Tech Note: Acrobat.com's free cloud tools

Free stuff from the cloud: Adobe's good looking "online office applications" and web conferencing in the form of a mini-Connect.

The office applications are the standard trio: word processor, presentation software, and spreadsheets. You can't help but compare with a famous trio from Microsoft but these offerings have their own look (but with a lot of compatibility). The word processor is called "Documents" but some people will remember it as buzzword. That was a FLASH-based word processor that Adobe bought a couple of years ago. Adobe promised to keep buzzword alive—and free.

buzzword is a fun program with good looks and high functionality. I have used it as a collaborative work space. (And now you can't help but compare with online tools from Google.)

For desktop conferencing, acrobat.com now offers a free 3-seat "room" in Adobe ConnectNow. Upgrades are available, too. For $15/month, the suite of tools includes 5 seats in ConnectNow. For $39/month, the number of seats jumpts to 20.

Disclosure statement: I have no relationship with the products named here and I have not received any compensation or free product for mentioning them. (This blog's only monetary reward comes through google.adsense links, which are selected by Google, not by me.)

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Conference Hand-outs: List is Still Building

The list of conference PPTs and hand-outs is still building, but a nice set is already available on the web from the 2010 Assessment Conference at Texas A&M. The gathering broke at mid-day today with an unusual snowfall. Big fluffy flakes as we exited the meeting.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

SACS' Wheelan at A&M Assessment Conference

One more SACS remark...

Today's main event at the Texas A&M Assessment Conference was the person fast becoming everyone's favorite speaker, Belle Wheelan. In fact, most casual conversations for the first several hours of the day began the same way: isn't she a great speaker. (And then they related where they've heard her speak in the past year.)

Wheelan is doing more for the assessment world than any amount of P.R. could accomplish. Her plain-speaking about the Department of Education is instructive and with humor she communicates what higher ed needs to understand about "the issues," chief among them distance education requirements.

She ended the morning at a luncheon devoted to the SACS 5th Year Interim Report requirement. The bottom line advice: "read the instructions" and "take it seriously."

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

SACS on Distance Learning

New guidance from SACS addresses distance learning. Just added to the web in January 2010, the document relates standards to likely documentation with these headings: Expectations, Questions / Considerations (in question form), and Best Practices (with helpful level of specificity). Direct links to the pertinent PDF files:

Guidelines added in 2010:
Distance Education and the Principles of Accreditation: Documenting Compliance
http://www.sacscoc.org/pdf/081705/Distance%20Education%20and%20the%20Principles%20of%20Accreditation.pdf

Policy Statement from 1997, updated 2006, endorsed 2009:
Distance and Correspondence Education
http://www.sacscoc.org/pdf/081705/distance%20education.pdf

The full set of SACS' Instituitional Resources is on the SACS-COC web site:
http://www.sacscoc.org/inst_forms_and_info1.asp

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Recession Realities: Blog in 2010

Ray Schroeder continues to blog on the Recession Realities in Higher Education in the U.S. His 2010 entries display the range of institutions facing budget cuts, many of which will play out in lay-offs, whole majors eliminated, and truncated summer schedules.

The short list of institutions detailed in the blog: City College of San Francisco, Dartmouth, U of Illinois, U of Nevada, Brown. The list goes on and on.

As the blog makes clear, cuts today are not isolated events with recovery in sight. As students, staff, and faculty adjust to new conditions, they will realize the long-term effects. For staff and faculty, that's likely to be reduced income (for some, loss of job altogether). For students, the effect is likely to be increased time to degree. And increased costs, too.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

UT's Assessment Institute, June 2010

UT Austin has opened registration for its Assessment Institute for 60 participants able to travel to Austin for June 17-18, 2010.

Early bird registration before May 1: $575
Regular registration before June 11: $650

The Institute's emphasis is on academic program assessment. Interactive sessions are planned and that's the reason attendance is limited. The Assessment Institute web page provides more detail as well as hyperlinks to resources produced by UT's Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Checking up on EDU Checkup

Checking up on Nick DeNardis's reviews of university web sites takes a lot of time... because the number of his reviews has doubled since I last visited. The time is worth it. The site is EDU Checkup.

My favorite part of the web site is the Tips Archive. I can scan the list of recent analyses, reading concise tips based on what Nick found on a site. The tips are sound even if they are based on some errors the universities made. (You can click the name of the college for the video clip in which Nick offers his critique of the academic home page.)

FYI: No advertising here. I receive nothing from EDU Checkup other than a good education in academic web design.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Transparency: Course Views

With economics as its focus, Justin Johansen's 2009 dissertation research on open courseware at Brigham Young U concluded that sharing the details of academic courses, along with actual curriculum content, does not reduce enrollment for the course by paying students. That's an important factoid for the institutions that currently or hope to display open courseware on the Internet.

Open courseware probably promotes enrollment but that's a conclusion that deserves testing more broadly. The premise is logical, though: a "deep" view of the course (even if scope is not of the entire course) permits students to preview assignments and even content knowledge. Level of difficulty is evident and perhaps even the professor's personality is, too.

The additional bonus is that learning outcomes are visible in open courseware. Whether for the student shopping for a good fit or the public seeking to understand what the institution offers to students, the display of outcomes provides context for the assignments and content. An ideal display would include assessment results tied to the outcomes from prior semesters of the course. Transparency at its best.

(In keeping with the subject of the research, Johansen's dissertation is available on the web. Use link at top of this entry.)

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

New blog: Genuine Evaluation

Australia and New Zealand provide the world with wonderful scholarship and practice—and that includes a new blog on evaluation. (Twitter, too.)

Patricia J. Rogers and E. Jane Davidson have been stateside for parts of their career but currently reside in their homelands. With the power of Internet technologies, we can enjoy their takes on evaluation instantaneously, of course.

The name of the blog is Genuine Evaluation, launched in January 2010. Start reading now to follow the development of a site by two talented writers. They incorporate philosophy with practical aspects of evaluation and critical review of based on their own use of methodologies. They also promise an occasional joke.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

CHEA Award - Student Learning Outcomes

The 2010 CHEA Award for Outstanding Institutional Practice in Student Learning Outcomes has been awarded to Capella U, Portland State U, St. Olaf College, and the U of Arkansas - Fort Smith.

Capella U's work in SLOs is tied to the online university's extensive use of electronic rubrics in its courses. Instructors' scoring with rubrics produces a tremendous amount of data that permits reporting on learning outcomes across courses and whole programs. The institution publishes reports on a Learning Outcomes web page: select a degree from "Program Outcome Reports" in the left column. After a pause of several seconds, graphics will load.

Disclosure statement: I serve as a member of Capella University's research faculty. I have not received any compensation or acknowledgment from the institution concerning my writing about Capella. In fact, I do not discuss my blog or other work with anyone at the institution. (This blog's only monetary reward comes through google.adsense links, which are selected by Google, not by me.)

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.