This summer, after a team retreat and much soul searching, Instructional Technology changed its name to Learning and Research Technologies. For awhile, we’ve felt our name hasn’t accurately represented our team’s portfolio of services, but when we added a new group, Research and High-Performance Computing (R/HPC), to our team in the spring, we realized it was time to change our name.
Research and High-Performance Computing
This new team within Learning and Research Technologies will offer high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities, support, and consultation to researchers beginning this fall. We anticipate the computational cluster to be brought online in September, but the R/HPC team is available immediately to consult on your individual research computational needs be they related to needing an allocation on the cluster, or discussing if placing a specialized workstation in the ITS-managed colocation facility is the right fit.
In addition to designing the HPC cluster this summer, R/HPC stood up two campus services available for use today:
Contact the Help Desk at help@lafayette.edu, or feel free to reach out to Jason Simms, Manager of Research and High-Performance Computing, at simmsj@lafayette.edu or (610) 330-5632.
Moodle
Each summer we update Moodle to a newer version with each version having it’s own flavor of updates. But, the updates to the theme and to the Dashboard are two features we’re excited to introduce to instructors. Some noteworthy highlights include:
- Users having the ability to customize their Dashboard in very meaningful ways through starring, hiding, filtering, and sorting their courses in Moodle and even Spaces.
- Some commonly accessed functions are now co-located under the Gear icon located in the upper-right of a course. Some popular functions located under the Gear icon include:
- Turn editing on
- Edit course settings
- Quickmail
- Gradebook setup
- Merging courses
- Instructors now can provide private replies to students within a discussion forum, as well as lock a discussion forum making it read-only. Further, everyone in a forum can sort discussion forum responses by last posted or creation date.
- Participants and Roster are more front-and-center (well, left) in the sidebar menu. Participants is where one could add a Writing Associate to their course, and Roster is a tool to help instructors learn their students names.
- The sidebar menu is collapsible by clicking the “hamburger” icon in the upper-left next to the Moodle logo.
- Moodle course sites are created hidden from students, so remember to make your course sites visible.
Kaltura
- We merged our two instances of Kaltura, so now all your media content lives simultaneously on media.stage.lafayette.edu and Moodle/Spaces. Put another way, any media contained in “My media” is available for you to post at either media.stage.lafayette.edu or in a Moodle/Spaces site.
- Kaltura now uses Kaltura Personal Capture, an updated desktop recording tool. This tool automatically creates chapter markers when recording PowerPoint presentations. Unfortunately, this automatic functionality doesn’t work with other presentation software (e.g., Google Slides).
- When recording from a PC using Kaltura Personal Capture or Kaltura Classroom (lecture capture software installed on all classroom PCs), multiple video sources can be recorded at full quality. For instance, it’s possible to record one’s screen while simultaneously recording from a portable document camera connected to a microscope. Viewers of the recording can select which video source they want to bring to the foreground or they can put both sources side-by-side on their screen.
- It’s possible to order captions at no cost for media posted to Kaltura. Captioning can be turned off or on by the viewer, providing them a more tailored experience.
Rockwell Integrated Sciences Center
Obviously, there are a lot of great things happening in Rockwell, but we think these new features are rather exciting:
- All smart classrooms in Rockwell have screencasting capabilities. Click “wireless” from the touch panel or button panel to connect nearly any device to the screen wirelessly.
- Classrooms and teaching labs have built-in web conferencing cameras and microphones that can serve as inputs for Zoom, Kaltura Classroom, and Kaltura Personal Capture from the classroom PCs. For spaces without this capability, we added more Logitech conference cams to the Skillman Library circulating equipment pool.
Tech Lounge
The Tech Lounge is a place for anyone from the Lafayette community to get quick help, one-on-one consultation, and general instruction for services such as software, network connectivity, email, and virus/spam remediation. Feel free to stop by Skillman 104 during its regular hours, and its special move-in weekend hours:
- Friday, 9 a.m – 4 p.m
- Saturday, 12 – 5 p.m.
- Sunday, 12 – 7 p.m.