CIRTL Café Course Support

Organizing an Online CIRTL Course or Workshop

The CIRTL Portal Team makes the following recommendations on announcing / recruiting and organizing an online CIRTL course, workshop or event that uses some form of technology. Crossnetwork courses have great promise to meet CIRTL goals, but can be challenging to manage in terms of technology.

The Portal team has organized three online tools that instructors can use at their discretion.

CIRTL Café Groups: The Café allows collaborative groups to request a public or private workspace within the Café. The Group feature is access from the right hand block labeled Collaborate. Café Groups organize a number of functions including discussion forums, group member’s blogs, website and file sharing, polls, web pages. These features are assessed, along with creating or joining a group, are available on the right hand column once someone has signed into the Café.

Moodle: Moodle is an open source course management system similar to Blackboard or WebCT. Moodle is accessed through the link on the Café home page or through http://www.cirtl.net/moodle/.

Eluminate: Elluminate is a web-conferencing tool built specifically for live, multi-media, many to many collaboration using: voice over internet (VoIP) audio, live webcam, breakout rooms, interactive whiteboard, chat style messaging, and shared viewing of applications. A headset or microphone and earbuds are required to use the VoIP connection. To take full advantage of the interactive distance conference a webcam is also recommended.

Network partners can access Eluminate through the Café at http://www.cirtl.net/elluminate. Scheduling Eluminate is also done through the Café at  http://www.cirtl.net/elluminate/calendar.

We believe our portal, The CIRTL Café (http://cirtl.net), can also be an effective tool in recruiting participants, managing their enrollment in your course, and serving as a common gateway to the diverse technology tools that will likely be used by the CIRTL community toimplement network courses. We are trying to help by reducing the need to rely on email as the sole tool to organize these courses and to support diverse tools that could be used to offer the course, including the tools developed specifically by the Portal team (CIRTL Moodle site, CIRTL Café Group function, and a trial Wiki).

Creating Café Pages for Recruitment and Course Management

The Portal Team can help the process by creating two types of web pages on the Café focusing on recruitment and course management. The type of information required to make these pages is listed below.

Recruiting Page

The goal of the recruiting page is to highlight the goals and description of the course, course logistics, and to provide a place for graduates-through-faculty to register for the course. TheCafé software collects participant information and stores it in a .CSV file that can bedownloaded from the Café and opened in Excel or Word. This page will be listed under the Courses tab and in advance of the course, it will be accessible through the upcoming CIRTL events page.

The following information should be included on the Café Recruiting page:

Title:
Event Type:
Event Host Institution:
Course Description:
Instructor(s) and/or Facilitators:
Course Time and Place (if face2face):
Technology Tools (list and short description):
Notes: often a statement on how to sign up for credit
Click here to register for this event
For more information contact:
Attachment: Course flyer

Example of a gateway page: http://www.cirtl.net/events/seminars/spring2009/diversity_cc

Course Gateway Page

The goal of the gateway page is to provide one place on the web that can act as a repository of the course information, including links to the technology sites used to serve the class. By using the page, we can reduce the need to rely on email to inform participants of crucial information. These pages are always listed under CIRTL Network Courses tab.

The following information should be included on the Café gateway page:

Title
Event Type:
Event Host Institution:
Description:
Instructor(s) & Facilitators:
Cross Campus Scheduling:
Locations for Face2Face meetings:
Technology Requirements
Notes:
Syllabus: attached file

Example of a gateway page: http://www.cirtl.net/events/seminars/spring2009/ett

For assistance setting up course pages:

Contact:

Adam Jonas
jonas@wisc.edu
608-262-8545

More Information

Kitch Barnicle
Project Manager / Network Coordinator
Center for the Integration of Research,
Teaching, and Learning
1025 W. Johnson St., Suite 552
Madison, WI 53706
608-262-9174 (voice)
608-265-0538 (fax)
aim/skype: kitchbwork