Yesterday afternoon the Faculty Senate voted unanimously to approve the LMIS Committee recommendation that UPS adopt Moodle as our new Learning Management System.

New UPS Chief Technology Officer Molly Tamarkin has proposed we adopt the name “Move To Moodle” for the project of rolling out Moodle over the next year to two years. The move will be gradual. Over the summer, OIS will form a technical team to plan and manage the conversion process.

For more information please visit the Moodle page.

Instructional Technology has worked over the last two years to respond to faculty input from the LMIS Committee to evaluate our Learning Management System needs. Many thanks to all Moodle testers, faculty and students (over 350 of you), for your hard work and willingness to take the lead, to experiment, and to put up with the inevitable difficulties that come with pioneering.

The Instructional Technology group would like to extend a warm welcome to Molly Tamarkin, the new Chief Technology Officer for the University, and the head of the Office of Information Systems. We look forward to working with her on behalf of the faculty to extend and enhance our mission to support teaching with technology in the classroom.

• The UPS Appointment Announcement
• Politics and Government Blog Post
• Tagged links about Molly and her background

During the break, the Blackboard server was upgraded to add more disk space to it. Since last spring, Blackboard has been constantly more than 85% full, and by the end of last fall term was at 95% full.

On January 3rd, a disk upgrade tripled the size of the available room on Blackboard, which should provide plenty of room for PDF and audio files for the next year or two.

Remember, you can tell how full Blackboard is on the login screen near the bottom.