MISO (Measuring Information Services Outcomes) survey is a very popular survey that measures the performance of information services organizations. The then IS at Wellesley administered it in 2008. After I arrived in 2010, I made a decision to wait a little bit for the reorganizations and the repositioning of LTS to settle before we administered it again. We finally administered it in Feb 2015 to the campus faculty, students, and staff. All the faculty and staff, and a sample of Wellesley students (with balanced class participation) were invited to participate. The overall response rate for the faculty was 62% whereas for the students and staff it was over 50%. For some administrative offices, the response rate approached 90%. This is pretty impressive and therefore we can also rely on the results of the survey to measure the responses and respond appropriately.
The survey LTS administered in 2015 aimed to collect feedback on three areas: the importance of library and technology resources and services, satisfaction with those resources and services, and an assessment of how informed the faculty, students and staff are about LTS resources, services, and policies. Whereas we were very interested to know how well we are doing, the most important reason for the survey was to understand where we could be doing better. It is extremely hard to gather a coherent picture of this other than a survey with such a high response rate. You can read more about this here.
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I have been using the two factor authentication for Google for quite some time and have never had any issues. I have it turned on for both my personal Google account as well as for my Wellesley account. On the latter one, it is of limited use because of our own use of single sign on. I experienced a real panic this morning that was an eye opener for me.
All began with me getting excited about a Chrome extension called Spaces for Chrome. Since I am big user of spaces on Mac OS, I got all excited about using this. I typically have 20-25 tabs open in my Chrome browser and I hate restarting it. Since this Chrome extension seemed to address grouping of the tabs as well as CPU/Memory savings, I thought I would try it out. I installed and happily reorganized my tabs based on some themes. Then I noticed that the Calendar extension had a red X on it. It said I needed to reauthenticate. So I did. Since I have set up two factor authentication, I was sent a code and everything seemed OK. But then, the red X came back. Disclaimer: I have no proof that it is this chrome extension that caused the problem. It is just an assumption!
I went to look at Chrome settings and it had an authentication failure. I reauthenticated, got the code on my cell phone and everything was fine again. Except… (more…)
I am very excited to be able to spend the day with colleagues from Colgate, Davidson, Hamilton, and Wellesley to see how best to collaborate on matters of common interest in the area of blended learning. I will write more about what we discussed today after the meeting is over, but if the discussions last night at dinner was any indication, we are in for a great day.
What brings the four of us together is that we are all small liberal arts colleges who are also members of edX. We also have grants from Mellon foundation to collaborate on “blended learning in the liberal arts” context. Whereas edX provides us a fantastic and solid platform to experiment with the MOOCs, the way teaching and learning happens in a small liberal arts college is very different from the large universities and therefore, through collaborations such as this, we can help edX understand our needs and support us better.
We have a session where students from all four colleges will help us understand their perspectives on matters related to MOOCs and blended learning. I find the student feedback essential for us to be able to strategize the future in this area.
I wrote earlier about the course that I am currently enrolled in – The Analytics Edge and the competition to develop a model to predict which blog posts in NY Times are likely to be popular. I am happy to inform that I placed reasonably well and received a very nice grade. As the toppers are discussing their strategies, I am thrilled to find out that my model was not that different than theirs! What gave them the edge was their patience and persistence in playing with the model to remove a few words that were “over contributing” to the model.
Off to the meeting…