The esteemed Chuck Severance (former Sakai CEO) has put together a video about IMS LTI.
This is a technology that will appear in WebLearn next year and which allows departments or colleges to integrate their own tools into WebLearn. Information such as username and WebLearn context (ie site) can be passed from WebLearn into the departmental tool.
If you want more information about how this will work then please contact the WebLearn team via the usual route.
The video
These icons are all available in the following folder:
There is a handy ‘crib sheet’ containing all the images; this is useful in finding the name of the image:
Here is an example of use within a WebLearn site:
<img alt="Forgotten Password icon"
src="/access/content/public/images/silk/key.png" />
The icons are freely available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 licence and are known as ‘Silk Icons’. The original download is available from:
Recent discussion on the Sakai mailing lists has highlighted three interesting free content creation systems
Here’s what their websites say:
“MyUdutu™ is a FREE web-based tool which provides a user friendly platform to create highly interactive elearning courses quickly and easily. Anyone can design, build and implement online training courses without any prior technological expertise.”
“The eXe project developed a freely available Open Source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. Resources authored in eXe can be exported in IMS Content Package, SCORM 1.2, or IMS Common Cartridge formats or as simple self-contained web pages.”
“Xerte is a fully-featured e-learning development environment for creating rich interactivity. Xerte is aimed at developers of interactive content who will create sophisticated content with some scripting, and Xerte can be used to extend the capabilities of Xerte Online Toolkits with new tools for content authors.”
From the latest Sakai newsletter: “The next annual Sakai conference is only 11.5 months away. Mark the dates on your calendar now. We will meet in Berlin at the Ramada Hotel Berlin – Alexanderplatz on June 14 – 16, with pre-conference sessions on June 13.”
As Sakai Foundation members, Oxford University employees get a discount on the registration fee.
The original article has been removed and has been replaced by the standard copyright notice for display beside public photocopiers and scanners.
This may be useful as well: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/services/copy/copyright
The University holds a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) which permits the photocopying and scanning of limited extracts from most copyright-protected books, journals, law reports, conference proceedings and magazines for use by students and the course tutor on registered taught courses and non-credit-bearing short courses.
The proportion of a work that may be photocopied and/or scanned consists of:
One whole chapter of a book
One whole article from a journal issue
A short story or poem (not exceeding 10 pages in length) from an anthology
One whole paper from a set of conference proceedings
One whole report of a single case from a volume of judicial proceedings
or 5% of any of the above, whichever is the greater.
With the exception of those works listed in the ‘List of Excluded Categories and Works’ and the ‘List of Excluded US Publishers’, both published on the CLA website (www.cla.co.uk), the licence for photocopying covers material published in the United Kingdom, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Canada (including Quebec), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan (R.O.C), Trinidad and Tobago, and the USA (as also published on the CLA website under the heading ‘International Territories’ and added to from time to time).
Please note that the licence does not cover material already in digital form e.g. electronic journals and material available on the internet. It also does not cover newspapers, maps, printed music or works listed on the CLA’s Excluded Works list.
Course of study
Multiple copies must be distributed only to registered students and members of staff with strict reference to a Course of Study. A Course of Study refers to any segment of a student’s programme of study which, for purposes of examination and/or assessment, is a discrete and self-contained unit.
SCANNING for teaching purposes
The licence permits some copyright PRINT (not digital) material published in the UK, the USA and a reduced list of other countries (see the CLA website under ‘International Territories’) to be made available in digital format to students through the virtual learning environment (VLE). The University must keep detailed records of all items scanned under this licence and such scanning may only be carried out by the person(s) designated to do so in your department or college; for details as to who these are, please contact:
[YOUR DEPARTMENTAL CLA CONTACT]
[Every department has, or should have such a person. If you are unsure who this is then please ask around your department, your administrator is probably a good person to ask. If this does not solve the problem then please contact Charles Shaw.]
The material must be held in a password-protected environment accessible only to students on the relevant course i.e. WebLearn. If you wish to make digital copies available to students on a course of study, you should contact the above person for further details of the service. Members of staff not appointed as a Designated Person, and all students, are not permitted to scan under this licence. If they should do so – and do not seek the written permission of the rights owner – they may be putting themselves and the University at risk of a claim for infringement of copyright law.
Further information
The University’s Licence Co-ordinator is Charles Shaw, Secretary, Academic Services and University Collections, University Offices (charles.shaw@admin.ox.ac.uk; tel:(2)80563). Members of staff in the Bodleian Libraries should contact Mike Heaney, Executive Secretary (michael.heaney@bodleian.ox.ac.uk; tel:(2)77236) in the first instance. See also ‘User Guidelines’ on the CLA website.
Copyright Notice
Staff and students of the University of Oxford are reminded that copyright subsists in this extract and the work from which it was taken. This Digital Copy has been made under the terms of a CLA licence which allows you to:
This Digital Copy and any digital or printed copy supplied to or made by you under the terms of this Licence are for use in connection with this Course of Study. You may retain such copies after the end of the course but strictly for your own personal use.
All copies (including electronic copies) shall include this Copyright Notice and shall be destroyed and/or deleted if and when required by the University.
Except as provided for by copyright law, no further copying, storage or distribution (including by e-mail) is permitted without consent of the copyright holder.
The author (which term includes artists and other visual creators) has moral rights in the work and neither staff nor students may cause or permit the distortion, mutilation or other modification of the work, or any other derogatory treatment of it, which would be prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author.
Course of Study:
Name of Designated Person authorising scanning:
………..
Title:
Name of Author:
Name of Publisher:
Name of Visual Creator (as appropriate)
[and similar details of other publications if the notice covers more than one extract]
The planned upgrade on 6th July has been postponed for two weeks due to technical difficulties. It will now happen on July 20th.
This upgrade was not a major one. The biggest issue was that the Survey (Beta) tool was to be added to the list of tools in Site Info – this will now happen later and, in the meantime, the WebLearn team are happy to make the tool available to anybody that wants to use it.
WebLearn has a Beta version of a tool that can be used for course experience feedback (course evaluation).
On 6 July 2010, a new ‘Survey’ option will appear in the list of tools available to a WebLearn site. This tool is primarily aimed at gathering student feedback and as such has a number of features that directly support this process.
The Survey tool allows a template to be created which can contain a variety of question types such a multiple choice, multiple response, Likhert scales and free text.
All surveys are anonymous and are generally tied to a particular WebLearn site. All site members with the access role are expected to complete the survey and the same set of questions can automatically be asked of all maintainers and contributors on the site. After the survey has closed results can be downloaded as a PDF file or imported into an Excel spreadsheet for post processing.
WebLearn can be made to automatically send reminders to those who have not yet completed the form.
Of course it goes without saying that all this free to members of the University!
For more information about the tool have a look at
The next release of Sakai (the software upon which new WebLearn is based) will not contain the Blogger and Presentation tools and for this reason we are phasing them out of WebLearn’s toolset.
After a survey of WebLearn coordinators raised no objections, the decision has been made to prevent the addition of any new instances of the Blogger or Presentations tool from Tuesday, 6th July 2010. Existing instances of the tools will continue to work as normal.
PS. This was the 100th post in this blog!
WebLearn has a Beta version of a tool that can be used for general data gathering such as specifying dietary requirements or choosing which session to attend for conference guests.
On 6 July 2010, a new ‘Survey’ option will appear in the list of tools available to a WebLearn site. As well being useful for course and lecturer evaluation, this tool allows general data to be collected via a web form.
The tool has an option to grant access to non-WebLearn users; respondents would access the survey via a link placed in an email or on a website. Alternatively, respondents could be given a WebLearn account (by being added to a site) and then be asked to login in order to access the survey. As all surveys are anonymous, names must be collected via text boxes on the form.
The Survey tool allows a template to be created which can contain a variety of question types such a multiple choice, multiple response, Likhert scales and free text. At the point when the template is instantiated into a survey, it is possible to specify whether respondents need to log in to WebLearn or not.
If users are required to login the WebLearn can be made to automatically send reminders to those who have not yet completed the form.
Of course it goes without saying that all this free to members of the University!
For more information about the tool have a look at
I failed to blog this at the time. The ‘Restore’ facility in Resources was fixed on 8 June 2010.
All files deleted after 9am on that date will be recoverable for a period of 90 days.
WebLearn User Group talks Technology-enhanced learning and teaching Turnitin at Oxford Sakai in UK HE LTG Case Studies LTG Likes OxTALENT