WebLearn upgraded to Version 2.8-ox3 – 25 September 2012

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Adam Marshall

WebLearn was upgraded on 25th September 2012 to version 2.8-ox3. For more detailed information please looked at the detailed release notes.

Improvements

  • OXAM now housed within WebLearn
  • many improvements to the Assignments tool in the area of Turnitin integration, eg, turnitin integration will now accept resubmissions, no longer possible for students to see the Turnitin originality report despite this having been disabled in Assignments and the Instructor now does not have to have submissions  added to Turnitin’s repository
  • Assignments 2 tool now available for people participating in the pilot

SES Tool

  • now has a new landing page
  • now has calendar / agenda view of upcoming courses
  • courses that are less than 2 weeks old are marked as ‘new’

Bug Fixes

  • can now download ical (.ics) files from sign-up tool
  • Mailsender – emails now get sent to correct recipients when selecting individuals from an internal subgroup
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Problems with Reading Lists in sites created from a Template

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Adam Marshall

We have just discovered a problem with Reading Lists in the 3 site templates:

  1. Template for content
  2. Template for tutors
  3. Template for lecturers

It would appear that when a site is copied (duplicated) any Reading List contained within that site is not copied; in other words, the Reading List in the copy of the site is the same ‘physical’ list as that in the original.

To illustrate this simply, if you edit the Reading List in the original site then the Reading List in the copy will also change.

This has severe implications when the site in question has been created from a system-wide site template: all copies made from a particular template contain the same Reading List. If one person edits the Reading List then everybody else’s copy will also change without notification.

As far as we can tell nobody has yet edited a Reading List in a site created from a template.

We have now removed reading lists from the templates so new site created from templates should be safe.

Please get in touch with the WebLearn team if you think this issue affects you or you have any other questions raised by this post.

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WebLearn and Turnitin courses MT 2012

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Jill Fresen

Come along to learn more about WebLearn, Turnitin and avoiding plagiarism – attend our free half-day courses, byte-sized or lunch-time sessions. Booking is required, using the links provided. Booking opens 30 days in advance – if booking is not yet open for a particular course, you can express an interest and you will receive an email when booking opens.

New! Byte-sized sessions:
WebLearn Bytes: Resources, Week 5, Monday 5 November, 12:30-13.30
WebLearn Bytes: Surveys, Week 5, Thursday 8 November 2.00-3.00  
WebLearn Bytes: Site Info, Week 5, Thursday 8 November 3.00-4.00  
WebLearn Bytes: Assignments, Week 6, Monday 12 November, 12:30-13.30

Half-day courses:
WebLearn: Fundamentals: 
Wednesday 26 September 9.15-12.15
Tuesday 9 October 9.15-12.15
Thursday 8 November 9.15-12.15
WebLearn: Surveys, Tuesday 23 October 2.00-5.00 
Plagiarism: How to avoid it (for students), Friday 9 November 9.15 – 12.15
Plagiarism: Turnitin Fundamentals, Friday 16 November 9.15-12.15
WebLearn: Making your site work, Friday 23 November 9.15-12.15

Lunch time sessions (all 12:30-13.30):
WebLearn: Using Mobile Oxford, Week 3, Mon 22 October
Plagiarism: WebLearn and Turnitin, Week 4, Mon 29 October
Plagiarism: Interpreting Originality Reports using Turnitin, Week 7, Mon 19 November

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WebLearn User Group meeting: Tues 25 Sept 14:00

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Jill Fresen

Come along to the next meeting of the WebLearn User Group, to be held at IT Services (formerly OUCS), 13 Banbury Road, on Tuesday 25 September from 2 to 4pm, followed by our traditional cream tea.

Booking is required: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TOVD

Agenda:

Claire Aland (Dept of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics): Behind the scenes – supporting Anatomy teaching using WebLearn
Tim Kirtley (Librarian, Wadham College): Online exhibition and virtual tour of Wadham College Library
Liz Masterman (IT Services): Feedback on WebLearn from the Student Digital Experience (DIGE) project
Adam Marshall (WebLearn team, OUCS): WebLearn updates

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Old WebLearn now unavailable.

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Adam Marshall

Old WebLearn (aka Bodington) has now been decommissioned. This happened on the morning of 18 Sept 2012. The service is now unavailable.
See Melissa Highton’s blog post: ‘Bodington VLE retires’ giving the full story of the history of Bodington and Oxford’s involvement with it.

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Finding images for use in WebLearn

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Adam Marshall

Most of the images that can be found on the web will have some sort of copyright attached to them. If you want to use an image on the web, in a Power Point presentation or in WebLearn then you must first ascertain what the copyright allows you to do; this is necessary even if the image is used in WebLearn behind authentication.

The bottom line is that must always read the copyright terms and add attribution where it is required. I always add attribution even if it is not required as it seems like a nice thing to do – it also comes in useful if you need a different version of the image at a higher resolution.

I am indebted to Owen McKnight for pointing me towards Wikimedia Commons as a source of images and icons that can be used on web pages or in presentations, within the terms of their copyright licences. These licences are normally Creative Commons and make it easier for you to understand what you can do with the images. There’s also heaps of other media files such as sounds and videos.

Prior to this I have always used Flickr – using the advanced search facility and selecting images with Creative Commons licensing usually gives a large number of suitable images.

Damion Young from Medical Sciences has supplied an additional resource, Google: use the advanced search and in the Usage Rights drop down list select ‘Free to use, share or modify, even commercially’.

Dave Baker suggests ‘Creative Commons Search which is a meta search engine for CC items.

As if to illustrate my point, here’s a photo of some happy onions that I found on Wikimedia Commons. This photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

File:Happy Onions.jpg

“Happy onions” by Civertan (http://www.civertan.hu/) is licensed under CC BY SA 2.5

Links

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New WebLearn case studies

Posted on September 10, 2012 by Jill Fresen

The following new case studies have recently been uploaded to the WebLearn Guidance site (weblearn.ox.ac.uk/info > Showcase > Case Studies using WebLearn):

  • An organic approach to an intranet (Wulf Forrester-Barker, NDORMS)
  • Student voting: using the WebLearn Polls tool (Janet Smart, Saiid Business School)
  • Using WebLearn tools to improve teaching practice (Imogen Goold, Law Faculty)
  • Electronic tools for teaching (Dave Waters, Dept of Earth Sciences)
  • Using WebLearn to support tutors and students (Dept of Biochemistry)
  • Supporting first year teaching: Physics tutorials and WebLearn (Paul Jeffreys, IT Services and Keble College)

The LTG student intern, Alexandra Paddock, filled the LTG Case Study blog with over 25 new case studies of exemplary use of technology for teaching, learning, research and outreach. With Josh Carr, she has also created four new video case studies, available on the LTG YouTube Case Study playlist (and oxford podcasts):
 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6CDCFEF3102EFE44

Thank you to all our case study subjects. If you would like to share what you are doing with WebLearn, please let us know at weblearn@it.ox.ac.uk

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WebLearn unavailable on 25 September 2012 7-9am

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Adam Marshall

It is planned to upgrade WebLearn to version 2.8-ox3 on Tuesday 25 September 2012 7-9am. There will be no service during this period.

In addition, the ‘Turnitin via WebLearn Assignments Tool’ service will be unavailable from 6pm on Monday 24th September probably until lunchtime on 25th September – we are not exactly sure how long the migration will take.

This migration is necessary as we need to migrate to a newer version of the Turnitin API. This migration will result in an improved Turnitin service via WebLearn with more improvements to come in the future.

Any assignments submitted during this period which are routed via Turnitin will be placed in a queue and will be submitted once the migration has completed. This will mean that Turnitin reports will take much longer than usual to be generated.

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WebLearn User Group meeting: Tuesday 25 September

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Adam Marshall

WebLearn User Group meeting: Tuesday 25 September 14:00-16:00 (followed by cream tea),

Venue: IT Services (formerly OUCS), 13 Banbury Road.

Presentations from:

  • Claire Aland (Dept of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics): Behind the scenes – supporting Anatomy teaching using WebLearn
  • Liz Masterman (IT Services): Feedback on WebLearn from the Student Digital Experience (DIGE) project
  • Tim Kirtley (Librarian, Wadham College): Online exhibition and virtual tour of Wadham College Library

Booking is required.

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Release Notes – WebLearn – Version 2.8-ox2 – 21 August 2012

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Adam Marshall

New WebLearn was upgraded on 21st August 2012 to version 2.8-ox2. For more detailed information please looked at the detailed release notes.

Improvements

  • Arrange site now allows you to delete the site, this should remove the problem of there being lots of ‘Missing site’ messages
  • ‘All logged in users’ group has been removed, please use ‘All Oxford users’ instead and list external users by name when setting up site access.
  • Contribute role can no longer remove a site from the hierarchy
  • ‘Show all my sites’ link now displayed in drop box
  • New version of sign-up tool used

Bug Fixes

  • Sign-up tool: can now export data pertaining to a series of recurrent meetings in a single file
  • iPads no longer directed to non-functioning ‘PDA Portal’
  • SES tool: Skills categories and Research Methods headings now swapped around on Module Search page
  • SES tool: automated reminders to supervisors about outstanding approvals are now being sent
  • External account email messages now have a sender and from address
  • Site duplication: Web Content links to documents within the source site are now replaced with new site ID
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