Prepare Iowa News
LMS Newsletter
February 2006
Thank you for using Prepare Iowa, learning management system! We are excited to present our first newsletter of the year. If you have suggestions regarding the newsletter or ideas for Prepare Iowa, please feel free to contact the LMS Coordinators – visit the “Contact Us” page on the Prepare Iowa website.
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Contents:
Course Announcements – Archived courses, Web casts, and more on-line courses
Upcoming Enhancements – Course User Ratings, Calendar Event Submission, Upgraded Certificates of Completion, Upgraded Calendar format
Tips – Searching the Course Catalog, Printing an Activity Report/Transcript
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- Archives Now Available!
We are pleased to announce that all of the Fall 2005 webcast programs for both Grand Rounds and Best Practices in Local Public Health series are now available for registration and viewing.
To view the complete list, navigate to the Course Catalog and enter a keyword search of “archive”.
You may have noticed that we have been distributing more and more programs via RealPlayer webcasting. This feature is extremely convenient and cost-effective for anyone working with limited time and budget. There are two types of webcasts: live streaming and archived. The main difference is that the live version happens once and is over and the archived version is re-playable as many times as necessary. It can be forwarded, rewound, or paused, and is always available. For this reason it may be advantageous for certain users to view archived webcasts once they are available, which is usually within a week.
- On-Line Courses
There are several new online courses available in the course catalog which include: Basic Epidemiology, HAZMAT Awareness for First Responders, HAZMAT for Healthcare Providers: Awareness, HAZMAT for Healthcare Providers: Operations, and Weapons of Mass Destruction Awareness. Check them out in the course catalog!
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New Enhancements
Prepare Iowa has some exciting new features! Some of the new features include:
- A star-rating system for courses, users can now rate courses on a 1-5 star scale once they have completed a course. So if you have recently completed a course, click on “My Courses,” – “Completed Courses” and you will see where you can rate that course.
- Calendar events can be submitted for approval and inclusion in the calendar, so if you have an upcoming event that you would like to add, click on the “Submit Event” on the calendar page.
- Certificates have an improved format which makes them smaller files and faster to download.
- The calendar month-view format has been visually improved for a cleaner, more user-friendly look.
Please feel free to check these features out and give us feedback on them at prepareiowa@uiowa.edu
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Tips on Using the LMS
- How to search the course catalog - use the keyword search if you know any part of the title or the course number. MAKE SURE YOU CLICK THE "SEARCH" BUTTON AND NOT "BROWSE SELECTED CATEGORIES". If you would like to browse through courses by subject category, use the category checkboxes. MAKE SURE YOU CLICK "BROWSE SELECTED CATEGORIES" AND NOT THE SEARCH BUTTON.
- Print an Activity Report (Transcript) of all LMS and non-LMS Courses and Competency Assessments – You can add non-LMS Courses to your transcript, go to “My Courses” and select “My Current Courses,” then click on “Add Non-LMS Course” and click save after you’ve entered the information. To print your LMS Activity Report, go to “My Courses” and select “LMS Activity Report,” select the boxes you want displayed in your report and click on “Generate Report.”
