Call for Participation – WebLearn Polls via m.ox (Mobile Oxford)

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Adam Marshall

Have you ever wished your students could respond in class using personal voting systems (‘clickers’), but never quite got around to trying it? Well now you don’t need any special technology – the students can answer questions on their internet-enabled phones, and learn from each other while sharing phones, if necessary.

OUCS has launched Mobile Oxford (m.ox.ac.uk) (beta) which allows anyone with an internet-enabled mobile phone to access Oxford podcasts, certain WebLearn tools, or information on library holdings, bus times and the weather (amongst other things).

We are running a pilot project using the WebLearn Polls tool via the mobile platform, to enhance and support student learning.

Are you interested (or could you recommend any lecturers in your dept/division) in participating in our pilot project using the WebLearn Polls tool via student mobile phones during a lecture or small class? Please follow this link if you would like to participate in the pilot project:

  1. https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal/join/d477b60b-4e5f-4359-81ef-e85fdbb0054e.

This will enable you to join the Mobile Polls Pilot site in WebLearn and keep up to date with developments.

A prize will be offered for the person who gets the most people to respond via a mobile phone to a single poll in Hilary term. We will collaborate with all participants in the pilot project to write up your case study for the OUCS collection of teaching and learning case studies, as well as for possible inclusion in the next JISC book of case studies documenting innovative practice.

Links

  1. m.ox
  2. m.ox phone interface (preview)
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Dates for courses this term

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Adam Marshall

Dear WebLearn Users

Here are the course dates for WebLearn courses during Michaelmas Term 2010. Note that bookings are essential and open 30 days in advance of each course: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/

There is now a regular course on using the Survey tool in WebLearn, as well as a new course offered in conjunction with the Oxford Learning Institute: Learning and Teaching using technology tools, which is aimed at academic staff members.

WebLearn: Fundamentals

Thursday 28 Oct 2-5 pm (week 3)

Thursday 25 Nov 2-5 pm (week 7)

Tuesday 7 Dec 9:15-12:15 (week 9)

WebLearn: Migrating your content

Monday 1 Nov 2-5 pm (week 4);

Thursday 2 Dec 2-5 pm (week 8)

WebLearn: Making your site work

Wednesday 3 Nov 9:15-12:15 am (week 4)

WebLearn: Surveys

Monday 8 Nov 2-5 pm (week 5)

Learning and Teaching: using technology tools

Wednesday 24 Nov 9:15-12:15 (week 7)

Plagiarism: WebLearn and Turnitin

Thursday 18 Nov 12:30-13:30 (week 6)

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Sakai and JASIG Foundations To Pursue Merger

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Adam Marshall

Early this year, Jasig, the parent organization for uPortal, CAS, Bedework and other open source software serving higher education, and the Sakai Foundation, which supports the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment, formed Board-level groups to examine ways the two organizations could collaborate more closely. These Strategic Alliance Committees, led by Jasig Chair Aaron Godert, and Sakai Foundation Chair Josh Baron, met in New York in September to consolidate the outcomes of their discussions and bring proposals to their respective Boards.

See: http://sakaiproject.org/news/jasig-and-sakai-foundations-pursue-merger

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Old WebLearn user importer now fixed

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Adam Marshall

The problems with old WebLearn have now been fixed. New students should now be able to access their material.

The problem related to the format of the data which is used as a basis for the creation of accounts for new users. Our thanks go to the OUCS Registration team for fixing the problem so swiftly.

New WebLearn was not affected.

16.45pm Thursday 7th October 2010

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Become a member of the Sakai Foundation Board

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Adam Marshall

A note from Ian Dolphin (Executive Director, Sakai Foundation). Please contact the central team if you are interested:

Over the course of October and November the Sakai Foundation will be holding elections for two positions on the Foundation Board. In line with Foundation by-laws, Josh Baron, of Marist College, ends his first three year elected term this December, and Jutta Trevinarus, of the Ontario College of Art and Design, ends her second term. I would like to offer my thanks, on behalf of the community, for their leadership in supporting Sakai over the years.

Anyone may be nominated for one of the two positions, although we would appreciate your best efforts to discover the willingness of anyone you may nominate to stand. Please forward your nomination to Mary Miles – mmiles@sakaifoundation.org – by midnight Monday October 18th (US Eastern Time).

Voting will take place between October 30th and November 12th, and will be open to Sakai Foundation Institutional Representatives. Further details of candidates, together with details of how to vote will be mailed to Institutional Representatives in advance of the voting period. The availability of candidates details will be notified on this list.

I would remind you that Board members may be elected for a maximum of two consecutive terms. The Sakai Foundation by-laws may be found at

  1. http://sakaiproject.org/foundation-bylaws
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Survey tool now available

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Adam Marshall

survey-group-coloured

The WebLearn Survey tool (released as a Beta) can be used to design and manage electronic questionnaires to be delivered on-line. Surveys can be created to gather data for research purposes, general data gathering, or for course, lecturer or tutor evaluation, feedback and review.

Questionnaire templates can be created from scratch, or existing templates can be copied and modified. Various question types are available, such as Lickert scales, multiple choice with a single answer, multiple choice with multiple answers, and free text questions. Detailed settings control open and close dates, how participants access the survey, and who may view the results.

Links

  1. Surveys Step-By-Step guide
  2. Surveys  Least You Need To Know Guide
  3. Reserve a space  on the “WebLearn: Surveys” course
  4. Survey tool case study
  5. Comparison of survey tools
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SunGuard become Sakai partners

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Adam Marshall

“Malvern, Pa., September 28, 2010 — SunGard Higher Education and rSmart today announced a partnership regarding the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE), an enterprise community-source teaching, learning and research collaboration system. The partnership provides colleges and universities with comprehensive support to adopt the rSmart Sakai CLE as well as integration with select SunGard Higher Education solutions.”

SunGuard of course sell the ‘Banner’ student records system and are major players in the world of UK HE student systems. This partnership can only be a good thing for Sakai (and by implication, WebLearn).

More info: http://www.rsmart.com/node/2161

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University Skills Group online skills courses now hosted in WebLearn

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Adam Marshall

The WebLearn team has been working closely with the University Skills Group (USG – formerly the Graduate Skills Advisory Group) to move the former ‘Online courses’ (now called ‘Career Development Skills’) into new WebLearn. The courses were previously hosted within a different VLE service (provided by Continuing Education) which required a special username and password.

plag-course

In addition to being moved to WebLearn which is protected by Oxford Single Sign On credentials, the courses have been updated to the latest versions. They now employ the WebLearn Tests tool for quizzes and the Survey tool for users to provide feedback. The conversion was a major piece of work which involved not only programming changes to Sakai tools, but also integration with the existing content packages.

There are 14 courses covering Avoidance of Plagiarism, Career Planning, Conferences, Entrepreneurship, Ethics, Intellectual Property, Project Management, Publishing, and Managing Your Supervisor.

Although the courses are aimed at graduate students and researchers, they are available to all Oxford users. Access them via the Skills Hub link on the WebLearn Welcome Page (then select Research Skills Toolkit), or go to this direct link: https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal/hierarchy/skills/generic

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WebLearn User Group – 29 Sep 2010, 2-4 in OUCS

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Adam Marshall

You are invited to join us at OUCS for our next meeting to hear about the latest updates to the system and share ideas about WebLearn practice:

NEXT MEETING of the WebLearn User Group: Michaelmas Term 2010

Wednesday 29 September 2-4 pm, followed by our traditional cream tea Booking is essential (and is now open)


Agenda:

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Video tutorial guides for site managers

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Adam Marshall

The WebLearn team employed a student intern over the summer to produce video screencast tutorials demonstrating the use of some of the most important tools in WebLearn. The 18 videos are now available on the WebLearn Guidance site listed as “Video tutorials” under the “Guides and tutorials” section.

Video tutorials provide users with short ‘just-in-time’ visual demonstrations of particular tools. The topics have been subdivided into short sections covering two or three tasks within a particular tool, and lasting only two or three minutes.

We decided for reasons of accessibility to produce the videos using written scripts only. The script can then be read out by screen readers, and hearing-impaired users are not at a disadvantage. At a later stage, voice-overs may be added, if time permits.

The tools that have been covered:

  1. Site info (manage site)
  2. Resources (share documents)
  3. Home tool (front page)
  4. Web Content link
  5. WYSIWYG HTML editor

Other tools will be covered later.

Links

  1. index of videos
  2. guidance site
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