Author: Andrew Ruether

Academic Technology, Moodle

Course Evaluations in Moodle

Andrew Ruether

Moodle can be used to give anonymous course evaluations for classes.  To set up your own course evaluation, go to your course in Moodle and turn editing on.  Pick the location where you want to add the evaluation, then click on the “Add an activity . . .” pull-down menu and select “Questionnaire”.  Fill out the options as follows: General: give the questionnaire and name and provide some summary information (e.g. “Please complete the course evaluation”) Timing:  you can optionally specify dates and times that the course evaluation will be available to students. Recommended options: Type: Respond once Respondent Type: … Continue reading Course Evaluations in Moodle

Academic Technology, Blackboard, Faculty/Staff, Moodle, Workshops and Training

Moodle Training in December and Early January

Andrew Ruether

ITS will be offering three Moodle workshops in the next month. Spring 2012 will be the last semester Blackboard is available. Faculty teaching honors seminars during the 2011-2012 school year may want to use Moodle because Blackboard will not be available for rising juniors when they take their honors exams in the spring of 2013.  Feel free to drop into any of these workshops to learn more about Moodle. Introduction to Moodle On Thursday, December 15th from 1:30-2:30PM we will be holding a Introduction to Moodle training session in Science Center 256. On Friday, January 6th from 9:30-10:30AM, we will … Continue reading Moodle Training in December and Early January

Academic Technology, Faculty/Staff, Moodle, Workshops and Training

Moodle Workshops and Drop In Consulting Times

Andrew Ruether

Moodle is replacing Blackboard as Swarthmore’s learning management system.  While Blackboard will be available until June 2012, ITS is encouraging faculty to switch their courses to Moodle before the last minute. ITS will be hosting Moodle training and consulting on August 23-25 (Tuesday – Thursday) in the ITS Media Center (Beardsley 114). From 1:30PM – 2:30PM each day, we will have an Introduction to Moodle workshop. From 2:30PM – 4PM each day we will have consulting time where faculty and staff can drop by to work on their courses or ask questions about Moodle. If you have any questions, don’t … Continue reading Moodle Workshops and Drop In Consulting Times

Academic Technology, Faculty/Staff, Software, Students, Workshops and Training

R Statistical Software Training

Andrew Ruether

R is a free statistics program widely used at Swarthmore (and the rest of the world, too).  If you would like to learn more about how to use R, ITS will be hosting a series of web training sessions from the National Institute from Computational Sciences.  The sessions take place every Wednesday at 3PM from June 22 to July 6, 2011.  The topics are: June 22 – Introduction to R June 29 – R graphing with ggplot2 July 6 – Parallel computing with R Contact Andrew Ruether (aruethe2, x8254) if you would like to attend any of the sessions. Continue reading R Statistical Software Training

Academic Technology, Faculty/Staff, Software, Students

Summer Software Developers: Don’t forget version control

Andrew Ruether

If you are planning on doing software development this summer, consider using some form of version control software.  This will let you backup your work, allow you to roll back to a previous version, and make it easy for multiple users to work on the same code.  If you are still appending suffixes on to different versions of your program (e.g. myapp, myapp_1, myapp_2, myapp_old, etc.) version control will be a big help. There are a number of free or paid options available online, but ITS offers a free software development system including version control.  If you are interested, get … Continue reading Summer Software Developers: Don’t forget version control

Academic Technology, Faculty/Staff, Media Center, Students

Do you crave more power?

Andrew Ruether

ITS probably can’t help you with your plans for world domination, but we do have lots of computing power that we can share with you this summer. Virtual Desktops – If you are running projects that can use extra Windows-based systems, we have a pool of “virtual” computers that run on ITS servers and can be accessed from anywhere.  You can run a processor-intensive job on the virtual computer and leave your desktop computer free to perform other operations.  This is also useful if your program needs to run under Windows but you have a Mac or Linux system.  If … Continue reading Do you crave more power?