Part 1: In Search Of An LMS, We Created A Hub
http://courses.middlebury.edu/ For Faculty, the Course Hub is a quick way to link your disparate course materials (blogs, electronic reserves, articles, wikis, and sites) in one location so that they are easily found by your class. Spend a few minutes adding Resources for your online course materials and these will be available to your students throughout the semester. At the very least add your syllabus and make any course site a Resource.
For Students, the Semester Dashboard shows you the latest updates from all of your courses -- at a glance you can see if there have been new updates on the course blog, electronic reserves, or any other connected resources. Clicking through to the Course Hub site for any class allows you to browse through all updates as well as find links to all of the course resources.
Part 2: More than a Search Box: Deep Embedding of Library Materials in Learning Management SystemsLearning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard, Canvas, Sakai, and Moodle have become central to the teaching and learning experience for both instructors and student. Libraries have attempted to be a part of this space, which has led to many interesting projects: search boxes in the LMS, links to library resources enabled by default for all courses, embedded librarians in online courses, etc.
In this session, we will cover a new type of library integration: the EBSCO Curriculum Builder. This tool makes it easy for faculty to make use of library materials in their courses. With one click, faculty members can search the library’s collections and add items to a reading list, all from within the LMS. This eliminates the need for faculty members to understand and use permalinks for licensed library resources - a key step many instructors miss when adding content to their courses. It also encourages proper linking to library materials, a step many instructors bypass when they download a PDF copy of an article and upload it into their LMS. As a result, the library collects better usage statistics (each student use of a library resource is recorded in EBSCO’s reporting features) and faculty avoid inadvertently violating copyright.
The tool is able to accomplish this deep integration thanks to the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) protocol, which will be discussed in this session. LTI tools are very easy for LMS administrators to configure and clearly add value and functionality to the online classroom environment. As a result, implementation of this tool is simple and easy, requiring as little as 5 minutes to get up and running.
This session will show how this tool works from start-to-finish in Moodle and Canvas, including what steps the library and LMS administrator would need to take to get it up and running.
