Telesis Celebrates One Millionth User
On January 18, 2007 Min-Sun Son, an undegraduate student in Biomedical Engineering, logged on to Telesis, Washington University’s Web-based course-management system. In doing so, she recorded the 1,000,000th login since the program’s inception during the Fall 2004 semester. Son was recognized with a Telesis t-shirt on January 22 during the first meeting of the course “Experimental Methods for Biomechanics.” The class, taught by Ruth J. Okamoto, D.Sc., assistant professor of mechanical, biomedical, and aerospace engineering, celebrated with a bagel breakfast.
Okamoto has created a robust Telesis dimension for her Biomechanics course, with a community syllabus, course topics and assignments linked to the scheduled class meetings, and an electronic gradebook. “Each semester, I’ve integrated more of Telesis’ features—including submitting assignments electronically,” Okamoto said.
According to Associate Vice Chancellor Dennis J. Martin, who has led the team developing this tool, “Professor Okamoto is one of many faculty across the campus who have adopted Telesis and its various features. She has taken full advantage of the system’s many features, and in doing so demonstrates how technology can support the interaction of faculty and students in the classroom.”
Telesis was developed by Washington University’s Administrative Information Systems and continues in active development with a project list based on faculty feedback and requests. Last semester nearly 8,000 individual users, including 7,200 students, connected to Telesis. In all there were over 300,000 logins during the fall 2006 semester. More than 300 instructors from across the University use Telesis.
Fall 2006 saw the addition of several new Telesis features, including a tool to add members to a course community using their email addresses and improved procedures to create “umbrellas” that streamline management of multi-section courses. Enhancements to the popular Gradebook and Assignments features, as well as updates to Files and Calendar, were also released in fall 2006. Future plans include improved file management, such as the ability to upload and download zipped archives of files; a link to reset forgotten passwords; improved roster and email options; and an online quizzing and testing feature.
For more information about the Telesis course management system, send a message to telesis@wustl.edu . To access Telesis, point your Web browser to https://telesis.wustl.edu .