I hope everyone is doing well!  A few important announcements and reflections from this week.

1. Re: the ePortfolio sharing.  Be sure to revisit the ePortfolio rubric here:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0lwpuBcseSvakVLLVNsZnoyQ0E/view?usp=sharing.  Many of you have quite a bit to do before you hit those criteria.  Because we have under 3 weeks together, and all work is due by 8/1/15.  And, because I would like to preserve my sanity, if you can submit earlier, it would be greatly appreciated!
2. Don’t forget about your eLearning glossary.  Rubric here:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0lwpuBcseSvaGxDb1pScC01a00/view?usp=sharing
3. Re: LMSs and CMSs.  The WDYGOOI revealed some misunderstandings about some of the infrastructure terminology.  In general, these were directly correlated with the depth of the notes submitted.  The more detailed the notes, the less misunderstandings of the content.  If you are taking broad notes – any less than 3-4 detailed sentences per prompt, it is not sufficient for your understanding (in most cases.)  There is a point at which reduction is not clarity, and instead it becomes too general in order to truly comprehend the material.
4. The gradebook should be current and cleaned up.  Shout out to Kendron (BAM!) and Shane (aka Sherlock Holmes) for ferreting out the 100 XP for the ID&D project.  #SashaMathFail
5. Related – there were questions in some of the WDYGOOI notes.  I have notes for you all in the gradebook columns, so please check them out:)
6. I’ve had a couple folks take advantage of the resubmission powers!  Please do!  You can up your XP at any time!  Remember this isn’t just for a grade (I hope!) This is for learning.  I’m hopeful you will all get full XP, and it is 100% possible that you will!  I want you to “walk out” of this course with an ePortfolio you will be proud to use professionally, and knowledge and skills in online learning to further your careers.

Clarifications on LMSs:

CMS or Content Management Systems, only host content.  LMS, or Learning Management System, enables interactions between students, students and instructors, and content.  Most LMSs have some sort of CMS “behind” them to organize content.  The major LMSs include Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle and Sakai.  There’s also some really great next-gen LMSs including Helix (purely competency-based,) and a half dozen other emerging players.  Moodle, Sakai and Canvas are all open in that you can get the software, and install and manage them yourself.  Very few schools self-host Canvas.  The majority of Blackboard’s business is still self-hosted (at the colleges,) though that percentage is shifting more in favor of cloud hosting.  Canvas, that we typically think of when we think of Canvas, is entirely cloud-hosted, and updates roll out automatically.  Moodle, you can also self-host (as you can with Sakai.)  Moodle has three primary partners in the US that will host your Moodle for you.  They also have added code that lives on top of the core Moodle code and it improves the functionality in some ways and customizes it, etc.  MoodleRooms is one of these partners.  They are owned by Blackboard.  Remote Learner is another one.  If you host with either MoodleRooms or Remote Learner, the institution will pay for that service (just like with Canvas or Blackboard.)  Hope that helps clarify!

True story about Big Data:

So a colleague of mine comes back from an eLearning conference, having attended a keynote by a Google higher up.  She comes back with a handful of buttons, one of which says “Got Big Data.”  I put it on, looked at her and said, “What do you think?  Do we have Big Data?”  She says, “Oh we have it; we just don’t use it.”

That’s all folks! – Sasha