VICTOR SCHMITT-BUSH
Assistant News Editor
Back in Spring 2016, Fredonia’s online learning system, ANGEL, was not only replaced but unplugged and turned off by its host software, Blackboard Learning. The intentions were clear. ANGEL was an outdated service, and it was time for Fredonia to make a decision that would ultimately change the way that students and faculty interact online.
According to Lisa Melohusky, the instructional design specialist on Fredonia’s Educational Technology board, OnCourse is run by an open-source learning system called “Moodle.” She said that it’s a much easier host to work with than Blackboard because it costs half the price, while at the same time introducing a broader range of features. Moodle allows for more flexibility between staff and students.
“There’s about 70 activity or resource types that [faculty members] can add to a course,” said Melohusky. “Faculty usually adopt like two or three of the strategies and repeat them throughout the course. If they do discussion boards, they’ve probably adopted ‘Moodlerooms Forums,’ and they use that regularly.”
But it isn’t just the faculty that has the option to change and mess around with different features.
New or prospective students might be surprised to see that when they go to their homepage on OnCourse, they can customize a number of settings, such as placing course blocks in different corners of the page and even creating their own personalized blocks.
According to William Atkinson, a senior childhood education major, even though there are plenty of cool new features, some crucial elements of OnCourse are being underutilized by its staff.
“The gradebook is [never used],” he said. “My professors started using grade book quite a lot in the beginning, but now it’s like completely nothing. I don’t know my grades unless it’s midterms or close to the end.”
Atkinson feels that the gradebook should be used more often. He explained, “It helps us determine how well we are doing, and it gives us incentive to pick ourselves back up when we aren’t doing good.”
The educational technology board is aware of this. According to Melohusky, OnCourse is a relatively new online learning system, and they are consistently offering workshops for professors to help them to become more familiar with its customization features.
“We offer training every month on OnCourse,” said Melohusky. “And since Nov. 2015, we’ve had almost 300 faculty members attend ‘Intro to OnCourse’ between that time and now to learn the basics.”
Even so, Melohusky admits that teaching faculty how to use the gradebook can be difficult.
“The gradebook is the piece that probably gives people the most problems because there are so many options,” she said. “Professors have to narrow down which ones suit their grading style.”
She explained that extreme effort is being made by the technology board to teach faculty how to mess around with different settings but, as of now, the workshops aren’t as active.
“It’s really quiet right now because everyone is doing advising,” she said. “It will pick back up at the end of the semester, and then we’ll do more over the summer. People will pop in just to grab that workshop.”
Senior molecular genetics major, Mam Deng, also contends that the major issue with OnCourse is that a significant number of professors aren’t quite familiar with it yet.
He said, “I know I’ve had experiences where the professor thinks our grades are posted, and I’ve had to tell them that we can’t actually see them. Then it becomes a whole back-and-forth process to get that settled out.”
Deng even said he’s had to take matters into his own hands and walk professors through the system.
But as far as it being underutilized, Deng’s experience differs from Atkinson’s.
“I think most of the professors in biology and chemistry are using the gradebook,” he said. “There are a few who still are technologically uninclined. That’s the best way to word it, but they all attempt to use it, and most of them use it successfully.”
Professors and students might be pleased to know that Fredonia’s webpage offers a link to LYNDA, an online tutorial site that has a breadth of free-to-use workshops. Fredonia provides a direct link to LYNDA’s OnCourse tutorials.
“There’s a whole bunch of Moodle training on LYNDA,” said Melohusky. “If a faculty member likes to do a self study, they can go to the LYNDA videos and play them side-by-side as they’re working through their course.”
With OnCourse’s current faculty utility rate at 65 percent, more and more professors are becoming familiar with the program, according to Melohusky.
“It’s a pretty good number, and that’s the increase we’ve seen,” she said. “It started at like 57 percent when we first loaded.”
She believes that OnCourse is only growing as time moves on, especially because it is run by Moodle, which originated in Australia, moved its way into Europe and eventually into the United States. It is an open-source system that allows for extreme flexibility.
According to her, innovation is key with this software. Despite some minor communication issues between professors and students, the direction that OnCourse is taking is a positive one.