Podagogy

Not that long ago Google announced the availability of a new service connecting Google apps to specific Moodle courses. This enables faculty to integrate Google apps directly into their Moodle courses, and to require students to use the Google apps to produce course assignments.

The integration of Google apps into a Moodle course if fairly robust. Creating user accounts in Google apps automatically creates a Gmail account for each user. Further, each Google app displays the course name, reminding users that they are connected to their online course.

Having direct access for my students to Google apps within my online courses is exciting since I love the Google apps for online collaboration. But more than that, I see this new partnership as another indicator the idea of the LMS is being redefined, or re-imagined. What might this mean for Blackboard?

Back in January I posted an entry titled “The Potential & Dissapointment of iTunes U“. My greatest disappointment was the fact we could not reliably upload any file with a size greater than 100Mb. Often it took 2, 3, 4, or more attempts to successfully upload a larger audio or video file. In one case it took us 3 weeks of trying to upload a large video.

Recently, Apple updated the iTunes U backend providing new functionality and flexibility. Yesterday I decided to test the “new & improved” version of iTunes U by uploading the video file that took us 3 weeks to load. Call me jaded. Call me skeptical. But, I did not expect it to work. No one was more surprised than I to find the file actually uploaded successfully on the first try. No “time out” errors, no error of any kind.

So after a year and a half of investing, configuring, tweaking, and a lot of hair pulling, perhaps we have turned a corner. Don’t remind me that Apple iTunes U forum experts assured us there was no problem on their end. Don’t remind me that we invested heavily in an end-to-end Apple solution to get reliable uploads to iTunes U. I will be doing additional tests to see if my first success was a statistical outlier. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Apple’s upgrade of iTunes U has finally addressed a critical reliability issue. I’ll let you know the results of further testing.