The Telesis course management system completed a full academic year in production with the spring 2005 semester. At the close of the semester, just over 20% of faculty university wide had an active Telesis course with one or more log-ins. More than 25% of students had at least one course on Telesis in the spring semester and logged in at least one time to the system.

For the fall semester to date a total of 276 communities are active on Telesis. Of these courses,  63% are using the feature for an online syllabus. Half of the communities are using the assignments feature and nearly 40% are using the gradebook. Other popular features in Telesis continue to be topics, links and community calendar. Since the start of fall classes, over 2000 log-ins are made daily to Telesis, Sunday through Friday.

Enhancements to Telesis in the fall 2005 release include the ability to manage members in a community by a request process which allows for the addition of guest faculty, guest students (those who are auditing a course or sitting in informally,) and adding staff and others who are assisting in the use of Telesis for an instructor. After adding new members to a Telesis community, the instructor or leader can adjust the privileges available to each role to customize the management of materials.

Other enhancements include the ability of community leaders or instructors to create "self-service" communities which are not automatically generated by the course listing system as listed courses. This facilitates the use of Telesis for reading groups, academic advising and other programs. Adding support for non-course communities in Telesis enabled the Freshman Reading Program to create 50 communities this summer based on housing assignments for incoming students who could then access readings, share their thoughts and prepare for in-person discussions with faculty facilitators after they arrived on campus for the start of the term.

Additional Telesis features and improvements include better tools for gradebook testing, a convenient system to flag and set visibility of content for community members by an instructor or leader, and the ability to easily link to a word processor file to use as a syllabus in your Telesis course. Finally, information about holdings and links to staff and other Library resources were added as a standard item at the menu item Library in all Telesis communities.

If you have been considering trying Telesis for your courses or other communities, here are some ideas and resources that may be of interest:

• Telesis can support "umbrella" communities that consist of more than one section of a course or multiple courses. If your department offers content that is duplicated across several sections or you would like to combine a discussion or syllabus between related courses, consider trying Telesis

• If you'd like to know more about Telesis, check the page http://artsci.wustl.edu/ASCC/facilities/tl/whatistelesis.html. Here you can find an introduction to the tool as well as print-ready, downloadable copies of helpsheets to get you and your students started. The page also contains names of Telesis Support Representatives in your area if you would like an in-person introduction.

For information about Telesis or assistance using it, please send a message to telesis@wustl.edu.

by Kathy Atnip, Director, The Teaching Lab in A&S

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