EdTech Update Winter Quarter 2009

Posted 3:23 PM, March 19, 2009, by jenn

Reflections from Jenn
We made it through Winter Quarter. Congratulations to all of you and thanks for your hard work and positive energy! We had a wonderful time celebrating the end of the quarter with games and a potluck. The food was AMAZING!

I am sure that many of you have been following the news regarding Stanford's budget difficulties. Updated information on the University level is available here http://budget.stanford.edu/. This site has lots of good information on the process that Stanford is going through and resources for staff including information on the enhanced severance program that is available for employees who receive notice during this time. Dean Pizzo's latest comments are in the March 16th edition of his newsletter http://deansnewsletter.stanford.edu/#3.

I know that as our institution grapples with the changes that the economic crisis has wrought, including service and staff reductions, many of you are grappling the possible effect that this may have on your own work in the School of Medicine. I encourage all of you to sign up for the "Organizational Change" workshops that are being offered http://ld.stanford.edu/change.html. I am signed up for one in April and am looking forward to the opportunity to attend.

As always, I am ever impressed with your ability to support our faculty and students with skill, professionalism, and humor. Thank you.

Twitter Feed
The EdTechiteers are twittering! You can follow the EdTech feed at http://twitter.com/stanfordedtech. For staff who haven't posted yet or don't know how, we will go over the details again at our next staff meeting. I am really enjoying the useful and fun posts that are coming through and I hope others are too. Interested in the technical aspects? We are using a feed aggregator called GroupTweet http://www.grouptweet.com/.

MediaFlow
The MediaFlow project is in full swing! You can see the public face on our website at http://med.stanford.edu/irt/edtech/mediaflow.html. The project site where we are tracking all of our todo's and milestones as well as archiving all of the technical information is on our project management site https://edtechnology.grouphub.com/.

The first application to come out of the project is the Media DropBox. The drop box allows faculty and course support staff to upload media for courses including .ppt files, TA Handouts, etc. It then generates a page for every course that is linked to the course page (in either CourseWork or the CWP).

Picture of Media DropBox interface
Picture of integrated page

Special Events
We supported Andy Fire's lecture on March 4th. The event was broadcast from Braun Auditorium over Stanford Cable and into M114 and M106 for overflow. The lecture was not taped, but we got a few pictures of how full our spaces were. Standing room only! http://flickr.com/photos/stanfordedtech/tags/andyfire

CourseWork Move
EdTech is working hard on the School of Medicine's transition from CWP to CourseWork. This move will offer the school more integration with main campus systems and new features developed locally and by the Sakai community, such as Wikis and iTunesU. The CourseWork move began in Winter 2009 with the Surg101 undergraduate anatomy course. Anatomy faculty member Ian Whitmore gave CourseWork a positive review for both the course management as well as an online final exam. This April, our largest courses, Human Health and Disease and Practice of Medicine, open in CourseWork. Clerkships will roll out at the end of June, and the migration will be complete when Fall 2009 courses open up in August.

Computer Lab Changes
The M202 PC lab will become a dedicated teaching lab, beginning the start of spring quarter. Before the students return from break, the PCs in the student lounge will be replaced with newer, faster PCs and the computer lab will be closed off for classes only. The lounge will remain open to students 24x7. In early April, the PCs in the computer lab will be replaced with dual boot iMacs and we are upgrading the projector and installing a sound system to improve the teaching quality.

Remedy Roll Out
We are now using Remedy to track all of our support incidents. We have already used the data to determine how we can improve services to our classrooms. This is a great example of working with other groups within IRT to standardize and streamline support. Special thanks to Erik Hashiguchi for training us and helping with the setup and customization.

LKSC Photos and Video
We are still capturing still and video of the LKSC regularly. Check out the latest stills at http://www.flickr.com/photos/stanfordedtech/sets/72157615081334977/.

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