CUE News Winter 2008 Issue 2
Welcome to a new edition of the Catalyst User Experience Team newsletter. Your feedback has shaped the development of multiple tools over the last few months. We are thrilled to share the results of your contributions and thank you for your support.
In this issue:
- Call for Participation
- New Opportunities for Collaboration
- Meet the New, Improved Collect It
- Coming Soon: CommonView, Our New Workspace Tool
Call For Participation
SURVEY: Grouping students for better learning
The Catalyst team is investigating how to best support the use of groups in Catalyst Web Tools. Are you an instructor who currently divides or has thought about dividing your class into groups for educational purposes? Please take this brief survey to help Catalyst better understand your needs.
New opportunities for collaboration
Want to have online discussions with colleagues in Arizona? Share documents with your Kenyan research team? Collect files from an employee in King County? Access to the Catalyst Web Tools is expanding for people outside of the University of Washington (UW). Currently, you can grant non-UW users access to your GoPost discussion boards by having them sign in with a free ProtectNetwork ID.
The Catalyst team is working to expand opportunities for outside collaboration by allowing faculty, researchers, and students from other universities or institutions, as well as members of the public, to have secure, controlled access to more of our tools. If you haven't already, please take this brief survey to help us understand how you would like to use the Catalyst Tools in collaboration with people outside the UW.
Meet the new, improved Collect It
We're happy to announce that changes to Collect It were rolled out in time for Winter Quarter, making significant improvements to the user experience of the tool. These changes are a part of our continual efforts to refine the Catalyst Web Tools, based on feedback from CUE members and other campus users. The improvements allow you to:
- Find new submissions and comments easily
- Enjoy an enhanced visual display of dropbox activity, no matter the number of assignments
- Initiate dialogue with dropbox participants, even before any files are submitted
- Quickly find all management controls in one centralized location
- Add and sort assignments efficiently with improved assignment management
- Experience Collect It in new and novel ways by submitting documents to a dropbox that you own or collaborate on
Coming soon: CommonView, our new workspace tool
We are making steady progress on a new tool, CommonView. This tool allows users to quickly create a course or project workspace and provide students and collaborators with online access to resources including files, links, images, announcements, and Catalyst Web Tools. Design and development for the tool has been guided by the mantra "Everything in one place, for you, for them." Click on the image below to get a sneak peek at what the tool offers.
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Featured functionality: A. Add text, links, files, and Catalyst Tools to your workspace
C. Easily grant access to students and/ or collaborators D. Post announcements in a dedicated space |
The first functional release of CommonView is slated for Spring Quarter 2008, with an online grade book (and much more) to follow. Learn more...
Many thanks to the CUE members who provided feedback on early designs for both Collect It and CommonView!