Mike Smith

Author's posts

Dr. Ballenger Recipient of Outstanding Distance Faculty Award

Dr. Julia Ballenger of the Educational Leadership Department at Texas A&M University-Commerce received an Outstanding Distance Faculty Award from NETnet this summer. A regular fixture at the Office of Academic Technology, she was nominated by our Instructional Designer, Dr. Petra Strassberg. Dr. Ballenger reflects a deep commitment to her students and working with colleagues to …

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Permanent link to this article: http://sites.tamuc.edu/innovations/dr-ballenger-recipient-of-outstanding-distance-faculty-award/

Getting Connected in a Rural Reality…

Three monitors w/ City backdrop

A recent article from Texas Public Radio estimates there are nearly 2 million Texans who do not have access to broadband Internet. A majority of these live in rural areas, which have traditionally had less access to broadband services. This can potentially complicate efforts for some of our rural residents to participate in online courses …

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Permanent link to this article: http://sites.tamuc.edu/innovations/getting-connected-in-a-rural-reality/

Robots for any occasion

robot

BBC recently reported on “Tengai” a new robot designed to conduct job interviews. It has a humanoid face and impartially asks a predetermined set of questions, recording the responses so that a job recruiter can later review the session. The unit has a built in camera and speaker. The face mimics human expression. The unit …

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Permanent link to this article: http://sites.tamuc.edu/innovations/robots-for-any-occasion/

A new Learning Management System

Supernova Dust Factory in M74

Texas A&M University-Commerce is in the process of implementing a new learning management system (LMS) for online courses.  The current system, eCollege, is due for retirement in the fall of 2018.  A committee of campus stakeholders reviewed the top three LMS vendors and chose Brightspace by Desire2Learn as the new system.  The last several months …

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Permanent link to this article: http://sites.tamuc.edu/innovations/a-new-learning-management-system/

Captioning of Public Facing Videos- Berkley’s Tough Decision

Closed Captioning Symbol

  The University of California Berkley recently announced a decision to remove some 20,000 publicly available videos from their website in response to claims that the lack of captioning for these resources.  Berkley determined that it would serve its students better by providing pertinent video resources behind an authentication login.  Removal of the videos includes …

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Permanent link to this article: http://sites.tamuc.edu/innovations/captioning-of-public-facing-videos-berkleys-tough-decision/