ETS Initiatives
Below you will find a sampling of our larger initiatives. Many of these are collaborative projects in which ETS has partnered with other units on campus. Each project title is clickable and will take you to a page specifically related to that project. There you will find information on how to get invovled, find additional resources, and learn how to contact us. You can also contact Cole Camplese, ETS Director, for more information.
ETS Community Hubs
Since 2006, TLT has been implementing and supporting community blog sites, or the ETS Community Hubs, for its services and initiatives that encourage members of the Penn State community to not only find information but to share it. Users can subscribe to an RSS feed of new posts from each individual community, or from the TLT Community Aggregator site. The Community Hub aggregates content from the Adobe Connect, ANGEL, Blogs at Penn State, Digital Commons at Penn State, Education Technology Services, Educational Gaming Commons, iPhone, Penn State Learning Design, Podcasts at Penn State, SCOLA, and the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology.
These sites are designed to be open resources that are always available to anyone — either inside or outside of Penn State. We believe that the formation of a community of users is critical for the long-term success of our primary initiatives. The Community Hubs for a community of practice for the people engaged in the use of the technologies they support. We invite you to participate in the creation of knowledge at any of the Community Hubs.
The Blogs at Penn State
The Blogs at Penn State is a project exploring the use of blogs (Weblogs) in higher education. Once you have established your blog, you are free to use it as you see fit. Blogs are published in your personal Web space, so they belong to you. To learn more about the Blogs at Penn State or to get started go to the Blogs at Penn State Community Hub and explore. The site includes a forum where Penn State bloggers can gather to share information on how to get the best use of the Penn State blogs.
The Blogs at Penn State are powered by Six Apart’s enterprise blogging platform, MovableType 4. This open source software has been adapted to work within the Penn State environment. We are constantly working to envision new uses for the blog platform — as a matter of fact we see the blog platform as a personal content management system. This perspective allows us to think about blogs as the basis for all sorts of opportunities — from faculty web sites to student eportfolios. If there are things you’d like to explore about the Blogs at Penn State, please don’t hesitate contacting us so so we can get together and talk.
Blended Learning Initiative
The goal of the Blended Learning Initiative is o increase student success in high-enrollment classes—in terms of course access, academic achievement, and a sense of feeling engaged—several courses per year are being redesigned to make greater use of online delivery using ANGEL. This format is intended to make it possible to offer more sections of high-demand courses, permit more feedback from instructors, increase interaction among students, and help ensure that students master key concepts. The Blended Learning Initiative is a joint effort of the respective academic departments, the World Campus, the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, and TLT. In development during 2007 are ASTRO 001, MATH 021 (York and UP), NUTR 251, ECON 002, EGEE 102, PHIL 012, BiSci 002, and SPAN 002.
ANGEL for Teaching and Learning
ETS staff spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to better utilzie ANGEL for teaching and learning. We have staff dedicated to working with faculty and students to understand the overall needs assocaited with this University-wide resource. Our staff, along with those of other Information Technology Services units, regularly examine faculty requests for enhancements to ANGEL. Some enhancements are designed and programmed in-house; some are submitted to ANGEL Learning, Inc. to be incorporated into future versions of ANGEL. During spring 2007, TLT staff developed a more easily searchable documentation database, allowing users to locate specific help topics more quickly. This system will continue to be refined.
Learn more about ANGEL by visiting the ANGEL Community Hub. If you’d like to sit down and talk to us about how you are currently using ANGEL or would like to discuss some new ideas you have, please feel free to contact us.
Adobe Connect Pro
ETS staff continue to help support Adobe Connect Pro desktop videoconferencing software as a way to provide training and hold meetings at a distance. Adobe Presenter, part of the Adobe Connect package, allows faculty to synchronize audio with PowerPoint slide presentations and create Flash-based learning objects that can be posted to the Web, including an ANGEL course, for asynchronous use. TLT staff are also providing training opportunities, and compiling Adobe Connect models, case studies, and resources for faculty and staff at Adobe Connect Community Hub.
We are constantly looking at how to improve to the toolset and are exploring new and interesting ways it can be used to support teaching and learning. If you’d like to try out Adobe Connect or work with ETS to think of ways to integrate it into your classroom, please feel free to contact us.
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