TEAL Center Now Offers Online Courses for Faculty and Staff

The TEAL Center is working to move many of the classes it offers in person to an online format.  The new online format provides a great deal of flexibility for the busy schedules that faculty and staff members of the university maintain.  The classes are offered through Blackboard, which is also a great way for faculty and staff to experience Coastal’s learning management system just like the students.

To sign up for any TEAL classes go to: www.coastal.edu/teal.


Online topics available now or coming soon!

• Blackboard Learn: Introduction
• Blackboard Learn: Building and Managing Assignments
• Blackboard Learn: Building and Managing Tests
• Blackboard Learn: Grade Center
• Quality Matters Introduction
• Quality Matters Training
• Parts of Distance Learning Boot Camp (now infused with Quality Matters, too!)
• Narrated PowerPoint
• Providing Feedback on Student Assignments

Coastal Carolina University becomes a "Quality Matters" institution!

Coastal Carolina University recently became a Quality Matters institution. “Quality Matters (QM) is a faculty-centered, peer review process that is designed to certify the quality of online and blended courses” (http://www.qmprogram.org/). 

In the fall of 2003, MarylandOnline, Inc. began a three-year grant funded by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) entitled "Quality Matters: Inter-Institutional Quality Assurance in Online Education." QM has become a non-profit organization that provides tools and training to ensure quality in online education. QM provides a set of standards (The QM Rubric) to help guide the design of online courses and provides a peer review process between faculty to gauge online and blended courses based upon these standards.  

The development of the QM standards was based upon an extensive literature review. In order to spread the word about QM, the TEAL Center in Kimbel Library will be hosting a series of face-to-face and Adobe Connect trainings as well as online orientations to the program.  To view and signup for these trainings please visit: http://www.coastal.edu/teal/training. To learn more about the Quality Matters Program at CCU, please visit: http://libguides.coastal.edu/qualitymatters. 

The Teal World in Kimbel Library

It’s Homecoming Week at CCU and Kimbel Library jumped at the chance to participate in the fun by entering the office decorating contest. Library staff decorated the library’s foyer area in accordance with this year’s Homecoming theme, “The Teal World: Coastal”.

The display is a teal colored dorm room made with extra library furniture, cardboard and paper. All of the materials used in the display are recycled or recyclable.  The bed, TV, entertainment stand, and end tables are completely made out of cardboard and the rug is paper woven together. The knobs on the drawers are made from the caps of recycled water bottles. The handle on the entertainment stand is the handle from the bucket that is the top of the lamp.

If you look closely, you’ll see film gems such as “The Chauncy of Oz” and “The Good, The Bad and the Chauncy” as well as CCU t-shirts and other items.

Please stop by and take a look at Kimbel Library’s display and be sure to greet the two cardboard teal students who have made the teal dorm room their new home.

Go Chants!

New Database

New Database!  EBSCO’s Art and Architecture Complete

Art major or no, you’ve probably heard of Vincent Van Gogh, the prolific, eccentric painter of such masterpieces as Sun Flowers and Starry Night.  Two researchers and authors from Aiken, SC, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, have just turned prevailing knowledge about Van Gogh’s life and death on its ear with the publication of Van Gogh: the Life.  The two have already earned a Pulitzer Prize for their biography Jackson Pollock: an American Saga.   In their current book, they assert that Van Gogh was a solitary soul and a voracious reader, that he suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy and that he may well have been murdered.

If you’re interested in learning more about Van Gogh or Pollock or, for that matter, about Naifeh and Smith, turn to our newest art database, Art and Architecture Complete, to begin your research.  AAC indexes 780 journals, of which 380 are full text and 64% are peer-reviewed.  It also includes some monographs and a picture image gallery, but lacks podcasts and dissertation indexing.  Research on the aforementioned Van Gogh and Pollock may be pursued in 28 art history journals, 25 of which are peer reviewed and full-text up to and including the current issue.

Not an art major? Take note history, theatre and environmental studies students: AAC covers archaeology, costume design, photography, landscape design, sustainable architecture and landscaping, too!

Halloween Titles

It’s that time of year when, to paraphrase Shakespeare, ghouls and goblins and other things wicked this way come.  In celebration of Halloween, check out Rotten Tomatoes’ Top Twenty-five Horror Films (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/features/special/2010/top_horror/).   You’ll find DVDs in Kimbel Library’s collection that made the 2007 and 2010 lists now on display in the reading area on the first floor. 

Two silent masterpieces set the standard for the horror films that followed.  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, #5, was based on a real murder and the fangs and nails of the vampire in Nosferatu, #4, are grossness personified.   Three iconic horror figures--Dracula, #27, Frankenstein, #7,  and his Bride… #2-- made their screen debuts during the Great Depression , while 1956’s sci-fi/horror combo, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, #8, was an allegory on the political blacklisting of that decade.   The trailer for Alien, another sci-fi/horror combo, promised that, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”  Alien comes in at #9.  Two foreign language films made 2007’s list:  the Spanish language film, Cronos, at #42; the Korean, A Tale of Two Sisters, at #46.  Animals large (Jaws, #12) and small (Birds, #24) strike terror in peoples’ hearts when seen through the lens’ of directors like Spielberg and Hitchcock.  So, if you want your terror tempered by comedy, choose instead the laughs and screams aplenty in 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, #42.  Are you into the current zombie craze?  You’ll be glad that 1978’s Dawn of the Dead made the list at number twenty-one.  We’ve got the 2004 remake, featuring CCU grad Michael Kelly in a supporting role.  Good and evil vie for dominance in 1955’s Night of the Hunter, #15, as a psychotic preacher plays a cat-and-mouse game with two children.   Equally terrifying to children of all ages is the circus depicted in the now legendary film ranked #20, Freaks.  If you’re looking for horror that’s pleasing on the eye, two stylish depictions are M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, #29, and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, #14.  Want to watch the top horror movie of all time?  Ask for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho on reserve at the Circulation Desk and learn why protagonist Norman Bates believes a boy’s best friend is his mother.

Carrie, #46, Halloween, #34, and Rosemary’s Baby, #14, are, as of this writing, already checked out.  Grab one of the few remaining fiendish flics fast!