Our Mission, Part 2: Building the ecosystem of education technology tools that support learning, and working with departments and faculty to curate tools for the needs and learning goals of programs and disciplines.
Building a learning “app store” for Duke
In partnership with Duke’s Office of Information Technology, Learning Innovation kicked off development of a unified learner dashboard that supports all learning experiences and embraces all learning technologies someone might encounter in their life’s journey with Duke. It’s called Kits, and will open for beta testing in Spring 2019.
Supporting and enhancing Sakai
Duke Learning Innovation and the Office of Information Technology together make possible the foundational technology for learning at Duke: the Sakai learning management system. This year the Duke community created 4,855 Sakai course sites and 476 project sites, a 9% and 12% increase, respectively, over the previous year. Those sites saw a total of 24,970 unique users, an average of 6,394 unique users per day.
One of the features most requested by our Sakai users was easier transport of official course grades from the Sakai Gradebook to DukeHub. We made that possible by implementing an integration that was used by 35% of beta users in Spring 2018. This feature is now available for all Duke courses.
Learning Innovation improved Sakai for Duke Kunshan by making the sign-in process for faculty and staff more secure and by improving the way student information from Duke and Duke Kunshan are integrated in Sakai sites.
We helped instructors grade more quickly and consistently by expanding the availability of Gradescope, a popular digital grading tool, to the entire university. A Sakai integration with Gradescope for easy roster and gradebook management will be available mid-Fall 2018.
e-Portfolios
Throughout the 2017-2018 year, Learning Innovation supported the continued adoption of PebblePad, Duke’s e-portfolio tool. PebblePad is a robust digital platform that allows Duke faculty, staff and students to track and share their learning and skills. Over the last year use of PebblePad at Duke doubled, and it is now used by a dozen schools and departments for learning and assessment.
Read more about Duke’s e-portfolio initiative in our Featured Initiatives section