would finish as an experiment in moving legal education online quickly and in an emergency? I certainly didn’t see it coming but here we are. In person classes are not going to happen again this spring and everything is moving online. I hope law faculty are getting all of the support they need from their local IT staff but even the best staff might not have the time to get into some of the nuances of teaching online. In this brief post I just want to mention a few things to keep in mind that might ease the transition to to online learning and teaching.
While I’ll be mentioning Zoom, there are are other equally useful video conferencing tools being used by law schools and universities for online learning and teaching. Many of the features mentioned generally are available on most video platforms, so if your inline course has a synchronous video component you can use these tips.
Get the software setup well ahead of your first class, figure out how it works, run through starting and finishing a class a few times. For Zoom, definitely download and use the desktop client that’s available for Mac and Windows. Flip through the settings and try different things. This is a powerful tool that is built to be easy to use at a “let’s just get this meeting started” level. Getting more out of it takes some practice.
When setting up a Zoom session you have the option of whether or not to have everyone’s video on or off at the start, same with audio. Allowing students to not use video is a good idea because some students may not be comfortable sharing their surroundings or looking into a camera for the entirety of class.
As for audio, have it turned on to start so everyone can say hi and then students can be muted if necessary. I think everyone’s natural reaction when joining a conference call is to say “Hi!” and if they’re muted it causes a moment of confusion that’s easily avoidable.
Nothing will wrecks an online class faster than bad audio. A good headset is not expensive and relying on your laptop’s built in microphone and speakers is going to go horribly wrong at some point. Using a basic headset with microphone is going to avoid the vast majority of audio quality issues and good audio will keep the class moving forward.
Things will go wrong. Connections will drop. Screens will freeze. Sound and video will stutter. The Internet is a wild and woolly place where stuff happens. The most important thing you can do is keeping moving forward and …
Zoom has a feature that will automatically record everything including saving chat logs. Turn it on. Then when students have tech issues you can just share the recording with them. I have heard that some schools aren’t planning on recording everything. I think that’s a mistake. Recordings of your class will be a very valuable asset for your students.
They’re as new to this as you are. They may be familiar with some of the tools, but this is probably the first time they’ve taken a full course load of law school classes in a completely online setting. Let them know what to expect and when to expect it. Reassure them that you’re going to get through this together. Make it as smooth and comfortable as you can.
I know a lot of law faculty aim to make students uncomfortable and keep them on edge. Now really isn’t the time for that. We all have a lot on our minds beyond the walls of academia and it’s important to acknowledge that. Students can learn and faculty can teach the law in this new online world but it will be easier for both if everyone knows what to expect and everyone is treated with kindness.
As always, if you have any questions just drop me a line: elmer at teknoids.net
Creating online courses in WordPress is easier than ever with the help of some amazing LMS (Learning Management Systems) plugins. It’s a great business model, considering the low startup costs, profits, ability to share your knowledge, and flexibility. What’s that? I think I hear the school bell ringing. So, let’s get to it… Here’s a bit of what I’ll be going over: Why even launch an online course using WordPress? Do you need an LMS plugin? 3rd party sites (and why they’re probably not best) Creating online courses in WordPress
Source: How to Create an Online Course with WordPress and LMS Plugins :: wpmudev
Good overview of the pros and cons of building a course using WordPress and some third party plugins. Key thing to remember is that you’re still responsible for all the content, WP + plugins just give you a framework to offer the course in.
Early Cycle Law School Numbers Applicant and Application Volume https://blog.spiveyconsulting.com/early-cycle-applicant-and-application-volume/
Disruptive Leadership in Legal Education | Best Practices for Legal Education https://bestpracticeslegaled.albanylawblogs.org/2019/01/11/disruptive-leadership-in-legal-education/
Peter Potter, director of publishing strategy for the University Libraries at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, was appointed by the Association of Research Libraries as visiting program officer to advance TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem).
LJ: How does the TOME model work?
Peter Potter: TOME is an initiative to create a system whereby academic books can be made available open access. It’s an attempt to create, from the bottom up, a group of institutions and presses working together to ensure that payment is made on the front end of publication, rather than publishers having to rely on sales income. At the moment we have over 70 participating university presses, [and] 13 participating universities.
The press gets the up-front money. If a press is participating, they’re agreeing to publish this book in an open access format. That doesn’t prevent them from turning around and selling the book, which they can do. If there are print sales or ebook sales that they can generate, they should continue doing that.
Contribution from a university is a minimum of $15,000 per monograph. We figured that after this five-year pilot we would come back and revisit that amount to find out if that is actually enough to make this worthwhile for presses. We understand the $15,000 is less than what it typically costs to produce a monograph—Mellon did a study a few years ago in which they said it’s actually well over $20,000. But the idea is by making a book open access you’re not cutting off sale possibilities. The $15,000 jump-starts the book’s availability, it enables the press to go ahead and publish the book [in print format], and then they will see sales that will supplement that.
One of the things that’s important is that these are university press peer-reviewed books. We want it to be clear to provosts and department heads and deans that these are not second class books—they are books that a university press would have published anyway on the basis of quality. We didn’t want the sales potential of the book to get in the way of that. Sometimes decisions get made for a monograph based upon “we don’t think we can sell enough copies,” and this is a way to try to address that problem on the front end.
Source: Peter Potter on Funding OA Monographs
This approach of essentially paying upfront for the book has worked quite successfully for nearly a decade for CALI eLangdell Press. eLangdell Press books are distributed freely with a Creative Commons license that allows faculty to remix the work to tailor it to their course needs. CALI eLangdell currently offers over 30 casebooks and supplements in over a dozen areas of the law. DUring the Fall 2018 semester eLangdell titles were downloaded over 12,000 times, providing law students with over $1,500,000.00 in value.
