Jazz up your eLearning at the Heartland eLearning Conference March 8 and 9, 2010 at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma! Whether you are just learning to play or are an eLearning maestro, this conference will have something for you.  Registration is now open!

http://www.uco.edu/heartlandconference

Who Should Attend?

Instructors

Instructional Designers

Administrators

Trainers

and others who are interested in knowing more about eLearning

 Why Attend?

The Heartland eLearning Conference is a unique opportunity for those involved in the teaching, development, and support of eLearning to discover, discuss, learn, and share best practices. Not only will participants learn how to jazz up their eLearning, the University of Central Oklahoma's award-winning arts and music will shine. The conference will feature keynote speaker and pre-conference and session presenter, Dr. Curtis Bonk. Attendees will leave the conference jazzed up to do more with their current eLearning programs!

More About Dr. Curtis Bonk

Curt Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University and President and Founder of both SurveyShare and CourseShare. Drawing on his background as a corporate controller, CPA, educational psychologist, and instructional technologist, Bonk offers unique insights into the intersection of business, education, psychology, and technology. A well-known authority on emerging technologies for learning, Bonk reflects on his speaking experiences around the world in his popular blog, TravelinEdMan. He has coauthored several widely used technology books, including The World is Open, Empowering Online Learning, The Handbook of Blended Learning, and Electronic Collaborators.

Hello, I am one of the hosts for the October 9 CSBUG Workshop and Meeting and I am in need of assistance. The theme for the sessions will be Communication. Would any of you be able to come speak for about 50 minutes, including question and answer time, on the topic of communication in online courses. We wanted to spin this speaker towards options for communication not only in Blackboard. In other words, Skype, FaceBook and more.

Please send me a message if you or a coworker/friend/aquaintance has experience and would like to present.

I am more than happy to contact someone directly and ask if you will provide me with a name and contact information.

Thank you,

Karen

I've created this thread for people who join CSBUG to post a little introduction material about themselves and their institutions.

I'll start. I'm Jack Dozier. I'm the Coordinator of Technical Services at Ozarks Technical Community College in Springfield, Missouri. I'm the Linux system administrator which means that I run the Blackboard system.

OTC has about 10,000 students per semester. All of our courses (online and in person) have a Blackboard presence. We have around 225 purely online courses per semester.

Since I'm a sysadmin, I like talking about the technical details of our system. They are as follows.

We are running version 8.0.307.13 of Blackboard Academic Suite. It runs on 2 load balanced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 webapp servers with an Oracle backend. Our load balancers are Barracuda Model 440s. This is our first semester load balanced and we have been extremely pleased with it.

That's all for now. Everyone feel free to post introductions and whatever other information they feel useful.