Random Thoughts, Educause, Moodle, Google

I am just going to cover random thoughts in this post. First a reflection on the Annual Educause Conference held last week in Denver. Overall it may have been the best Educause I have ever attended and that may just be due to luck of how everything came together. Really enjoyed the session “Chronicle Tech Trends: After a Year of Disruption, What Now?”. Got to see my old colleagues Dave Mills and Ali Jafari from the Cyber Learning Lab. Ali has a new venture based on a Social Networking Course Management service called Course Networking. It has potential.

I continue to investigate CRM, DW and BI so I kept an eye out for anything new at Educause. We are hitting recruiting analytics hard so now we really can justify CRM for managing inquiries and communication. What we have found with DW and BI is that we can build what we need. What is really intriguing is the changing role of data. Historical data just does not carry as much weight as it used to especially with respect to admissions data.

We have some concerns about our Moodle LMS. Moving from version 1.9 to 2.2 is causing us to reevaluate performance sizing. We will be replacing MYSQL with PostgresSQL. Grade Book is the other issue but we have workarounds. I think we are going through a natural period after a major design upgrade where we will need to invest more resources then we have in recent years. Basically we have been spoiled by how little we needed to do for Moodle support.

Still waiting on Google to offer us an enterprise option (especially for G-Drive), however, we did finally turn on G+ Premium which gives us a bit more administrative control. I suppose this is another step toward more officially endorsing Google institutional services highlighted by Hangout. Still looking for an enterprise Video Conferencing solution that I can justify. Latest score sheet: Impressed with WebEx, Disappointed with Adobe Connect and others aren’t competitive for our situation. Still no complaints with Google Hangouts as long as the purpose fits the current model.

I’m a volunteer turkey carver tonight for our students Thanksgiving dinner. Hope you all have a good holiday. Still plenty of great football and of course basketball hits center stage now. For football it is “Go Beavers” and basketball “Go Hoosiers”