V-L-Easy! Day 4 – Smart Views

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As part of the countdown to the festive season, the VLE team and CPED are sharing their ideas for simple tools or techniques that can make life easier for lecturers and their students. So far, we’ve posted suggestions about Collaborate, Ally, and Student Preview. Today, the spotlight is on a little-used feature of the Weblearn Grade Centre.

Smart Views

On some modules, there are a large number of students together with multiple assessment points.  This can make the Grade Centre in Weblearn difficult to navigate. A Smart View in Weblearn can be created to display a subset of the Grade Centre The Smart View focuses on students and/or assessments results that meet certain criteria.

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V-L-Easy! Day 3 – Ally

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As part of the countdown to the festive season, the VLE team and CPED team are sharing their ideas for simple tools or techniques that can make life easier for lecturers and their students. Each day, we are posting a blog entry with some brief tips for lecturers together with links to further information including video guides or web-based resources.Yesterday, we showed how ‘Collaborate’ can be used for virtual meetings or classes. Today, we focus on another tool that is already integrated directly into Weblearn, but which may be under your radar.

Ally

Ally is an accessibility tool that enables barrier-free learning for all students not just those with recognised additional needs. Ally provides students with more opportunities to engage through being able to download additional alternative accessible versions of Weblearn course documents.

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V-L-Easy! Day 2 – Collaborate

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As part of the countdown to the festive season, the Weblearn team and CPED are sharing their ideas for simple tools or techniques that can make life easier for lecturers and their students.
Each day, we are posting a blog entry with some brief tips for lecturers together with links to further information including video guides or web-based resources.Yesterday, we showed how ‘Student Preview’ can imitate the student experience of your Weblearn module. Today, we remind you of a web-conferencing tool that is integrated directly into Weblearn.

Collaborate

As a busy lecturer, you might like to travel less between campuses to attend meetings. You may also like to provide contact-time for students without involving a commute for either party. Collaborate can help with these scenarios and others.

Collaborate is a real-time video conferencing tool that is part of Weblearn. It can be used like FaceTime or Skype: for one-to-one conversations. However, Collaborate can also accommodate many dozens – even hundreds – of simultaneous participants. This makes it ideal for larger virtual meetings, web-conferences, or other online teaching and learning activities. It is not exclusively designed for distance learning. Collaborate can extend your face-to-face delivery as a cloud-based environment for hosting seminars, revision sessions or ‘drop-in’ office hours.

Link to video of a Collaborate MeetingWatch this video (12m30s) of setting-up a Collaborate Meeting, using the chat panel and sharing files on-screen.

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V-L-Easy! Day 1 – Student Preview

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As part of the countdown to the festive season, the Weblearn team and CPED are sharing ideas for simple tools or techniques that can make life easier for lecturers and their students.
Each day for the next two weeks, we are posting a blog entry with some brief tips for lecturers, with links to further information including video guides or web-based resources.
Today we remind lecturers of the ‘Student Preview’ feature of Weblearn, which can be enabled by clicking on the icon at the top-right area of the Weblearn Page, and show how browser tools can also emulate the student view of Weblearn.

Student Preview

Weblearn appears differently to staff and students. You will appreciate this if you are a lecturer who has published some timely content or prompt feedback on Weblearn, only for students to report that they can’t find it.

However, there are a couple of ways in which you can verify that your Weblearn Module is appearing to students as desired, and that content can be accessed.

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Message from Turnitin CEO Chris Caren

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Dear Customers,

Turnitin UK services experienced two recent outages on October 22, 2018 from 09:37 to 14:36 BST and on October 25, 2018 from 10:48 to 13:33 BST. The root cause of these issues was an exploited vulnerability on the login page used by our UK customers, and, during the time period, customers were not able to access their accounts. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience to your institution, as we recognize that Turnitin is a mission-critical service that you rely upon for day to day operations.

The stability and security of our services are a top priority. The outages that occurred were not situations that we had encountered before and were unrelated to previous outages. As a result, it took our incident response team longer than usual to identify and fix the vulnerability. We have already made changes to prevent this from happening again and will also be adding the following safeguards to ensure that a similar incident does not occur in the future:

  • Additional monitoring and alerting that proactively warns for this unique type of situation.
  • Code updates in order to prevent a similar issue in the rest of the code base.

In regards to Turnitin’s overall 2018 service health, we would like to address a couple of points:

  • In comparing 2018 to 2017 service levels, Turnitin has had 56.2% less downtime but has had an increase of 64.8% in slow or degraded service;
  • Improving those degraded service numbers while keeping uptime availability as high as possible continue to be our highest priority and we will work with you to make sure that we minimize issues that result from service degradations.

Once again, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this service outage has caused. If you have additional questions about these outages, please feel free to respond to this message or reach out to your UK-based Account Managers, who are carefully monitoring service for our Turnitin UK customers and will be happy to provide additional information.

We value our relationship and look forward to a continued partnership together. Thank you for your time and for listening.

Sincerely,

Chris Caren,
CEO, Turnitin

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Help to raise student awareness of contract cheating

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poster by turnitin promoting International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating 2018Turnitin are sponsoring a competition in a bid to raise student awareness of contract cheating. Please tell your students that they have until Friday 2nd November for the chance to win £1,000. To receive the money they need to submit the most creative way of making students aware of the risks / inacceptable nature of contract cheating.

Contract cheating occurs when one person completes academic work (e.g. assignment, exam, test, quiz, exam) on behalf of another person who then submits it for academic credit. This behaviour undermines the quality and integrity of the degree, and it undermines the entire education system.

with the message I don't contract cheat because I'm smarter than that!

A whiteboard declaration ahead of the International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating.

The competition is Turnitin’s support for the International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating that takes place on Wednesday 17th October. You can take part in the day of action by

 

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Nureva Span: using the collaboration software with students

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Psychology lecturers from London Met made use of Nureva Span, London Met’s new collaboration software, in their first lecture with new students.

First year students took part in a ‘Treasure Hunt’ that exploited the real-time, media-rich, collaborative nature of the software’s collaborative canvases. To orientate themselves to the campus, the student teams were tasked with locating their scheduled teaching rooms, and capturing photographic evidence. Each Nureva Span canvas has a ‘Quick-share’ feature which allows participants to easily send a note or photo from their phones. On locating each room, the teams used QuickShare to post their selfies immediately to the shared canvas.

Photo of students taking group selfies across campus

This team share their photos using the Quick-share feature of Nureva Span.

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Learning Technologies Summer Forum

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Last Tuesday, the Learning Technologies summer forum took place in London with 20 conference sessions and 36 free L&D seminars. 

Designed to further develop the key themes from the autumn Learning Technologies conference, this event had something to offer for every individual that works in the Higher Education sector. The event was split in two main parts, a jam-packed exhibition that included more than 30 free seminars and the annual Learning Technologies Summer Forum Conference that forms part of a wider community of TELT professionals.

From an in-depth approach into the current issue of using Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality for educational purposes, to content creation strategies, design methodologies and developing a Learning Culture and Agility, this conference had something for everyone. If you didn’t get the chance to visit the conference, don’t worry because all of the seminar recordings can be found on YouTube.

 

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Weblearn Migration: date confirmed

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From Thursday 21 June at 5pm there will be temporary disruption to the normal Weblearn service as we begin the move to managed hosting from our current self-hosted provision.

Managed hosting will give Weblearn the higher performance and reliability that is associated with powerful cloud computing. In addition, we will benefit from round-the-clock technical monitoring and support from Blackboard, and upgrades to Weblearn will subsequently occur immediately, resulting in minimal downtime for London Met users. The migration will coincide with an upgrade to the latest software version of Blackboard Learn.

All content and data will be transferred to the managed hosting version of Weblearn which will take a few days. During this time period Weblearn will become read only. This means that you will be able to view and access Weblearn content but if you make any changes during the ‘read only’ period all changes will be lost and will not be recoverable.

What can I do during ‘Read Only’ access?

Do: access existing content and feedback
Do not: make any changes to content or assessments and feedback because these changes will be lost

Arrangements for online submission

All assessments scheduled during the migration period have been moved or paper submission has been agreed.

Key dates to remember:

  • Thursday 21 June at 5pm: Weblearn will be completely unavailable as data is transferred.
  • Friday 22 June: Unavailable then read only access to Weblearn from approx 5pm
  • Monday 25 or 26 June: Weblearn will become unavailable for 3-4 hours for further configuration
  •  If the migration goes smoothly, Weblearn will be fully available after 5pm on 26 June. If the downtime period needs to be extended further announcements will be posted.
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Weblearn Migration

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Photo of laptop showing Weblearn

This summer, Weblearn will migrate to a managed hosting arrangement with Blackboard, the company who provide the VLE software.This means that Weblearn will no longer run from our local servers, but instead will run directly from Blackboard’s servers. 

When will the migration take place?

The migration will take place from 22nd – 29th of June, 2018.

What are the benefits of managed hosting?

Managed hosting will give us the higher performance and reliability that is associated with powerful cloud computing. In addition, we will benefit from round-the-clock technical monitoring and support from Blackboard, and upgrades to Weblearn will subsequently occur immediately, resulting in minimal downtime for London Met users. The migration will coincide with an upgrade to the latest software version of Blackboard Learn.

How will the migration affect me?

The switch from a self-hosted VLE to a managed-hosted VLE will inevitably mean a temporary suspension of normal Weblearn service. From Friday 22nd June 2018, Weblearn will be completely unavailable for a day-or-two as data is transferred. Weblearn will return in a read-only state for the remainder of the week; during this time, no new content can be uploaded, and user data is not recorded, but users can view and download existing Weblearn content as normal.  Weblearn will return to full access from Friday 29th June 2018. 

There may be occasional down-time prior to the migration to test the transfer will run smoothly. Keep an eye on the Weblearn homepage for news about the migration project.

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