WebLearn Blog

After positive feedback from consultations with our users, we are now pressing ahead with our plans to start publishing automatically-generated lists of ‘Local WebLearn Coordinators’ which are created by processing the membership of Administration Sites.

This replaces our current approach of attempting to maintain a manual list which can be found at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/weblearn/admin-sites-list.xml. We use this list when we need to liaise with a unit about WebLearn matters and we point users (staff/students) at this list when they need support from the WebLearn Coordinator of the unit in question.

It has always been difficult for us to keep this list up to date. In the last couple of months it has become apparent that it is way out of date which is not helpful to us, our users and the units who have no valid contacts.

We intend to solve this problem by auto-generating this list. What we plan to do is the following:

1. Create a new role called “coordinator” for Administration Sites; this role would be identical in all but name to the current “admin” role – this has now been done.
2. Request that each unit check and update the membership and roles in their Administration Site.
3. Manually assign this role to all Administration Site participants who we know to be Local WebLearn Coordinators where this has not been done already.
4. Add some programming logic so that every Administration Site must have at least one participant with the “coordinator” role.
5. Form a list of WebLearn Coordinators by extracting members of each Administration site who have the “coordinator” role and use the names (not email addresses) and the associated Administration Site names as the basis of the new list. A web page containing this information would replace the current page and would be updated nightly.
6. Send system messages to this list instead of the manually maintained ‘wl-coordinators’ mail list.

What does this mean?

1. The change implies that anybody with the “Coordinator” role in an Administration Site will now be viewed as a Local WebLearn Coordinator. Units need to update the membership of their Administration site and take on the responsibility to assign this role to their preferred contacts in the future.
2. Members of the ‘wl-coordinators’ mail list who do not have the “coordinator” role will stop receiving emails via this route. To mitigate, we will identify and add these people to the WebLearn User Group email list which receives the same messages.

Drawbacks

A small number of units, specifically, Archaeology, OII, Medical Sciences and Exeter College supply a generic email address as a contact point, unfortunately these will cease to appear as WebLearn is unable to support generic accounts as site members.

Action

To help us achieve our goal, we would be very grateful if you could update the membership of your Administration site and set at least 2 people to have the new ‘coordinator’ role. The current list of coordinators can be found at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/weblearn/admin-sites-list.xml.

Please feel free to contact us with any other queries that you may have via: weblearn@it.ox.ac.uk