Just a Little Update on What's Happening at LearnAU

Hello. Just wanted to give you a little update on what we are doing and what we have in the works...

First, our LearnAU Team has officially moved to Academics. If you are reading this blog, there's a very good chance that you may already know this. If not, hopefully this will give you a little information on how to find us. On the Ashland Webpage, we are now located under the Academics tab. Here you will find a lot of information about our team, training for Bb Learn, updates and blogs on where we are in the transition, and links to videos to help guide you along the way. We also have a team email address - learn-au@ashland.edu. Feel free to email any questions, concerns, ideas, notes of encouragement to our team at this address. We all check this email in hopes to provide a better and faster means of communication with you and our team. We very excited about our move to Academics and all of the possibilities that it will bring in building relationships with all of you.

Many of you have already been taking advantage of training sessions with Eric, our Instructional Designer and Trainer. If you are unsure as to how to get to our training, go to our LearnAU webpage and select Training Resources then click our Training Request Page. Here, you will find a selection of “a la carte” training sessions. We have created a video tutorial to show you how to request training if you need it or want to look at it quickly before beginning to schedule training. We are also getting the Instructor Online Modules ready to begin. Those will be available soon and we will be adding many more modules as we go along. Department Chairs, would you like to set up training sessions for your department faculty and adjuncts? Just email us at learn-au@ashland.edu, and we will contact you to set up specific sessions for your department.

Migrating courses has also been a hot topic lately. Our student intern Nate Minneman has been working with several Administrative Assistants to put together a spreadsheet to send to Blackboard to Archive, Migrate and Delete our previous ANGEL courses. Most of our courses will be Archived. We will be Migrating the most recently taught courses and section types (online, hybrid, face-to-face, etc.) to Bb Learn. All other courses will be Archived or Deleted. The only courses that will be Deleted will be completely empty course shells with no content whatsoever. Archived courses will be brought over to Bb Learn, but will be in a non-active state. Our licensing with Bb Learn is a little different than it was with ANGEL. With this new system, we will have better accesses and be able to keep more people in our LMS, but will need to be good stewards of space. This means, we will need to Archive more as we go along. As this all gets worked out, more information will be coming on this process and procedures. If there is a course that you would like to have migrated now from 15Spring, please send an email to Learn-au@ashland.edu and we will get this process started for you. Remember, when making this request, we need the full year and semester, course department, course number, and section. An example would be:  EDCI*538*OL1 15/SP DESIGN & IMPLEMENT PROF DEV. This information can be found under the Manage Tab, General Course Settings in ANGEL.

Are you ready for Course Evaluations? We have been working on ironing out a few issues we discovered in our first pilot so we can put our training materials together to start Course Evaluations in Bb Learn. We will be contacting the College Administrative Assistants soon to begin training on the new process. We think you will be happy with the new way to do these...I know the College Administrative Assistants will be thrilled with the easier and much faster way of doing Course Evals!

Community Groups (now to be known as Organizations in Bb Learn) will be coming soon as well. Many of you have already contacted us to be part of the pilot group once we get these going. If you have a group that you would like to have be part of the Organizations pilot, just send us an email and we will add your group to our list.

As always, thank you for partnering with us and we look forward to great things to come in the future!