WebLearn was moved to v2.8-ox5 at the start of April, the highlights are
- The OXCAP work within WebLearn has now finished, there a few loose ends to tidy up in Oxford Open Data which influence what data is sent to WebLearn. We expect to have these final changes completed by May.
- Surveys conducted in foreign languages now work properly
- A URL redirection service has been introduced.
A bug-fix release 2.8-ox5.1 was successfully deployed on 30 April. The findings of the WebLearn Student Digital Experience (WSDE) Project have been published. Highlights include:
- Upload material in advance of a lecture so students can read up
- Students or lecturers should make audio recordings of lectures and put them in the Podcasts tool. Lecturers could encourage students to do this.
- Add Forums to sites for discussions (either including or excluding staff)
- Give students a folder in resources where they can upload course-related material
- Departments should hold induction sessions for students and should pass all student feedback to the WebLearn team
- Base all new sites on one of the (fairly new) site templates
- Focus the Welcome page on students instead of staff and create more student-centric help and guidance (underway)
- Promote My Workspace – many students do not know about it
- Improve UI and usability
Projects
The OXCAP project formally finished at the end of March – the software has passed user acceptance testing and is now live.
Work on the Student Enrolment System (SES) III project has now started. This project is led by the academic divisions and is funded by SSPB. It will further improve the SES tool within WebLearn in the areas of user interface, searching, reporting and course administration.
The SIPA project which works with academic and administrative staff members across the university to investigate assessment and feedback practices and to invite user input is drawing to a close. Since the pilot of Assignments2 tool began, iParadigms have rewritten the Turnitin web services interface which means we have to rewrite the Sakai – Turnitin integration code, which is a fairly big task. We have decided not to migrate to Assignments 2 since the tool is not yet mature, or in general use in the Sakai community. Instead we will apply its few benefits to the current Assignments tool. SIPA included a pilot of the PeerMark and GradeMark tools – there has not been much interest and we will continue to work with academics or administrators on request.
Other
Roger Pearson who was appointed as the learning technologist for the SIPA project has now left IT Services and moved to The University of the Creative Arts. Members of the WebLearn team gave a total of 3 presentations at the Euro Sakai conference and have submitted an abstract for ALT-C in September.
