Icon: Screen-friendly stylesheet Screen-friendly page

Investigate Educational Technologies

Supported Systems

Illinois Compass

Illinois Compass, powered by Blackboard Vista Enterprise Edition, is an enterprise learning management system that gives faculty, instructors, students, and others a collaborative online space with tools for managing and delivering course assignments, tracking and publishing grades, and keeping course material available to students outside the classroom walls. The system has been customized for use by University faculty.

iTunes U

Illinois on iTunes U provides access to a wide range of Illinois-related digital media content. Lectures, learning materials, music, sports, and items of community interest can be accessed from iTunes U on a Windows or Macintosh computer running the free iTunes software or be taken “on-the-go” with a portable MP3 or video player.

Mallard

Mallard is a powerful course management system developed at the University of Illinois. It allows instructors to develop sophisticated assessments, including quizzes and surveys.

CITES Wiki

The CITES Wiki service supports teaching, research, and departmental web-based collaboration and outreach, using a 3rd-party software called Confluence. The Confluence wiki system is quite flexible, allowing for a wide variety in the layout and look and feel of a particular wiki space, made possible by a choice of built-in templates and a "theme builder," where wiki owners can further customize their own space. On our campus, the Confluence wiki system has been used as the home page for web-based courses and departmental web sites, as a collaboration tool for research teams and student project groups, and as a communication and content management system for campus professional units. The CITES wiki service provides many other features, including blogs and comments, sharing of indexed file attachments across pages and users, sharing and exporting of pages to email, print, Adobe PDF format, text, and HTML. Wikis are powerful, web-based editing and collaboration tools, capable of supporting individual researchers and small groups, large courses, or entire departments and units.

Podcasting

Podcasting consulting, training and support is provided by CITES EdTech to help interested instructors discover the best pedagogical uses of podcasting for the courses they teach. EdTech consultants provide guidance on whether or not podcasting is the best option for a given course, strategic and creative podcast design, optimum workflow for podcast creation and where and how to host a podcast.  EdTech can also offer advice on equipment to be used for Podcasting and has a limited supply of equipment that can be borrowed to help get started with podcast creation.

Multimedia & Streaming Service

Multimedia & Streaming is supported by CITES EdTech providing free streaming server space for digital audio and multimedia files used for instructional purposes. The CITES EdTech streaming and multimedia server can stream most digital media formats including Real, Quicktime, and Windows Media. We recommend that instructors who routinely use digital multimedia files in their Compass Course sites, on class web sites, or in other online forums, host their material on the multimedia server.

Complementary Tools

Respondus

Respondus is a powerful, Windows-based software tool for creating and managing exams that can be printed to paper or published directly to Illinois Compass. Exams are created offline and the software provides many time-saving tools, such as the ability to import existing exams from word processor files. With Respondus, instructors can create up to nine different question types such as multiple choice, true false, matching, paragraph, short answer, multiple response, fill in the blank, and jumbled sentence including calculated and algorithmic formats. Moreover, multimedia content such as images, audio, and video can be easily embedded into questions without writing or viewing the underlying HTML links. Respondus allows instructors to retrieve custom reports such as student scores, summary statistics, and answer distributions. It also allows users to restore exam/survey projects (including media content) with one click - ideal for providing a colleague with a ready-to-use exam.

StudyMate Author

StudyMate Author is a powerful, Windows-based software tool that enables the creation of ten different online interactive study activities. These activities use Flash for their delivery and work well with slow and fast Internet connections alike as well as with all popular web browsers. Because they are web-based activities, they can be delivered as stand-alone exercises or easily integrated into an Illinois Compass course site. StudyMate Author can easily import questions from Respondus, a companion tool used for creating questions and quizzes for print or online use in Illinois Compass. The StudyMate Author web site provides examples of text-only based activities. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has site licensed this software so it is free for all instructors, staff, and students on this campus.

Audacity

Audacity allows instructors to reduce background noise from sound files for better audibility, add fades and other effects to audio, and export the end product as an MP3 file (which is much smaller than a WAV or other audio file type).

Virtual Worlds

Over the past five years, commercial and open source online virtual worlds like Second Life, Active Worlds, Club Penguin, Webkinz, and There have become increasingly accessible and popular among children and adults alike. In these worlds, users navigate using avatars - graphical representations of themselves - through a simulated 3D environment. Virtual worlds are not games (although they may contain games inside them).&Rather, they provide virtual places for people to meet, learn, socialize, play, and create.