The recent WebLearn upgrade added a new link entitled “My Replay Folder” to every Oxford SSO user’s Home area (“My Home”).
When clicked this link will open a new browser tab displaying a personal folder in Panopto called “My Folder”.
By default, this folder is private and can be used for storing personal media recordings (video or audio), however, individual recordings can be moved, copied, shared with others or be made public.
Panopto have made this video explaining how to use your My Folder.
Those wonderful people at H5P have added some new features the most impressive of which is the integration of LaTeX into all content types (eg, drag and drop, multiple choice etc.)
If you want more information then you will find that the H5P Release Notes are very interesting.
You may also be interested in this previous blog post about H5P.
A new (external) tool called ‘Cabinet’ has been added to WebLearn. You can find it in the “Plugins” section of the “Manage Tools” page in “Site Info”.
Digital technologies are revolutionising our ability to integrate objects and images into university teaching. Cabinet has been developed to support teaching with objects and images in 2D and 3D, using a range of visual materials from Oxford’s GLAM collections and beyond.
Cabinet enables you to integrate text and object in the teaching process, providing full access to visual materials for study and revision
Objects and images used in lecture courses, handling sessions, classes, tutorials and seminars are uploaded onto Cabinet to give students the opportunity to review and revise materials alongside text. Cabinet supports both classroom and independent work through close study of high-resolution digitised course materials, and through interactive tools such as tagging and annotation of materials they encounter. The platform offers both a dynamic site for analysis and interaction, and a rich archive for the course module that enables its use by any teacher of the course.
Cabinet contains features allowing in-depth engagement with sources, including annotation of objects in 3D space, embedding of multimedia such as video and audio content, and the ability to post comments to stimulate online discussions about physical and textual study materials.
Cabinet is designed to be intuitive and flexible; it suits the learning preferences of digital natives, and also addresses the variety of teaching styles and time constraints of lecturers and tutors.
Papers can be of any size and can be organised by weeks, themes or other categories.
Both faculty members and museum curators are currently populating the site with courses from across all four Divisions of the University, and are actively experimenting with the platform. Initial feedback from students and lecturers is highly positive.
Cabinet is now supported by the Technology Enhanced Learning team, who offer full support in structuring the online course and in uploading course materials. The Cabinet team at the Oxford Internet Institute also welcome further enquiries from colleagues, and can offer some additional support such as 3D imaging.
Cabinet was originally developed by a team led by Oxford Internet Institute (OII), and funded through University’s IT Innovation Seed Fund (2015-16) and the GLAM Digital Content Board
IT Services offers a variety of taught courses to support the use of WebLearn and the plagiarism awareness software Turnitin. Course books for the WebLearn Fundamentals course (3 hours) can be downloaded for self study. Places are limited and bookings are required. All courses are free of charge.
Click on the links provided for further information and to book a place.
The University’s Disability Advisory Service brought to my attention that Policy Connect, (who describe themselves as “a cross-party think tank improving people’s lives by influencing policy”,) have recently published a report on Accessible VLEs (Twit: #AccessibleVLEs). Apparently there has been lots of interest in the findings and recommendations, from both education providers and government.
In case you had missed the announcement, new accessibility regulations came into force last Sunday (23 September 2018). The headline of the new regulations is:
The new legal requirements build on your existing obligations to disabled people under the Equality Act 2010 (or the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 in Northern Ireland). These say that all UK service providers must make ‘reasonable adjustments’ for disabled people.
WebLearn’s WYSIWYG HTML page editor has a built-in accessibility checker. We strongly recommend that you use it so you can be confident that web pages authored within WebLearn are accessible to all users.
Here’s what Policy Connect say about their Accessible VLEs report
This report has been produced in advance of the new digital accessibility regulations becoming law in September 2018, to help the Government and FE/HE providers put in place the necessary guidance and practical provisions to turn the regulations into reality.
The new regulations, in improving equal access to higher and further education, can – if implemented well – make an important contribution to meeting the Government’s ambition to create a more prosperous and equal Britain by growing our domestic talent pool and closing the disability employment and attainment gaps.
The report’s recommendations are aimed at doing much more than simply achieving compliance with the regulations. They set out how the requirements can be met in such a way as to improve learning and education for all students whether disabled or not.
The report begins with with the context of why digital accessibility is important in education. It starts with the recent history of inclusion and sets out how digital accessibility can make virtual learning environments (VLEs) a key learning tool for all users. Chapter 2 sets out what the new regulations will mean for educational leaders, lecturers and teachers, and what kind of information and data is included or exempt. Chapter 3 describes how the Government and sector bodies can help higher and further education institutions deliver on their obligations under the regulations – implementing these recommendations will be cost-effective and help consistency of application across the sector. Chapter 4 is targeted at the higher and further education institutions themselves and provides a strategic ‘how-to’ guide to implementation, with the objective of using the requirement for digital improvements to make education and learning better for all students.
Contact the WebLearn team if you would like hard copies of the following JISC Tech-Dis books about accessibility and particular electronic formats:
A message from Turnitin.
To clarify, during the maintenance period (Sept 22 4pm – 12:30am (Sept 23))
Dear Customers,
You may have noticed that some Turnitin customers recently experienced intermittent service interruptions or degradations. We apologize if you were one of the customers affected, and we are happy to report that our services are currently stable.
To prevent further issues of this nature, we will be performing some proactive emergency maintenance that will temporarily disrupt our services including:
PDT Sept 22 8am – 4:30pm
BST Sept 22 4pm – 12:30am (Sept 23)
AEST Sept 23 1am – 9:30am
Is your time zone not listed? Click here to find out when you’ll be affected.
Users will be unable to submit and grade during this maintenance window, so please ensure that any submission deadlines are adjusted to fall outside of the window.
Thanks for your understanding and continued support of Turnitin.
Stay up to date with Turnitin system status by following @TurnitinStatus on Twitter.
WebLearn was upgraded to version 11-ox12 at the end of August: this was a small release.
There is a separate blog post about using the brilliant H5P.
We recently received this from the people at *Research about the *Unity platform. (*Unity is another name for the Apereo Open Academic Environment)
Dear Colleague
*Unity will close down on 10 September 2018. After that you won’t be able to use it any more, so if you have any material you want to keep hold of, you need to download it before then.
We’ve taken this decision because, although *Unity was popular with many users, it wasn’t adopted by university IT departments. Without their support, we can’t make a success of it.
Our goal was to create an open platform for cooperation between academics everywhere with shared governance, so that academia could reclaim space that has been colonised by big technology players. This idea is explained here: http://oaeproject.org/2015/12/11/reintermediation.html. But, with some notable exceptions, it proved impossible to get university IT departments to buy into this vision.
An FAQ for dealing with practical issues has been posted at https://www.unity.ac/faq and you can also ask questions to support@untiy.ac. Please note that if we receive large numbers of queries it may take some time to reply.
Thank you for using *Unity and good luck with your studies.
With best wishes,
Martin Atkinson
Technology Director
*Research
From Steve Pierce (Replay Service Delivery Manager)
Dear Replay community,
On Saturday, July 21, we will require Panopto for Windows, Remote Recorders, and Panopto for Mac to be upgraded to version 5.6 or above. This change will be applied to the Panopto portal at 01:00 BST. For more information on the mandatory upgrade, see this article on the Panopto support site:
The latest versions of the Panopto for Windows and Panopto for Mac manual recorders (5.7) can be downloaded from:
The latest versions of the Remote Recorders can be downloaded from:
If you are updating an existing remote recorder you should not need to inform us, but if you are installing for the first time or on a new machine, please let us know via replay@it.ox.ac.uk so that we can assign correct permissions.
On Tuesday July 24 at 18:00 BST Panopto will be performing essential updates to the ox.cloud.panopto.eu cloud database in preparation for integration with Oxford’s new Canvas VLE. The process will take up to three hours (21:00 BST). During this downtime, you will not be able to access recordings on your server, and any attempts to upload from clients will result in a “Server unable to connect” message.
On Saturday, July 28, Panopto will update the ox.cloud.panopto.eu cloud database. This update will require downtime from 23:00 BST July 28 for up to three hours (02:00 BST July 29). During this downtime, you will not be able to access recordings on your server, and any attempts to upload from clients will result in a “Server unable to connect” message.
On Saturday, August 11, Panopto will be making a number of updates to the Panopto Cloud infrastructure to increase performance and scalability. These updates will require downtime from 20:00 BST August 11 for up to three hours (23:00 BST). During this downtime, you will not be able to access recordings on your server, and any attempts to upload from clients will result in a “Server unable to connect” message.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns please e-mail replay@it.ox.ac.uk
SaLTIre is a very useful “tool” for testing IMS LTI support. The site https://lti.tools/saltire/ provides a test Tool Provider and Tool Consumer which is great for quick checks of LTI support.
The website was originally developed as part of a JISC project.
WebLearn User Group talks Technology-enhanced learning and teaching Turnitin at Oxford Sakai in UK HE LTG Case Studies LTG Likes OxTALENT