If you are on a PC, there is a nice free utility called PureText, which removes formatting from text – it runs in the background and instead of pressing Control-V to paste, you press Windows-V if you want to strip out HTML tags.
Free download from http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext
Thanks to Sonya Powney (Learning Resources Developer, The Royal Veterinary College) for this information.
New WebLearn offers many facilities which will be invaluable should students not be able to attend lecturers due to circumstances beyond their control.
WebLearn has many tools that will allow teaching and learning to continue in the absence of face-to-face meeting between students and tutors. The most obvious approach is to set up a site with all members of a course or tutorial group listed as participants. This site can then host learning materials in the Resources tool within a WebLearn site; any documents stored in Resources can be found by the Search tool.
The document repository can be backed up by the use of the Chat and Forums tools for synchronous and asynchronous communications respectively. The Sign-up tool could be used to arrange a series of online tutorials in much the same way as it can be used to organise face-to-face tutorials and /or the site Schedule (calendar) can be used to indicate when a tutor will be present in the chat-room to answer student questions.
The Email archive (mail list) and Announcements tool also facilitate easy communication within a course. The Assignments tool (with optional Turnitin plagiarism checking) can be used for the on-line submission of essays and tests can be conducted within the Tasks, Tests and Surveys assessment system.
If lectures have been recorded then they can be housed in WebLearn via the internal ‘Podcasts’ tool – this tool allows a sequence of recordings to be made available via a single URL (an RSS feed). This feed can optionally be protected behind Oxford SSO authentication.
There are more details about the individual tools in the section entitled Tools in the New WebLearn.
We would recommend that departments and colleges begin planning now; the first thing to do is establish a WebLearn presence and begin setting up and infrastructure that can be brought into play should there be a need.
This Friday lunchtime sees the start of our new Make: courses which highlight the creative use of technology in research and teaching. We are all looking forward to the first session, Make: Websites – Using MedLearn. This one-hour presentation will give an introduction to MedLearn from a user’s perspective, how useful it is, how to create materials and more. For information and booking please go to:
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKM
To find out more about our digital media courses – why not come to breakfast:
Make: Digital breakfast
Fri 07 May
08:30-10:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKN
The following sessions are also scheduled for this term:
Make: Together – Using E-assessment *
Tue 27 Apr
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKJ
*This session focusses on the QuestionMark Perception assessment tool – obviously it is also possible to do (formative) assessment in new WebLearn. QuestionMark Perception is licensed software which must be purchased – it is more comprehensive than the Tasks, Tests and Surveys tool in WebLearn and is worth looking at if WebLearn doesn’t have desired functionality.
Make: Images – A chemical galaxy
Tue 04 May
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKA
Make: Open – Crowding together
Tue 11 May
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKB
Make: Images – Using maps creatively
Wed 12 May
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKE
Make: Audio – Real life podcasting at Refugee Study Centre
Tue 18 May
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKC
Make: Music – An overview of some music creation software
Wed 19 May
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKI
Make: Together – It’s easier than you think
Thu 20 May
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKF
Make: Together – Using iCases for simulations
Fri 21 May
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKL
Make: Together – Teaching undergraduates with WebLearn
Tue 25 May
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKD
Make: Together – TEI and wikis
Thu 27 May
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKG
Make: Together – How we wrote Mobile Oxford
Wed 02 Jun
12:30-13:30
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TMAKH
Both WebLearn systems were upgraded on 13th April 2010, new WebLearn to 2.6-ox3 and old WebLearn to 2.34.
New WebLearnThere is a separate document containing a more detailed list of changes.
Are you involved in recording events, placing material on-line, using images for website or creating educational content ? If so, then this course is for you!
Further details and booking on-line here:
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TWRX
This course will cover the basics of copyright, copyright and related rights with regard to audio visual content and copyright in an on-line environment. It will also introduce Creative Commons licenses and open content, helping you to find materials to re-use in your teaching and learning.
The course is run by a copyright in education expert, and is offered at a very heavily subsidised rate through funding from the OpenSpires project – OpenSpires – http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk
An excellent lunch is included and it’s a good chance to chat with your peers and experts at OUCS
Here are the course dates for WebLearn courses during Trinity Term 2010. Note that bookings on the courses database open 30 days in advance of each course: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/
There is a new course on offer in conjunction with the Oxford Learning Institute: Learning and Teaching using technology tools, which is aimed at academic staff members. The WebLearn User Group is scheduled for the afternoon of 5 July. Besides the usual system updates, we will have a speaker from the Library talking about copyright issues, short presentations by two academics who use WebLearn to support teaching and learning, and a discussion on particular WebLearn tools.
Tuesday 11 May 2-5 pm (week 3)
Monday 14 June 2-5 pm (week 8)
WebLearn: Migrating your content
Tuesday 25 May 2-5pm (week 5);
Monday 28 June 9.15-12:15 am (week 10)
WebLearn: Making your site work
Tuesday 8 June 2-5 pm (week 7)
Monday 5 July 2-4:30 pm (week 11)
Tuesday 18 May 9:15-11:15 am (week 4)
Learning and Teaching: using technology tools
Tuesday 4 May 2-5pm (week 2)
Plagiarism: WebLearn and Turnitin
Monday 7 June 12:30-13:30 (week 7)
WebLearn will be unavailable for a short period between 7am and 9am on Tuesday the 13th of April for an upgrade. Both the old and new systems will be down during this time.
The outage will only be brief, but please avoid using WebLearn during this period to avoid any interruptions.
Changes in this release include:
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 proposing that they be phased out of WebLearn’s toolset.
Ideally we would not include them in the next major release (probably due at the start of HT 2011), however, if this would seriously inconvenience users then we will consider delaying this to the end of academic year 2010/11.
This is just an exploratory posting to ask people who rely on these tools to contact us so we can discuss the impact of any changes. If this affects you then please send an email to weblearn@oucs.ox.ac.uk briefly explaining your use and giving the URLs of the sites where the tools are used.
Thanks to Jill for this.
Test 1: Create NEW template. Create new survey based on that template. Edit a question in the template. There is NO CHANGE to that question in the existing survey – Good!
Test 2: COPY a template. Edit a question in the new template. Create new survey based on that template. Again, if you do further edits to questions in the TEMPLATE, there is NO CHANGE to the existing survey.
The confusing thing is within My Surveys – Edit. Under Survey Settings, there is an Edit link, which allows you to edit questions in your SURVEY via a temporary sort-of ‘buffer copy’ of the template. This is in fact editing a particular question in this survey only, which reflects nowhere else.
Advice to users: Do all your editing in the Template, and then the final thing is to create your survey. If you have to change a particular question a particular survey, you can do it via Edit Survey, but this change is reflected nowhere else, and the edited question can be used nowhere else.
Note: The Evaluations tool is currently in pilot (until July 2010). The WebLearn team must add it manually to a site.
Contact the WebLearn team if you are interested in using it for Course Feedback or Surveys.
WebLearn User Group talks Technology-enhanced learning and teaching Turnitin at Oxford Sakai in UK HE LTG Case Studies LTG Likes OxTALENT
Comments on: ‘Eduserv-funded study into the use of Microsoft SharePoint in UK Higher Education Institutions’ Report
From: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/SPfinal.pdf
“Microsoft is promoting SharePoint as a VLE. ……… Despite not being frequently deployed as an institutional VLE, SharePoint is being used in teaching and learning, particularly for functions which are not easily fulfilled by the VLE, for example: group collaborative work, ad-hoc non-repeated courses, and work that cuts across several or many different courses.”
I would contend that the above excerpt from the report’s Executive Summary simply doesn’t hold here.
These facilities are much in demand by Oxford students and academics and are the exact reasons why we chose Sakai (and Bodington before) as our institutional VLE. I am assuming that this text mainly refers to Blackboard / WebCT (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, Moodle).
The Blackboard model of a VLE where students are pigeon-holed into particular courses would simply not work for us.
The main body of the report also mentions licensing restrictions of Blackboard being a problem when opening up materials either to other institutions or the general public – of course open source solution such as WebLearn do not suffer from such problems. Indeed one of the largr modifications that we have made to Sakai is to make it very easy to open up Oxford learning material.
From page 25 (section 7.2)
“We are using both SharePoint and Moodle in our Department and we seem to fall into two groups of teachers/researchers: Moodle is used by those who teach standard modules and find it convenient. SharePoint is used for those who want more flexibility, more collaborativeness, and the possibility to have different levels of user permissions and contributions.”
Again I would contend that this doesn’t hold for WebLearn – two more strengths of Sakai are the collaborative features and the ability to offer a myriad of different permissions within a single site. Again we have enhanced these facilities locally as they are of great importance to Oxford.