WebLearn User Group – Hilary Term, 21 March 2012

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Adam Marshall

WebLearn User Group – Hilary Term, 21 March 2012

Please book at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TOVD if you plan to attend.

  • Welcome and introductions 14:00 – 14:10
  • Presentations from WebLearn users 14:10 – 15:20
    • Damion Young and Jon Mason (Medical Sciences Learning Technologies) –
      Adapting WebLearn for the Biomedical Sciences programme and other tips
    • Lettitia Derrington (Continuing Education) – Supporting Continuing Education
      programmes and modules using WebLearn
    • Stephen Eyre (ITLP team, OUCS) – How to use Audacity to record and upload
      audio content and feedback into WebLearn
  • Questions and discussion 15:20 – 15:30
  • Fawei Geng (WebLearn team, OUCS): WebLearn templates 15:30 – 15:50
  • Adam Marshall (WebLearn team, OUCS): WebLearn updates 15:50 – 16:00
  • Refreshments downstairs 16:00

Date of next meeting

Early July, Trinity term 2012 – speakers required!

Useful Links

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WebLearn and Turnitin – meetings and courses

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Adam Marshall

WebLearn User Group Meeting: Wednesday 21 March 2012, 14:00-16:00 at OUCS (followed by tea and cake)

At the next meeting of the WebLearn User Group users from Medical Sciences, the Said Business School and the Department of Continuing Education will share with us how they use WebLearn to support teaching. We will have a demonstration of how quick and easy it is to record your own audio files and deliver them via WebLearn. We will also launch our first three pre-populated WebLearn template sites. More details at https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/info/eas

Booking is required

WebLearn and Turnitin courses in Trinity Term

Look out for the following WebLearn and Turnitin courses which will be scheduled for Trinity Term. The courses are all aimed at staff members, not students (unless they are postgraduate students with teaching responsibilities). We encourage academic staff in particular to come and experience how WebLearn can be used to enrich the teaching and learning environment. Places are limited and bookings are required via the links provided. Bookings open 30 days in advance, but you can express an interest in a course and receive a reminder when booking opens.

3 hour sessions

Lunch time sessions:

  1. WebLearn: using Mobile Oxford
  2. Plagiarism: WebLearn and Turnitin
  3. Plagiarism: Interpreting Originality Reports using Turnitin
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OxCAP Project: All about XCRI

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Adam Marshall

The OxCAP project is a JISC funded initiative which will provide an XCRI-CAP XML feed of graduate training opportunities at Oxford.

When complete, this will mean that graduate students will have a ‘one-stop-shop’ (in WebLearn) of available training modules with a search facility and links to book a place.

This is how JISC describe XCRI-CAP:

“XCRI-CAP is the UK standard for describing course marketing information. It shows how to structure the information, defines and names the data components and specifies the types of data permitted within each component. Its purpose is to enable information about courses and other kinds of learning opportunity to be shared efficiently between the computerised information systems used by learning providers and organisations collecting, aggregating and publishing information about courses. It is recommended by the UK government and is generally applicable across all sectors of UK education and training.”

JISC have provided a video explaining all about XCRI-CAP: http://vimeo.com/36233873

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WebLearn podcast is supremely popular!

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Adam Marshall

Rev Dr James Robson ‘Supporting Tutorials: WebLearn’ is the most popular podcast on Oxford Podcasts this week and has had 60 likes on YouTube.

Revd Dr James Robson is a Winner of the OxTALENT 2011 Award for ‘Best Use of WebLearn to Support a Course or Programme of Study’.

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WebLearn report: Oct 2011- Jan 2012

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Adam Marshall

Period: Oct 2011- Jan 2012

Software

New WebLearn was upgraded in Jan 2012 – it now stands at v2.6-0x10. For more detailed information please looked at the relevant blog post:

We will move to Sakai 2.8 at Easter.

Improvements & Bug Fixes

  • The owner of a template can be changed. This is the most frequently requested feature enhancement and will effectively allow the authoring of Survey Templates to be a collaborative process. Templates can now easily be passed from user to user.
  • When a template is a copied, an annotated duplicate of each individual original question now appears in the owner’s question bank
  • Events from merged calendars are now part of the ‘subscribe’ (Private URL) link
  • One can subscribe to a calendar via the synoptic view of the schedule
  • There is a publicly accessible Graduate Training WebLearn site containing most courses (link from front page)
  • Training on this site can now be categorised according to the Researcher Development Framework
  • Two-factor authentication (2FA) went live on 24th Jan, users must register to use 2FA sites and sites can only be created via the Examinations and Assessment team. It is now possible to use SAML2 to protect a WebLearn site with an extra “password” which is sent to a registered user as an SMS. Work has been undertaken to ensure that there are no “back doors” into such a site, eg, webDAV access has been disabled.

Training and Guidance

The revamped WebLearn Guidance Site went live just before Christmas. We are planning several new courses:

  • WebLearn: Assessment and Feedback
  • Plagiarism: Turnitin Fundamentals
  • Plagiarism: Interpreting Originality Reports using Turnitin
  • Plagiarism: Information skills for students
  • Plagiarism: Tackling and managing plagiarism in the internet age

Projects

The Student Enrolment System II finished at Christmas.

The OXAM Migration project formally finished at Christmas – the software is currently undergoing user acceptance testing.  This replicates and improves upon the incumbent OXAM service and is now deployed within WebLearn.

The Nexus-WebLearn integration project has made slow progress, next on the hit list is insertion of (Tutorial) sign-up events in personal calendars.

The WebLearn team has now started work for the Blavatnik School of Government (BSG) as part of their project to provide their students with an iPad App interface to their learning material.

The OxCAP Phase I project was successful and now OxCAP Phase II has started (in January) and will run until March 2013. This is a JISC funded initiative to expose data (as a public XML feed) about graduate training courses at Oxford. OxCAP II addresses local needs: we will develop an internal protected feed, a new WebLearn tool which will allow a search of all graduate skills training courses at Oxford to be performed, a Share Point site for entering courses data and a JavaScript library to allow basic searching on institutional websites. This project offers a solution to a problem that students (and staff) have been demanding for a while now; this project has the explicit backing of the PVC for Education and the Registrar.

Staff

A new member of staff, Roger Pearson, will started work in the WebLearn team on Nov 1st. He is working on the “assessment and feedback” project known as SIPA, he will be reviewing and developing our support of Turnitin, investigating GradeMark and PeerMark (which will also be piloted), and recommending improvements to the WebLearn Assignments tool.

A new Java developer Colin Hebert has now started, he will also work on the SIPA project but will initially do general WebLearn and BSG development work.

Upcoming

  • Improvements to Sign-up tool
  • Site templates facility – it will be possible to base a new site upon a selection made from a choice of templates each tailored for a specific situation and each containing their own help and guidance.
  • Integration of the Behaviour Composer and Epidemic Game Maker (modelling tools) into WebLearn using IMS Basic LTI (see: http://m.modelling4all.org/)
  • Move to Sakai 2.8 (incl. collapsible LHS menus, academic network creation, improved WYSIWYG editor plus lots more)
  • Sign-up tool enhancements (categories, change organiser, auto create groups, prevent withdrawing when closed, better export)
  • Formal announcement of OXAM database of past exam papers service.
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Supporting Tutorials Using WebLearn

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Adam Marshall

The tutorial system lies at the heart of Oxford’s educational experience, to further this practice LTG have produced a video case study entitled WebLearn: Supporting Tutorials.

Supporting tutorial practices through the use of technology can enable both tutors and students to interact with each other and relevant content, before and after the tutorial sessions. Revd Dr James Robson is Senior Tutor in Theology at Wycliffe Hall. He has used WebLearn for tutoring and supporting his students in their learning and formation.

For more information, look at the LTG case studies blog.

Revd Dr James Robson is a Winner of the OxTALENT 2011 Award for ‘Best Use of WebLearn to Support a Course or Programme of Study’.

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Humanities Student Enrolment System now working

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Adam Marshall

A patch was applied to WebLearn this morning (17 Jan 2012) which fixed the teething problems that Humanities students will have experienced when trying to use the Student Enrolment System over the last 7 days

We apologise for any inconvenience that these issues may have caused.

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Instability problems (hopefully) fixed

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Adam Marshall

We hope that this morning’s reconfiguration and restart of WebLearn will stop the problems of instability that have dogged WebLearn over the last week.

We apologise for the unscheduled breaks in service and really hope that these are a thing of the past.

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WebLearn and Turnitin Courses Hilary Term 2012

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Adam Marshall

A variety of taught courses are offered by OUCS free of charge, to support the use of WebLearn and (as from this term) the plagiarism prevention and detection software Turnitin. In most cases, the course books can also be downloaded for self study. The courses are all aimed at staff members, not students. Places are limited and bookings are required via the links provided. Bookings open 30 days in advance, but you can express an interest in a course and receive a reminder to book when booking opens.

WebLearn: Fundamentals

Thursday 26 January 2-5 pm (week 2)

Tuesday 28 February 2-5 pm (week 7)

WebLearn is a web-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), which provides tools to support teaching and learning, assessment, collaboration, communication and sharing of resources. This course is at a basic level, aimed at staff members with little or no experience of the system.

WebLearn: Making your site work

Monday 30 January 2-5 pm (week 3)

After having attended the WebLearn Fundamentals course, and/or having used new WebLearn for some time, users need to know more about the planning, structure and design of WebLearn sites and the effective use of WebLearn tools.

WebLearn: Tools to support Teaching and Learning New!

Tuesday 14 February 2-5 pm (week 5)

This course focuses on WebLearn tools for tutors and lecturers to use in communicating with students, arranging tutorial sessions, conducting course evaluation surveys, providing reading lists, organising learning materials, and tracking site usage.

Plagiarism: Turnitin Fundamentals New!

Thursday 16 February 9.15 am – 12.15 pm (week 5)

Turnitin is an online software application which compares matches of documents and is primarily used to detect instances of plagiarism. This course, aimed at new users of Turnitin, goes through the process of setting up the software and submitting papers to it.

WebLearn: Surveys

Tuesday 21 February 2-5 pm (week 6)

WebLearn Surveys (beta) can be used by staff members to design and manage electronic questionnaires to be delivered online. Surveys can be created for general data gathering purposes, or for course, lecturer or tutor evaluation. They can be delivered to WebLearn site members, ad-hoc groups or the general public.

WebLearn User Group

Wednesday 21 March 2-5pm (week 10)

This is an invitation for WebLearn users to meet with members of the OUCS WebLearn team to give feedback and share ideas and practices regarding the use of WebLearn. Ensure that your voice and ideas are heard and shared in order to inform the ongoing development and support of the system.

Lunch time sessions:

Plagiarism: WebLearn and Turnitin

Wednesday 15 February 12.30-13.30pm

The Turnitin plagiarism detection service identifies pieces of text in students’ work that match with existing electronic texts. It can be used to screen assessed essays and also for formative purposes to improve student academic writing skills. The WebLearn Assignments tool is integrated with Turnitin.

WebLearn: using Mobile Oxford

Wednesday 22 February 12.30-13.30pm

This course demonstrates the award-winning Mobile Oxford platform (m.Ox) and a selection of WebLearn tools that can be accessed via a mobile device. Participants will have the opportunity to use their mobile devices to try out various WebLearn tools via the mobile platform.

Plagiarism: Interpreting Originality Reports using Turnitin New!

Wednesday 29 February 12.30-13.30pm

What do the percentage matches mean? What about direct citations? Should I include bibliographies in the similarity index? This lunchtime session covers Turnitin Originality Reports and how to interpret the results.

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New WebLearn was upgraded on 10th January 2012 to version 2.6-ox10

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Adam Marshall

New WebLearn was upgraded on 10th January 2012 to version 2.6-ox10. We had intended to move to 2.8-ox1 but unfortunately have had to delay this again, this time until the Easter 2012 release. Many apologies for the delay.

Improvements

Surveys Beta

  • The owner of a template can be changed. This is the most frequently requested feature enhancement and will effectively allow the authoring of Survey Templates to be a collaborative process. Templates can now easily be passed from user to user.
  • Appropriate options in the ‘Question-level settings’ on the ‘Assign Survey’ page are now greyed out if the respondent does not have to login.
  • Improved error message when survey assignees do not have a WebLearn account
  • When a template is a copied, an annotated duplicate of the original questions now appears in the owner’s question bank

Calendar Subscriptions

  • Explanatory text has been added about subscribing to one’s My Workspace calendar
  • Events from merged calendars are now part of the subscribe link
  • One can subscribe via the synoptic view of the schedule

Student Enrolment System

  • It is now possible to receive a daily digest of all email messages
  • Students can be approved by clicking in a link in an email (rather than having to visit the SES site)
  • There is a publicly accessible Graduate Training WebLearn site containing most courses
  • Modules can now be categorised according to the Researcher Development Framework
  • It is possible to require ‘sign-off’ from a department’s finance officer, so-called ‘third-level acceptance’
  • Modules can be set to not require supervisor approval
  • We have fixed a number of minor bugs.
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