Free Range Learning

Here's the last MyLutherNet Minute. It explains how to logically order e-reserves in 1:43.

Don't want to watch the video? Download the information as a PDF.

As I mentioned in my previous post we will be housing the MyLutherNet Minute video tutorials here on our blog as well as directly in MyLutherNet. The four that we have produced so far are below. We expect to add about one every week.

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We've recently begun creating quick tutorials (two minutes or less) of how to do "things" in MyLutherNet - things that might not be terribly obvious but might make working in the system a bit easier. These videos are housed in MyLutherNet in the Help section but we thought it might be nice to also house them on the blog.

The idea for the MyLutherNet minutes started with First Week for the 2009-2010 academic year when Dan and I produced four short animations on various components …

Luther Seminary offers quite a few online courses, and even more if one counts residential courses that have an online component. But many students are nervous about online learning for one reason or another.

In this Tech Talk, I discuss some common myths about online learning and explore what a typical online course at Luther Seminary consists of.

Thanks to Mary Hess for linking us to a fantastic article from First Monday: Insidious Pedagogy: How course management systems impact learning , by Lisa M. Lane.

Lane writes a superb critique of course management systems (CMSs), such as Blackboard , Moodle , and our very own JICS (i.e. MyLutherNet ). Lane's point is not that CMSs are bad, or poorly designed, or even that they should go away. Lane's point is that CMSs are "not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. …Course …

We in Learning Design & Technology are pleased to announce that exciting changes are coming to MyLutherNet !

This January, Luther will be upgrading the basic software that runs MyLutherNet (i.e. Jenzabar Internet Campus Solution ) from version 6.4 to version 7. This upgrade will offer us more powerful tools for running online courses and faster performance from previous versions of MyLutherNet.

Then, in early February, we will roll out a new visual design of MyLutherNet. Our office has been …

This week we be gan another phase of user testing of MyLutherNet . We are in the initial stages of redesigning some of the navigational structure of the portal and wanted to get as much user feedback as possible. This particular redesign focuses on the registration, bill pay, and degree progress functionality of MyLutherNet. So our friends from the Registrar's Office have been helping us out with the testing.

  The type of user testing that we've been conducting does not (perhaps …

The LDT staff and some other Luther folks are out here in Washington DC this week at the Jenzabar Annual Meeting. (Jenzabar is the software company that makes the program that runs MyLutherNet.) We've been learning a great deal about what is possible with the program. So far the most inspiring has been a presentation by Sarah Lawerence College who have extensively modified the software to look like this.

I'm a big fan of how clean they have made the interface and they've also created …

Next week the three of us (Ryan, Kristin, and myself) go to JAM - the Jenzabar Annual Meeting. Jenzabar is the company who makes the software that runs MyLutherNet (MLN). We're hoping that in this conference will give us great insight into how we can make MLN more usable and friendly for students, faculty and staff.

So, in the spirit of collaboration, tell us what you would like to see happen with MLN! What is confusing about it? How do you use it? How would you like to use it?

Already-existing web videos can be posted in Discussion forums in MyLutherNet.  Simply copy the "Embed" code (html) and paste it into a Discussion forum.  Note: be sure to be in "HTML" editing mode in the forum post.  Simply copying the code into the WYSIWYG box will not work. ~Dan