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New Link from SPARK to OWL in Testing Phase

The UMass Amherst Provost’s Office, the Office of Information Technologies (OIT), and the Center for Educational Software Development (CESD) have developed a link from the learning management system used for on-campus courses, SPARK, to our online homework tool, OWL.

OIT Academic Computing and CESD staff are testing this “powerlink” in about ten courses during the spring 2008 semester. We will be asking both the students and the instructors involved what they like and dislike about this new feature. Our hope is to offer this link to the entire campus for the fall 2008 semester and, eventually, to OWL users on other campuses.

The key features of the SPARK-OWL integration include:

  • SPARK course instructors can add the advanced homework/questioning capabilities of OWL to the normal quizzing/surveying features found in SPARK without having to manage two rosters.
  • Instructors no longer need to roster students into their OWL course or manage add/drops in their OWL enrollment. Rostering will be handled from the SPIRE to SPARK communications each night.
  • Once students are logged into SPARK, they can click a link to get into OWL without having to log into OWL separately.
  • Instructors can use each tool to do what it does best rather than settling for a less than ideal approach or having to build additional features into a tool that duplicates existing capabilities in the other.
  • OWL assignment grade totals can be transferred into the SPARK gradebook from the OWL gradebook.
  • OWL instructors can use the SPARK to SPIRE communication to submit course final semester grades to SPIRE automatically.

For more information about the SPARK-OWL link, please contact Cindy Stein (545 2617 | stein@cs.umass.edu).

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