In order to deploy some important system updates, WebLearn will be unavailable for up to 15 minutes between 0700-0900 on Tuesday 24th June. Unfortunately, this will mean that there will be no service during this period.
We apologise for any inconvenience that this essential work may cause.
IT Services has just launched a brand new project aimed at improving the resilience of WebLearn. The project which started in June 2014 and will run for 9 months aims to improve the infrastructure that supports the WebLearn architecture.
WebLearn is now classified by the University as a Tier 1 service. This means that it is essential to the business of the University and must suffer from minimal unplanned downtime.
Even though the reliability of WebLearn has been very good of late, there are still improvements that can be made. WebLearn runs in a physical cluster of 4 machines: one back-end server which hosts the MySQL database and SOLR search platform and a further 3 worker nodes which host the rest of WebLearn.
There have been a couple of occasions when a problem with SOLR has put a strain on the back-end server and caused the database to run slowly – to an end user, this makes WebLearn appear sluggish with slow response times.
On other occasions, we have noticed ‘runaway threads’ on one of the worker nodes – to an end user who is using this node, again, the service will appear to be labouring.
The objectives of WeRP are that robustness and recovery time should be improved, this will result in less unplanned downtime for users and should also give overall faster response times.
Certain kinds of problems will be able to be identified quicker and users will be less inconvenienced when there is a problem as it will be easier and quicker to take a node out of services in order to repair a problem. Improved monitoring & access to logs will allow both IT Services to diagnose past issues and respond to user queries.
The project is at a very early stage and is still in the planning phase – keep an eye on this blog for updates of progress as an when they happen.
Come along to the WebLearn User Group meeting at IT Services on 7 July 2014 at 14:00 to learn more about ‘Writing accessible web pages’ (Booking is required at http://courses.it.ox.ac.uk/detail/TOVD).
The following news release is from Jisc: see http://jisc.msgfocus.com/q/112eRgM9oyVzKqK4cdb/wv
Today Jisc welcomed reforms to copyright law that expand the ability of ‘authorised bodies’, including colleges and universities, to copy work and make it more accessible for disabled people. It does this by removing previous legal restrictions on what can be copied and by whom.
All disabled people, regardless of impairment, are now covered by the legislation where their impairment affects their ability to access work on an equal basis to someone without the impairment. The previous law restricted the exception to visually impaired persons only. This brings the law more in line with the Equality Act 2010 definition of disability and means, for example, that students with dyslexia, are now covered by the exception. All copyright work is now covered, including recordings of performances and broadcasts, film and video clips.
Betty Willder, legal information specialist, Jisc Legal said: “Universities and colleges, as authorised bodies under the reforms, can now make more materials than ever accessible to disabled students. They can for example now subtitle a lawful broadcast or a video clip for disabled learners, where there is no commercial alternative available, without risk of infringing copyright. These changes are a positive step forward in bringing copyright law up-to-date with the digital learning environment and accessibility needs.”
Alistair McNaught, senior adviser, Jisc TechDis said: “These changes are of great significance to library and disability staff in higher and further education. They can now support learners more quickly and confidently because the law is more inclusive and much clearer. The challenge now is to encourage more disabled learners to take advantage of the opportunities presented by alternative formats. Increasing demand will create the incentive for suppliers to make their mainstream products more accessible at source.”
Jisc is providing support and guidance for UK colleges and universities on the changes.”
A number of these students report how helpful and effective the ‘on-line platform(s)’ are that they use as part of their Sustainable Urban Development M.Sc. course. One of these platforms is, of course, WebLearn which is used extensively by the Department of Continuing Education.
As previously proposed, we have now switched to using an automatically generated list of WebLearn coordinators.
To do this we have visited each and every administration site and assigned the ‘coordinator’ role to the people that we believe to be Local WebLearn Coordinators. The following link will display coordinators for all administration sites: <https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/x/rDVByp>
May we kindly request that you check that we have the correct details for your department or college? If we do not then please accept our apologies. To fix any problems, you should modify the membership and / or roles in your Administration Site – there is no need to inform us of any changes that you make.
The “wl-coordinators-announce maillist” will not be used in future. Members of that list who are not WebLearn Coordinators have been added to the WebLearn User group site so will still receive important announcements.
Please do get in touch (via the usual channels) if you have any questions about this or any other areas of WebLearn.
The central team has recently introduced some changes in the roles in an Administration site (the ‘coordinator’ role). See this blog post for more information: http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/adamweblearn/2014/04/proposal-automatic-generation-of-a-list-of-weblearn-coordinators/
A lunch time overview session as been scheduled for Local WebLearn Coordinators. Come along to find out more about your role and recent changes.
Date: Thursday 12 June 2014
Time: 12:30-13:30
Venue: IT Services, 13 Banbury Road
Booking: http://courses.it.ox.ac.uk/detail/TOVS
We hope to see you there.
WebLearn offers a space (‘site’) in your departmental or college area, which provides an easy way to author web pages, upload and share materials, and collaborate and communicate with students, colleagues, experts, or external users.
The WebLearn team in Academic IT Services offers one-to-one consultation on designing and building WebLearn areas. To book a consultation, email the WebLearn team, weblearn@it.ox.ac.uk.
You can also book to attend the Computer8 sessions at IT Services which are held every Friday morning during term time from 10:30 – 12:00.
WebLearn was upgraded on Tuesday 13th May 2014 to version 2.8-ox10.1. For more detailed information and other minor changes, please looked at the detailed release notes.
If you would like to suggest further improvements then please do so by contributing to the WebLearn User Voice feedback service.
Have you ever wanted to use a WebLearn tool icon in a document or web page and been dismayed that, at a size of 16px, it is too small and therefore not suitable for use? If so then you may be pleased to know that we have developed a set of larger icons (45px, 90px and 120px) for the most popular WebLearn tools.
Examples, Resources tool:
16px 
45px 
90px 
120px 
There are 35 larger icons all available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 licence:
Here is an example of use within a WebLearn site:
<img alt="Polls tool icon" src="/access/content/public/images/silk/1-large/90px/18_polls.png />
The original (small) icons are also freely available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 licence and are known as ‘Silk Icons’ or ‘Fam Fam Fam Icons’. The original download is available from: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
You may find other large silk icons at: http://fatcow.com/free-icons.
Trinity term’s programme of training has been announced: http://wp.me/p1K8WQ-SZ
The TurnItIn Academic service suffered from poor performance throughout the whole of the last week of April; by the end of the week the problems appear to have been solved. The problem resulted in a backlog in processing student papers, but the UK service was back to normal within two days. This time the Turnitin providers sent out frequent status updates, and we fed the information to status.ox.ac.uk.
Have you got a suggestion to improve WebLearn? If so you may like to contribute to the WebLearn User Voice feedback service which available from the WebLearn Welcome page: “Suggest an Improvement”.
The WebLearn team plans to publicise the weekly Computer8 sessions to encourage users to make us of the free, individual consultation time on offer. Also, we would like to strongly encourage departments and colleges to enter this year’s OxTALENT awards in the category: “Use of WebLearn to support teaching, learning, or outreach”.
There has been an upgrade to WebLearn since the last report (to 2.8-ox10). Since the WebLearn developers are focusing on a move to sakai 10 over the Long Vacation, the ox10 release was a modest affair.
The much delayed Groups Store project has now started. This project is being carried out by the Identity and Access Management (IAM) team; it is hoped that WebLearn integration will be forthcoming and at this stage we hope to offer basic integration by Jan 2015.
Work to move WebLearn from version 2.8 of Sakai to version 10 of Sakai in time is progressing smoothly with much progress being made, however, there is stall a large amount of work outstanding.
Planning for the project to work with Sydev to improve the resilience of WebLearn is just about complete. The project manager will be Gabriel Hanganu and the project should start on 1st June. When the work is complete this should offer greater service stability and quicker recovery times in the event of an outage.
The WebLearn team are currently investigating how students and staff would like to use WebLearn on their mobile devices. If you have a view on this then please get in touch and we will come and talk to you.
Nick Wilson has joined the WebLearn team as a Java developer. Nick used to work for Right Move and, in our opinion, has made, er, the right move in joining the team.
Nicholaas Matthijs from Cambridge University gave a presentation about the Apereo OAE on April 3rd to a crowded ISIS teaching room. Apereo OAE is a brand new platform that aims to support academic collaboration and academic networking. It is being developed by the same organisation that oversees Sakai which of course is the software which underpins WebLearn. The talk was recorded and is available for viewing now.
WebLearn User Group talks Technology-enhanced learning and teaching Turnitin at Oxford Sakai in UK HE LTG Case Studies LTG Likes OxTALENT