WebLearn and Turnitin Courses and User Groups: Hilary Term 2018

Posted on January 8, 2018 by Jill Fresen

IT Services offers a variety of taught courses to support the use of WebLearn and the plagiarism awareness software Turnitin. Course books for the formal courses (3-hour sessions) 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.

WebLearn 3-hour courses:

Byte-sized lunch time sessions:

These focus on particular tools with plenty of time for questions and discussion

Plagiarism awareness courses (Turnitin):

User Group meetings:

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Write your own tools and utilities using WebLearn’s Entity Broker REST interface

Posted on December 21, 2017 by Adam Marshall

Entity Broker is a REST web service interface to Sakai. It is self-documenting, see https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/direct/describe, but as you will see, some of the documentation is somewhat lacking.

I stumbled across a blog post that Damion Young’s made about WebLearn (Sakai’s) Entity Broker, he has very kindly filled is some of the missing pieces of the jigsaw.

It is entirely possible to write useful utilities using a combination of JavaScript, HTML and calls to Entity Broker, indeed, this is how the original Mobile Oxford offered a mobile interface to WebLearn. (The current Mobile Oxford no longer offers such an interface.)

Some of the most recent WebLearn utilities / dashboards have been written in JavaScript, examples,

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New Student Dashboard: Collating All Recorded Lectures

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Adam Marshall

At the start of December we added a new personalised dashboard that displays a personalised list of all your sites / courses containing ‘Recorded Lectures’.

To access your dashboard you must first login to WebLearn, click on your avatar at the top right of the screen and click on ‘Recorded Lectures’ – this is the same whether on a desktop, mobile or tablet. (You can set your avatar photo by clicking on Profile in this same menu.)

The next screen will display your dashboard – it may take a couple of seconds to load depending on how many sites you belong to.

The dashboard will show a list of site titles which, if clicked, will take you to the site’s Overview page. (Note that you must be a member of a site for it to display in the list.)

The dashboard may also show a direct link to the ‘Recorded Lectures’ within a site. Click on this link to display a list of all the recordings for your course. Note that this will open in a new browser tab.

Unfortunately it is not currently possible to highlight which of your sites contain newly uploaded videos. We realise that would be very useful but it is not currently technically possible.

We hope you will find it useful to be able to access all your existing recorded lectures via this dashboard.

 

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Using WebLearn to aid student induction

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Adam Marshall

Lettitia Derrington (Department for Continuing Education) received a project grant to develop a WebLearn feature that could be made available across the University to support the online induction of postgraduate students. http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/adamweblearn/2015/11/university-teaching-awards-2015/

Lettitia built an ‘Induction Lessons Tool’, made entirely with the standard Lessons Tool in WebLearn. It was trialled within the CPD Centre, Department for Continuing Education in 2016-17 (with eight programme sites), offered to other teams within ContEd in 2017-18 (four additional sites) and is now in a format that could be rolled out to the wider University.

We asked Lettitia to describe how she customised WebLearn in this way to meet the needs of tutors and students in ContEd.

The aim was to create an induction area for postgraduate students as an alternative to, or to complement face-to-face induction activities. We wanted to provide a sense of progression through the various steps that students need to take and to make the information visually appealing and the content engaging. We also needed to ensure that we provided the essential information that departments have to provide for inductions as well as signposting useful information from the wider University.

I used the Lessons Tool to create a grid layout and to embed images and videos easily. It also allows me to embed generic files held on a central site, so that updating the information can be carried out in one location with the changes automatically updating all individual sites.

I hope that describing the different areas with a question – ‘Have you…..?’, emphasises the importance of the tasks, which is substantiated by quotes from previous students describing how important/useful it is.

I used colour on the main boxes as a differentiating factor, and I have carried the colour coding through to the subpages. I don’t think that it is very obvious to the students, but the subpages are divided into white and coloured boxes. The white information contains the essential information that departments have to provide, whilst the coloured boxes contain additional information to enhance the student experience.

Feedback from students has been good. The Induction section has been very useful as a resource to help them to do everything they need to be ready. All in all, it has had an immensely positive impact in supporting the delivery and administration of ContEd courses.

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Usage Satistics

Posted on November 20, 2017 by Adam Marshall

Every year we traditionally present the number of unique logins in Week 1 of Trinity Term. This can be viewed as a rough measure of the growth of a service. As you can see, apart from one year, growth has been steadily increasing  year on year.

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WebLearn Tests tool

Posted on October 11, 2017 by Jill Fresen

A powerful way for your students to test their understanding…

WebLearn offers a tool called ‘Tests’, which allows tutors and lecturers to create pools of questions and assessments based on selecting questions to present to students. Students can take the test in their own time and benefit from hints and feedback provided by the tutor when creating the questions.

The following questions types are possible:

The process of creating a test involves the following steps:

  1. Create questions in a question pool – options are available to provide overall feedback or hints
  2. Build an assessment by selecting questions to present (either sequentially or randomly)
  3. Test drive the assessment (test) as a student
  4. Set options such as open and close dates, time limits, number of attempts etc.
  5. Publish the test for students to take

The Tests tools keeps track of all attempts and provides a report showing student names, start and finish time, and scores. The data can be exported to Excel for further analysis.

Further information:

Contact us

If you would like to discuss possibilities for using the Tests tool in your courses, contact our team of learning technologists at weblearn@it.ox.ac.uk

 

 

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WebLearn and Turnitin Courses and User Groups: Michaelmas Term 2017

Posted on October 9, 2017 by Jill Fresen

IT Services offers a variety of taught courses to support the use of WebLearn and the plagiarism awareness software Turnitin. Course books for the formal courses (3-hour sessions) 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.

WebLearn 3-hour courses:

Byte-sized lunch time sessions:

These focus on particular tools with plenty of time for questions and discussion

Plagiarism awareness courses (Turnitin):

User Group meetings:

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New Features in WebLearn 11-ox7

Posted on October 5, 2017 by Adam Marshall

A new version of WebLearn (version 11-ox7) was released on Tuesday 3 October 2017. The main ‘headline’ is that authentication has now switched to Shibboleth in anticipation of the removal of the WebAUTH service. Other improvements have been made to Reading Lists, the Peer Assessment process and Anonymous Submission sites.

Here is a list of the main improvements:

  • Change the authentication method from WebAuth to Shibboleth
  • The HTML WYSIWYG editor now has an “Insert HTML5 Media” toolbar button

  • One can now embed HTML pages containing Font Awesome icons within Lessons pages
  • On a public site in the Lessons tool, the resources folder listing is now correctly shown for non-logged in users
  • In Lessons, formatting improvements have been made to the calendar event pop-up and Forums and Announcement widgets change colour when the page’s colour scheme is modified
  • Reading Lists: links to journal articles now open in a new tab
  • NHS users can now post messages to the Email Archive
  • Additional ‘Joinable Sites’ options have been enabled – you can now specify whether Joinable Sites can be joined by any logged in user or just by users with an Oxford SSO account.

Anonymous Essay Submission & Assignments Tool

  • On Anonymous Submissions (AS) sites, one cannot now allow Students to see their TII reports – the option is greyed out
  • A “reveal assignment on this date” option has been added, this means an assignment can be set up but students will not see it in the list until the “visibility date” is reached
  • If peer assessment already selected then the configuration options are shown by default
  • The default End date of the Peer Assessment period is 7 days after Accept Until date

Dynamic Lookup of Users

As part of the VLE review requirements gathering exercise, it was suggested that there should be an ‘auto-complete’ feature when adding users to a site. we have now implemented this new feature and we would like a small number of volunteers to test-drive this new facility. Please get in touch if you would like to help out.

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Lecture Capture (Replay) Forum – Wed 27 Sep PM

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Adam Marshall

From the Replay Team

We will be holding the annual Replay lecture capture user forum at IT Services, Banbury Road on Wednesday 27th September from 14:00-17:30. There will be a buffet lunch beforehand from 13:00-14:00.

The forum is designed to bring Oxford staff up-to-date with the latest developments of the Replay lecture capture service and is an ideal opportunity to meet other Replay users across the university.

Replay lecture capture service: http://help.it.ox.ac.uk/replay

Both academic and IT/AV/administrative staff are welcome to attend. The event is free, but please book if you plan to attend so that we can correctly assess numbers for lunch: https://oxford.imparando.com/accessplan/clientinput/course/coursebooker.aspx?coursedateid=42554

There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion, along with a series of brief talks, including:

  • How to get started using Replay
  • What’s new with the Replay service and the Panopto software
  • Case-studies from departments
  • Guest speakers from other UK institutions
  • The VLE review and new Panopto integration options, including embedding
  • and more…

There will also be a series of training sessions throughout the next term: Dates to be confirmed and booking links will be posted at http://help.it.ox.ac.uk/replay/trainingsessions

As always, send any enquiries to the team at replay@it.ox.ac.uk

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Innovative use of WebLearn – Oxford Online Programme in Sleep Medicine

Posted on July 7, 2017 by Jill Fresen

In 2014 Oxford University approved a brand new postgraduate programme in Sleep Medicine. The two-year online programme leads to a postgraduate diploma (PGDip) or a Master of Science degree (MSc).

The programme is hosted by the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute (SCNi), at the University of Oxford which “brings together world leading expertise in basic and human sleep and circadian research and in the evaluation and management of sleep disorders” (Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, 2016).

Learning technologists in Medical Sciences and IT Services were involved in building a customised portal and customised online course components in WebLearn. In tandem with the course development team, the learning technologists have tried hard to design a programme that attempts to imitate the face-to-face, personalised Oxford learning experience.

This approach is achieved through small student groups, moderated online discussions, live webinars and collaboration with subject specialists to reflect the most recent research findings. It was particularly important to employ aspects of personalisation, e.g. showing students only material that is relevant to them, at the appropriate time (depending on current module, week etc.).

In the structure of the online modules, the WebLearn ‘Lessons tool’ was used to offer the pedagogical advantage of tailoring a learning pathway for the students, with integrated content, relevant activities and assessment opportunities.

The customised interface and personalisation features were realised by taking advantage of WebLearn’s ‘behind-the-scenes’ RESTful web services API and rendered using a popular open source JavaScript framework called Angular 2. A very modest amount of development work was undertaken by the WebLearn team to make this approach possible.

 

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