Information for Faculty about Tech Support

The CTER Technical Support Team provides CTER faculty with support in areas like the following:

• Helping to set up and maintain course web pages
  • CTER web pages adhere to a common format and style, to permit ease of development and ease of use for faculty and students. We can also work with you to build on the basic style to add more functionality.
• Helping to set up and maintain Moodle
  • Moodle is an online Course Management System that permits students and faculty to communicate in writing asynchronously. Moodle allows faculty to design their courses very flexibly by features that let them add a variety of tasks where and when they are desired. CTER administers and maintains the Moodle server. We can help you set up courses and user accounts for your students in Moodle.
  • Moodle Tutorials for Instructors
    
• Ensuring that faculty and students have the equipment and skills necessary to teach effectively in the CTER online environment
  • For faculty, this involves helping them to set up their office computers to utilize the resources CTER provides and supports, and providing them with the tutelage they need to make best use of the resources.
  • For students, this involves providing comprehensive and easy-to-understand online tutorials in all the course resources they will need to use, and being available daily to respond to technical questions as they arise.
• Providing assistance with scheduling and conduct of face-to-face meetings
  • CTER classes typically meet once per semester in a face to face session. This is at the sole discretion of the instructor; some CTER courses have had two meetings, others none. (When one or more students cannot attend, they can be provided with videotaped or digital video of session highlights.)
• Using streaming media to deliver multimedia content to students, both live and asynchronously
  • CTER can digitize instructors' audiotapes and videotapes into streaming files which students can access online in a browser. (This can be done in either Realmedia or QuickTime format, either of which can be played back on free browser plug-in software we provide to students and faculty.
  • CTER can assist faculty members in delivering live "office hour" style chats, in which teachers speak to students and students can respond to the teachers and to one another via text-based chat. This can be done in the CTER Development Office (Room 372 Armory) using Real and WebBoard servers maintained by the University's WebTech group. It can also be done with QuickTime streaming, via a server maintained by the College of Education.

The Technical Support Team are also responsible for areas like these:

• Creating and distributing CD-ROMs for CTER course participants
  • CTER typically produces these CD-ROMs once or twice a year. They contain publicly available software supporting online instruction which would be inconvenient for students to download from home, such as new versions of web browsers, email programs, streaming audio and video players, and file viewers. They also contain course content which instructors have prepared ahead of time and which is too large or otherwise inconvenient to ask students to download.
• Administering and maintaining CTER web servers, and cooperating with external servers' administrators to ensure that course materials are always available
  • CTER hosts four servers of its own: ctercms.ed.uiuc.edu, cterport.ed.uiuc.edu, wik.ed.uiuc.edu, and cterhost.ed.uiuc.edu. The CTERCMS, or CTER Moodle Server, contains courses created by instructors along with the official Tech Support site. The CTERPORT server hosts the cter homepage with general information and tutorials. The WikEd server hosts a wiki application that is used for courses or collaborative work. The CTERHOST server is used by students or other affiliated faculty members who wish to test Moodle in their own environment. All are located on Macintosh G3 computers running OS X or Linux.
  • CTER also makes use of servers administered by the College of Education (www.ed.uiuc.edu) and other groups on the University campus to support resources like the CourseInfo, Moodle, and streaming multimedia resources described above.
• Maintaining course records electronically so that teachers and students can access them conveniently, yet securely
  • Our CTERbase resource, for instance, is a web-enabled database which permits students and teachers to communicate about progress toward their assignments
  • We can also create and host online surveys for your students, either in CourseInfo or via web-enabled databases of our own design
• Engaging in ongoing formative evaluation of the CTER program and its courses
  • We conduct formal and informal participatory evaluation employing multiple qualitative and quantitative measures on an ongoing basis. This permits us to gauge the extent of CTER's success at all times and to be in a position to make changes effectively whenever desirable.
  • ICES Tutorial for the instructors: How to Add the CTER questions to the ICES form
• Providing direct support for students and faculty in getting and staying connected
  • This involves office visits and other communication with faculty as well as provision of technical support by telephone and email for students in CTER courses.

This listing is not meant to be exhaustive. CTER Technical Support staff can work with you to create or master practically any kind of resource that adds value to your online instruction.