Cal State Fullerton won two top awards at the statewide Cal State 2018 Tech Conference earlier this month.
The two-year-old conference brings together academic and information technology staff and management from throughout the California State University in an opportunity to collaborate and build a network to share best practices.
“Our campus was honored twice this year and won three awards last year, which demonstrates that Cal State Fullerton is one of the leaders in technology in the CSU,” noted Amir Dabirian, vice president for information technology and chief information officer.
Taking the gold award for external collaborations was the university’s partnership with Sharestream, an online video platform and streaming-media solution for education.
“Implementing Sharestream as CSUF’s media repository and streaming-media platform has resulted in enhanced security and structure for online instructional content and improved digital rights management,” said Shelli Wynants, director of online education and training (OET).
The platform’s functionality permits the creation of department and college collections for online content “that is shared across course sections and instructors,” Wynants added. The platform also has provided an integrated, easy to use, cost-effective captioning service that increases student accessibility to online video.
Cal State Fullerton earned a silver award for “technology supporting innovation in teaching and research” for the adoption and integration of H5P, a free, open-source content authoring system, into the university’s learning management system (LMS).
“Our faculty and staff are now able to create engaging, well-structured instructional presentations that can include images and videos, as well as built-in quizzing, interactions and content organization elements seamlessly and easily,” Wynants noted.
“Several faculty, along with OET’s Open Educational Resources certificate program, have integrated it into their online instructional methods,” she added. “Both faculty and students have expressed better engagement in the online content via H5P activities. It has become an integral component in the LMS and its adoption among faculty continues to grow.”
To learn more about using H5P, OET and the Academic Technology Center have added the system to their lineup of Tech Tool Tuesday workshops for faculty members.