AUTHORIZING BODY: Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost
RESPONSIBLE OFFICE: e-Learning and Instructional Support
DATE ISSUED: January 19, 2007
RATIONALE: Moodle and other online learning management software, are available for faculty and students as a pedagogical aid in the teaching and learning process. Since Learning Management Systems serve as digital classroom space, policies for its use must take into consideration both university procedures and academic needs.
POLICY: e-Learning and Instructional Support develops, administers, maintains, and provides support services for Learning Management Systems. e-LIS must respond to faculty requests for help and special services concerning Learning Management Systems and those services must be in accordance with university-approved procedures and policies, concerning users, assigned roles, additional requested courses and cross-listed courses, semester transitions of content, incompletes, course ownership and user support.
SCOPE AND APPLICABILITY: This policy includes all faculty, students, courses at OU that are in Banner and imported into Learning Management Systems.
DEFINITIONS AND PROCEDURES:
A. Users and Usage All persons associated with Oakland University as students, faculty, or staff have access to Learning Management Systems through their OU email account. Guest roles must be created by e-LIS and granted access on a temporary basis upon requests from faculty or staff in relation to a specified teaching and learning need. Only OU students will have access, unless other contractual arrangements are made. Faculty may use Learning Management Systems for teaching, research, and/or committee work. There are three types of university courses using Learning Management Systems: traditional classroom courses with supplementary Learning Management Systems' materials, web-enhanced courses with ' activities substituting for in-person classroom hours, and completely on-line courses.
B. Assigned roles and courses in Learning Management Systems are integrated with the student information system in Banner by means of software called Luminis Data Integration Suite for e-Learning. Academic units are responsible for input and accuracy of schedule information. If changes to any courses' students or instructor are desired, then those changes should initiate in the academic units. Then the correct information will be pulled through to Learning Management Systems. However, due to differences in Banner and Learning Management Systems software, e-LIS recognizes that there will be necessary exceptions to this general principal.
Possible Learning Management Systems' roles attached to a Learning Management Systems account:
*Instructor role--the primary instructor of the course, who creates all course elements and has access to all course and student information in the Learning Management Systems' course. Instructors may login as any of the students in their course, send mail to their OU email, and access grades.
*Secondary instructors and TAs role--The primary instructor can add other instructors (if they have an LDAP and OU email account) and choose to give each editing or non-editing privileges. Guest instructors without OU email, from off-campus, will have to be manually added to the Learning Management Systems' server, before they can be added to courses.
*Student role--a student role doesn't allow one access to the course creation or management tools. Instructors may use this role to view and test the course from the student point of view.
*Administrator role--an administrator may change settings for the entire program and login as any instructor or student to trouble-shoot.
Exceptions to Banner. Learning Management Systems import course information including classes, instructors, and students from Banner. But since Learning Management Systems is a digital classroom environment rather than a registration system, there will be discrepancies between the two software systems, such as roles and accounts. Exceptions may be manually added to Learning Management Systems for the following reasons:
*Test students: Faculty may request a student role and account to practice online course features that they have created in Learning Management Systems.
*Additional guests in instructor roles: Faculty may request that additional guest speakers and instructors be added as co-instructors or student status to their Learning Management Systems course. The possible roles in Learning Management Systems do not always correspond to real roles.
*Students: Students who are registered in one Learning Management Systems course and need to access another may be added. This is possible as long as there are no tuition, fee or academic record implications as approved by the Office of the Registrar.
*Entire courses: Faculty and staff may request new courses to be created for advisement, tutoring, committee-work, pilot studies, research, and/or training purposes with a faculty-designer (s) and either guest student accounts or actual students.
C. Additional Courses requested by Staff
Staff may request courses so that they might have contact with the student population they are trying to reach. A conflict may arise where students' course lists may become too lengthy so that academic courses become buried in the non-courses. For this reason, the responsible authority for any given population of students must approve student enrollments in non-academic "courses".
D. Cross-listed Courses
There are a number of possible types of cross-listed courses.
1. Courses cross-listed in Banner. These courses have two different rubrics but are approved through the traditional process as one course. Learning Management Systems import these cross-listed courses as one course, with the multiple CRNs listed, exactly the same as in Banner.
2. Faculty requests for combined courses that will be accommodated.
*Combined identical sections with the same course rubric for courses taught in the classroom at different times for the purpose of course resource materials.
*Combined identical sections for a special purpose like the library module put into combined sections of RHT 160.
3. Faculty requests for combined courses that will be accommodated only with the permission of the chair, dean, or provost's office as appropriate.
*Combined courses with different rubrics.
*Combined course sections with the same rubric for completely online courses.
4. Faculty requests to separate courses cross-listed in Banner into separate courses will not be accommodated.
E. Semester Transitions
The transition or copying of course content between semesters should be as simple as possible in the Learning Management Systems' environment. Faculty may request ongoing development courses to be created on the Learning Management Systems' server by filling out a request form on the e-LIS and Learning Management Systems' website. Content will then be moved for faculty if desired.
There will be different areas with different types of courses on the Learning Management Systems' production server as seen, for example, on the my Moodle page:
1. Live Courses (These are archived and removed from the server.)
*Current Instruction Semester such as Winter 2005. One month prior to the start of a new instruction semester, these courses will be imported from Banner and available for faculty to create new content or import old content. A week before classes start, students will be given access.
*Prior Semester such as Fall 2004. The prior semester courses will be kept on the server for the entire length of time of the current instruction semester. Students will continue to have access to prior semester courses for the full following semester. At the end of the current instruction semester, before the prior semester courses are removed from the server, the prior term will be copied and archived, which the e-LIS staff at faculty request can access. For example, the Fall 04 semester courses will be kept on the Learning Management Systems' server throughout Winter 05. (At the beginning of Spring/Summer05, the Fall 04 courses will be archived.) Likewise, winter courses will remain through the Spring/Summer semester, Spring/Summer courses throughout the fall.
2. Ongoing Courses (These aren't archived each semester, but are ongoing and stay on the server.)
*Ongoing Development Courses. These course shells will be created at faculty request to store course data or develop courses. One development or practice course per live course is typical. No students from Banner are imported into the development semester courses. Faculty may use these courses for developing content for teaching, service, and research purposes. Courses may be created to support groups such as committees or advisory councils. At the end of every academic year (immediately after June 30 each year), all materials in the Development Courses that have remained untouched for a period of 2 prior years will be archived and accessible by e-LIS, who will search old courses at faculty request.
*Academic Groups. These courses are those such as the library modules, The Tutoring Center, and Professional Advisors. All staff seeking groups of students must have the approval of the department, school, or Office of Academic Affairs before students will be added.
*Faculty Organizations. Faculty may have courses created for a digital space that enhances committee work or academic work.
F. Incompletes
Oakland University Undergraduate policy (see page 70 of 2004-5 undergraduate catalog) on "I" grades is that they must be cleared during the first 8 weeks of the "...next semester (Fall or Winter) for which the student registers..." According to this policy, if a student receives an "I" grade in Winter, Spring and Summer semester, it would not need to be made up until 8 weeks into Fall, if he/she registered for Fall. If the student had an incomplete in fall, and registered for winter, he/she would have 8 weeks into winter to complete the course. If the student had an incomplete in fall or winter and did not register for the following winter or fall, he/she would have 1 calendar year from the end of the semester to complete it. Also there are P grades that indicate "progress"- another type of incomplete that get 2 years from the end of the term of registration for completion.
Learning Management Systems will have two full and consecutive semesters worth of courses, available to partially accommodate incompletes. Since the Learning Management Systems server simply and physically can not accommodate any more than the 5000 courses per two semesters that it handles now, we will be dependent on conforming to the catalog by means of archived courses. Former Learning Management Systems' courses that are archived will be available by request from a form on the e-LIS website. e-LIS will construct a shell for the archived course and import it so that the instructor and student can both access it.
Students with incompletes may access their old course if it's from the previous semester. If faculty want such students to complete their grade accessing the current semester's course, we will add the student to the new course.
G. Course Ownership
Faculty shall individually own their courses in Learning Management Systems. No other faculty member, administrator, or academic unit may copy an individual's Learning Management Systems' course without their written permission. However, if a particular unit and their faculty to share modules or courses among a certain group approve alternate written arrangements or contracts, e-LIS will follow those arrangements if they are consistent with all other policies in this document.
H. User Support
Webpages at: http://www2.oakland.edu/elis/ contain links to four help request forms.
*Help Request General Form--any type of help involving Learning Management Systems may be requested here by instructors and students.
*Learning Management Systems' Development Courses--this form is to request additional practice courses on Learning Management Systems.
*Faculty Test Account--faculty may ask for a student identity to test how elements of their Learning Management Systems' course are working.
*Archives--faculty may request a copy of old Learning Management Systems' courses (older than one semester) from our archives. However, it would be best also for faculty to create their own backups of Learning Management Systems' courses and keep their own archives. e-Learning and Instructional Support will answer these emailed help requests within 48 hours.
I. Audits
The registrar's office looks upon learning management systems as an extension of Banner because student records come in from Banner and students can see their grades in the learning management system. If e-LIS puts unofficial audit students into the learning management system, there could be liability issues with offering grades and materials to non-students. So only officially registered audits will be added to Learning Management Systems' courses.
J. Student Privacy
Learning Management Systems usually are password-protected, so that students meet in a private online classroom space. Although students generally should not see each other's registry information without consent, such as emails, the Participants Block in Moodle does allow students to see other emails within a particular course. The Participants Block may be hidden from students by an instructor closing the eye icon or students may hide their email in the Edit Profile area.
Reviewed by:
E-LIS Faculty Advisory Committee 10/27/06
Senate Academic Computing Committee 10/27/06
Academic Council 1/17/07