It's almost impossible to do anything in technology nowadays without hearing about security risks. Your computer can get a virus, your cell phone can be hacked, the credit card swiper may have been tampered with...it's never ending. Some of these things you may be able to mildly ignore for a little while longer, but throwing caution to the wind when it comes to the security of your eLearning content, platform, and users is not something to take likely!
When it comes to security, it's not necessarily about a "product", but more about policy and practices. I located a very interesting article by Najwa Alwi and Ip-Shing Fan (2010) titled, E-Learning and Information Security Management. This article is all about protecting your content, site and students. I recommend you read the whole thing, but I will give you the highlights here.
There are 11 listed threats in the article, but when reading through them we can narrow them down into three general categories.
1. Intentional mischievous attacks (hacking, viruses etc.)
2. Technical problems (System hardware failure, server problem, bugs etc.)
3. Human error (Making a change to the system that caused issues)
Take an intentional preventative course of action against all three of these, and you will at least have a head start on staving off problems. The first one may just flat out be bad luck, but you can do some things to help yourself safe. When it comes to hackers, they usually get in through a worthless password (usually "password" or "12345"). Don't even allow your users to use such passwords. You may have noticed a trend in online passwords that you have to use a capital letter, numbers, lower case letters, special characters and sometimes you can't have more that two matching characters in a row. I know it is tough to throw an exclamation point at the end....but it's the safe thing to do! There are settings within most LMS platforms that allow you to closely regulate what passwords will be allowed, as well as how often they should be reset. Set this stuff tight, it's a healthy dose of preventative security.
Technical problems can be really tough, because you can't see them coming, and most of us mortal LMS users won't be able to do anything but call our LMS provider or host in a panic. Using a reputable provider with redundant servers and other fancy things that you and I won't understand is what we need to look for. Just ask them how they protect against the system going down, and then ask them to repeat themselves in English for you.
Lastly, there is human error. The inevitable mistake of checking the wrong box, saving the wrong thing, overwriting something you didn't mean to do...or maybe not saving when you should have. From my experience, the best measure of control, is limiting access to the vitals to as few people as possible. The other measure of success I have incorporated is not allowing students to make account changes, and loading all student profiles through uploading an excel spreadsheet. I can very easily keep an excel spreadsheet with clearly labeled column headers. By keeping this on excel sheet, I can very easily make sure that all columns are filled in, and that they are filled in correctly. I upload new users on a weekly basis by building a spreadsheet based on a payroll report (how you get student data may vary wildly). I add columns to this report for password and user name, adjust their user groups as I need, and then I just upload the file to the LMS and all of these users are up and running immediately.
Check with your LMS provider for the best way to get users uploaded, but all of them that I am aware of will work with excel spreadsheets, and many will work with CMR programs like salesforce.com.
Be safe out there!
Resources
Ribble, M. (n.d.). Nine elements: Nine themes of digital citizenship. Retrieved May 30, 2012, from http://www.digitalcitizenship.net/Nine_Elements.html
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Can you see me now?
Your new LMS is certain to be a hit if you have done your homework, and used the amazing resources and products that have flooded the market place. There is another angle to your new LMS that you may not have even realized!
The beauty of an LMS is the ability to offer learners content at their own pace, in their own time...anytime. However, some occasions will still call for face to face to teaching, and your LMS doesn't have to fall short. Not every LMS will have a built in tool for live video conferencing but most do. If yours does not, it will most likely have at least a scheduling tool so you can post an upcoming "classroom" style course with all the pertinent details so your users can sign up just and know where to be to attend the class.
Once you've figured out if you can do video conferencing on your LMS or not, you may want to look into features of actual video conferencing software to help your class have the best possible experience. Like I said, some LMS platforms will have a built in tool that will access your computer's webcam, and micrphone and allow you to round up your students for a face to face learning session. Other times you will need to know what is out there to help you get your students together.
In each of these cases, you will at the very least need a device with a camera, microphone and speaker (which means just about everything like your cell phone, tablet, laptop, and PC will all work).
Everyone likes free! There are a host of free video conferencing tools out there. There are some important things to know about these versus ones that cost money. Quality is the first thing that comes with a better video conferencing program. Video conferencing software, to techy folks, is called a "codec" which stands for compression and decompression. Better codecs can take better quality video and audio and "compress" it to a smaller size, allowing better quality images and audio. If you've ever done a video conference from iPhone to iPhone using the famous and free face time program offered by Apple, you'll know how poor the quality can be. Face Time is a very low quality codec, and this is why your video and audio suffer. You are also doing this across a cellular signal in most cases and that doesn't help your cause. Using wifi will improve things a bit, but it's still a low quality free codec. Other free codecs include Google Hang Out, Skype (wildly popular), and Oovoo. The other limitation to these free codecs aside from quality, is the number of people you can have in one call. For classroom style lessons, it's frequently a larger group of users, and most of these are limited to three users.
The first step up in my opinion, is WebEx.com. WebEx is very popular with small to medium businesses and classrooms alike. For about $40 a month, you can have up to 25 users on a video conference, and only the host has to pay a penny for the service.
Beyond an affordable solution like webex, you can start to look into more of a large corporate business solution. Companies like Polycom, Cisco and Life Size are rolling out amazing software codecs. I spent some time in the medical technology realm, and software codecs where starting to take the forefront over traditional hardware codec systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
No matter what route you go, I would recommend making sure your students have a way to reach out to you face to face. Video conferencing systems allow for remote desk top assistance, as well as file sharing, and some other terrific tools for learning and collaborating. Check out this article for a longer list of codecs that might meet your needs. http://www.computerworld.com/s/ article/9234680/7_low _cost_ videoconferencing_services_Which_is_best_for_your_meeting_?taxonomyId=86&pageNumber=1
Resources
www.polycom.com
www.cisco.com
www.lifesize.com
www.skype.com
www.google.com/hangout
www.apple.com/ios/facetime
The beauty of an LMS is the ability to offer learners content at their own pace, in their own time...anytime. However, some occasions will still call for face to face to teaching, and your LMS doesn't have to fall short. Not every LMS will have a built in tool for live video conferencing but most do. If yours does not, it will most likely have at least a scheduling tool so you can post an upcoming "classroom" style course with all the pertinent details so your users can sign up just and know where to be to attend the class.
Once you've figured out if you can do video conferencing on your LMS or not, you may want to look into features of actual video conferencing software to help your class have the best possible experience. Like I said, some LMS platforms will have a built in tool that will access your computer's webcam, and micrphone and allow you to round up your students for a face to face learning session. Other times you will need to know what is out there to help you get your students together.
In each of these cases, you will at the very least need a device with a camera, microphone and speaker (which means just about everything like your cell phone, tablet, laptop, and PC will all work).
Everyone likes free! There are a host of free video conferencing tools out there. There are some important things to know about these versus ones that cost money. Quality is the first thing that comes with a better video conferencing program. Video conferencing software, to techy folks, is called a "codec" which stands for compression and decompression. Better codecs can take better quality video and audio and "compress" it to a smaller size, allowing better quality images and audio. If you've ever done a video conference from iPhone to iPhone using the famous and free face time program offered by Apple, you'll know how poor the quality can be. Face Time is a very low quality codec, and this is why your video and audio suffer. You are also doing this across a cellular signal in most cases and that doesn't help your cause. Using wifi will improve things a bit, but it's still a low quality free codec. Other free codecs include Google Hang Out, Skype (wildly popular), and Oovoo. The other limitation to these free codecs aside from quality, is the number of people you can have in one call. For classroom style lessons, it's frequently a larger group of users, and most of these are limited to three users.
The first step up in my opinion, is WebEx.com. WebEx is very popular with small to medium businesses and classrooms alike. For about $40 a month, you can have up to 25 users on a video conference, and only the host has to pay a penny for the service.
Beyond an affordable solution like webex, you can start to look into more of a large corporate business solution. Companies like Polycom, Cisco and Life Size are rolling out amazing software codecs. I spent some time in the medical technology realm, and software codecs where starting to take the forefront over traditional hardware codec systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
No matter what route you go, I would recommend making sure your students have a way to reach out to you face to face. Video conferencing systems allow for remote desk top assistance, as well as file sharing, and some other terrific tools for learning and collaborating. Check out this article for a longer list of codecs that might meet your needs. http://www.computerworld.com/s/ article/9234680/7_low _cost_ videoconferencing_services_Which_is_best_for_your_meeting_?taxonomyId=86&pageNumber=1
Resources
www.polycom.com
www.cisco.com
www.lifesize.com
www.skype.com
www.google.com/hangout
www.apple.com/ios/facetime
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