Good news for you Humanities faculty out there! The MMLC has completed our move to the NU Library and many of you may be wondering where you can go or how you can get the same services you were used to getting in Kresge. The MMLC may be spread out across campus now, but we are committed to supporting you and your students. All of our facilities are open when classes are in session, and among some of our new spaces are:

• The MMLC Computer Classroom (NU Library Lower Level, Room B183)
• The MMLC Equipment Checkout Counter (NU Library Lower Level, Room B185). Open Monday-Thursday 8:30am-6:30pm, Friday 8:30am-5pm
• The MMLC Activity Space (Deering Library Second Floor, Room 208 – shared with the Music Listening Library). Open Monday-Thursday 10am-10pm, Friday 10am-5pm, Saturday 1pm-5pm, Sunday 1pm-10pm.
• The MMLC Student Project Studio (Locy Hall Room 316)
• The MMLC Digital Art Computer Lab (Roycemore School B37)

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Northwestern’s Canvas transition website
http://www.it.northwestern.edu/about/it-projects/learning-management/index.html

After a year of pilot testing, Northwestern officially debuts Canvas —  a brand new learning management system — this fall. Some of you might currently be in the middle of getting your Canvas site ready for fall courses, others will continue to use Blackboard this year and switch to Canvas at a later point. (Blackboard is scheduled to go offline in August 2015.) No matter what your timeline is, we thought it would be good to get you up to speed on Canvas highlights.

Over the past several months, the MMLC has enjoyed working with Faculty Support Services (FSS) from NUIT Academic & Research Technologies, the team that is implementing and supporting Canvas at Northwestern. Together, we have collaborated on hosting workshops and experimenting with the many features and functions of Canvas. We would like to introduce you to some of the staff and resources around Canvas so you can benefit from their insights. Before we get to that, let’s review how you can get started and find any needed support. Full post

This summer will mark the beginning of a massive renovation of Kresge Centennial Hall. The MMLC, along with many of the building’s faculty occupants, departments, programs and centers, will move to a set of temporary locations during the nearly 3-year project. We’re very excited for Kresge’s future, but we’re also working to make sure that our assigned interim “swing space” in Northwestern’s Main Library allows us to continue meeting the learning and instructional needs of Weinberg students and faculty. In this article, we want to provide more details about our upcoming temporary home, explain how our operations will change, and share some suggestions that may help. Full post

The “original” front page of the insurance exchanges site in fall of 2013.

Hmm. Which one is the iPhone? Hint: it is not the left one.

The word “design” seems to be used more as a noun than a verb in the last decade or so.

The “design” of the website for insurance exchanges, HealthCare.gov, was a big issue last fall, as it interfered with signing people up for healthcare.

Court rulings on whether or not Apple’s “design” for the iPhone was copied by Samsung have made headlines for several years as the trials wend their way through the courts.

Design has come to be affiliated with a kind of “personal” style. Adopting the “look” of Ralph Lauren’s clothing, or the look of Gucci or Levis, or Old Navy says something about you, and how you want to be viewed by others. Some would never wear Gucci and Old Navy at the same time. Some people would never wear Gucci, period.

You get the idea.

Can the same be true of documents, and web pages and PDF files you create? Is there “fashion” in fonts? Or at least better at doing their “job” than other fonts? Full post

Sergei Kalugin evaluates the physical properties of the Madshus ski.

This January, the MMLC welcomed Sergei Kalugin to join the department as a full-time Web application developer and designer after three months of working as a contracted consultant. Graduating with Masters Degrees in Economics and Business from Baltic State Technical University in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2008, Sergei has since held a number of web design and e-Commerce positions both in Russia and the USA, before turning his focus to the educational sector. Fluent in three world languages (Russian, English, and Finnish) and equally comfortable in the languages of design and programing, Sergei brings a valuable blend of talents to the MMLC’s courseware and research development initiatives.

While many of our faculty and student patrons may not have met him yet, they have most likely seen his design and/or programming work: whether on of our recent special event postcards, or in one of our most recent courseware projects. For this article, I asked Sergei about design and its role in the learning experience. Full post

Todd Murphey

At our January World Wine Web event, we had the pleasure to welcome Todd Murphey, Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at McCormick. Todd taught one of the first NU MOOCs this past fall on the Coursera platform: “Everything is the Same: Modeling Engineered Systems.” For those of you who weren’t able to hear Todd talk about his new teaching experience, you can still benefit from Todd’s insights because he was kind enough to answer some follow-up questions.

1) What motivated you to develop and teach “Everything is the Same: Modeling Engineered Systems,” one of NU’s first Coursera courses?

One of the things I noticed early in the MOOC debate was that people teaching MOOCs were almost unconditionally in favor of them.  My concern was that there would be a fundamental bias as a result—that the only people who had any personal knowledge about teaching and learning using MOOCs would be people who bought into them ahead of time.  So I decided I would like to create a great MOOC while fundamentally being objective about the impact on our students and the online students.  I also thought it was exciting to take material we have had in our undergraduate curriculum and translate it into a medium many of our undergraduates find much more intuitive than traditional books. Full post

As promised, the MMLC unveiled a new iPad Cart that I talked about last month. To get people up to speed, the MMLC hosted a workshop for interested faculty on October 12, 2013. Since many of you are aware of the basic functions of iPads, the workshop focused on why you would want to use an iPad in class and how to design lesson plans for short one-off activities.

Why use an iPad in a classroom setting?

The purely logistical reason for integrating iPads is that there are specific apps you want your students to use but your students don’t have access to their own iPads or the MMLC’s term loan ones. Or you have an activity that can’t be done with just a computer. Perhaps more importantly, you have a creative activity that you want your students to do in class for the immediacy of it. You want your students to experience real-time pressure, work in groups, and ideally maximize engagement – which is what we had in the back of our minds when we presented the participants of the workshop with the activity we were going to have them do. Full post

When I approached the Hewlett Fund for Curricular Innovation in the summer 2011 for funds to purchase iPads for my advanced German conversation class, I had no idea where this project would take me. The only thing I was certain of was that the way I had taught my advanced conversation class was not providing my students with the language input or the language practice they needed to significantly improve their oral proficiency.

This initial request to the Hewlett Fund morphed, with their help, into something much bigger: a two-year study involving twelve instructors who agreed to incorporate iPads into their language class in an effort to experiment with new teaching paradigms. The efforts were supported by the MMLC. To be frank, we could not have done it without their assistance: from worrying about Wi-Fi connections in the classroom, to updating and preparing iPads, answering student questions, and offering workshop for instructors unfamiliar with the technology, they made sure the only thing we had to be concerned about was searching for answers to critical questions. How can we integrate this technology into our classes? What are the benefits and challenges? Can an iPad provide a more flexible learning environment and a richer contextualization of the material being learned? How can it promote engagement, genuine interest, collaboration and sharing among our students? Full post

At a recent World.Wine.Web. event, the MMLC invited Psychology professors Benjamin Gorvine and David Smith to talk about their use of TopHat, a type of software known as a Student Response System, or “clicker.” Speaking to a crowd of fellow faculty and staff, they presented an overview of TopHat as well as a statistical analysis of the largely favorable opinions their students held towards the software. In this article, we’ll cover a bit about the purpose and history behind student response systems (SRS), present what’s in use at Northwestern today, and provide some suggestions on how to get started.

Many instructors regularly seek to better engage students in the class, whether it is to make them a more active participant in the learning, or simply to be able to better assess what students are grasping. Greater audience participation is a frequent pursuit, particularly when inherent classroom dynamics can present significant challenges. For example, students in large classes may acquiesce into a large tranquil sea of anonymity, leaving instructors little feedback, until a quiz or test, on how “tuned in” the students really are.  Even in smaller discussion courses which are typically highly interactive, some students may feel shy to ask questions or present opinion, leaving critical feedback unvoiced.

One way of increasing audience participation, particularly large audiences, was long-ago solved by popular televised game shows: audience voting. I can remember the 1980’s show Love Connection, where audience members would vote for the best romantic match for the show’s contestants. More recently, there’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, where the audience, by poll, helps the contestant answer a multiple-choice question. And then, there are plenty of other shows, such American Idol, that have opened voting beyond the studio audience, allowing at-home viewers to vote via telephone, via internet, and now even via a smartphone app.

Although the classroom is not usually a game show, it is hard to disagree that being able to perform simple types of electronic voting in a class lecture offers significant opportunities. Consequently, through the years, there have been many implementations of classroom response systems based on varying combinations of hardware and software, with each generation seeming to offer greater flexibility and lower cost. Full post