Oncourse went though some minor changes through the summer, with most of those modifications being made for the faculty.
Katy Wigley, instructional design and technology specialist with the Institute for Learning and Teaching Excellence, said changes to the grade book and blogs were made to add functionality for the faculty.
“Students use Oncourse to access information,” Wigley said. “It is a teaching and learning tool.”
Students can now change the number of tabs that show at the top of their workspace through the preference option.
Another noticeable change was made to the navigation menu. It went from black to red.
Changes were also made to computers across campus to help make accessing Oncourse easier. Since browsers like Firefox store a Web site’s information every time, the ILTE received complaints about having trouble accessing Oncourse.
Throughout the summer, the “remember my Web sites” option was removed from all of the computers on campus except for faculty machines.
“There were over-the-top efforts to minimize the problem,” Wigley said.
There is an ongoing process to get the option removed from the faculty computers.
However, there were still problems this semester. Rosters on Oncourse loaded slowly for two days during the first week. The programmers found the database problem and fixed it.
Another issue arose the second week when the server overloaded. With all of the schools trying to access Oncourse, the server got too busy. Wigley said she is confident the problem has been resolved.
“I expect [the delays] to decrease each day,” Wigley said.
By AMANDA FRENCH
Staff Writer
aafrench@ius.edu