Hi all,
Just looking for some inspiration and ideas, if you feel up for sharing.
I'd like to know how other people are using Community and Content on their campuses, and how training is being conducted for each in terms of faculty and staff.
This is more of a brainstorming than a question, so I'd like to just gather some ideas.
Thanks in advance,John
SUNY Cortland's instructional designer
John,
We don't have Content on my campus, so I can't help there. We do have Community, and we use it primarily for two things:
1) The "portal" functionality allows us to set up customized tabs and modules, to install building blocks the create custom module types, and to target content to specific user groups based on institutional role. Since those things are all handled by the admin (me), there's not a lot of training going on.
Early on, we did try so create custom modules that colleges, departments and administrative units could use to post their own information in the "My Institution" area, but in practice they never actually did this, so we wound up moving more to using modules that would pull information (RSS feeds, mostly) from the places where it was actually being posted. However, I know some schools do a lot more targeted dissemination of information using Community features, to the point that they create special institutional roles for all the colleges and departments.
2) "Organizations" allow us to set up places for all kinds of non-course groups (committees, student organizations and clubs, teaching circles, etc.) to post and exchange information in a somewhat centralized way, and to manage their own membership in the way they can't with courses (whose enrollments are controlled by integration with our SIS). Functionally, there's really no difference between organizations and courses, so there's not a lot of training going on there that's different from what we do for instructors already.
Mike
Mike, thanks. You're always such a wonderful help! I really appreciate it.