New Facilities – The Highlights

• Upgrade to Sakai 2.6 (see below)
• Addition of ‘Make Web Content Link’ to every item in Resources via the ‘Actions’ menu – this is an easy way to add a ‘Web Content’ link to a file or folder in Resources to the left-hand side tools menu
• Addition of interactive participant group browser – this makes finding groups much easier
• Office 2007 documents are now searched
• Oxford term dates subscription now works; easier method of term dates display
• New much improved ‘Site Stats’ tool (version 2)
• ‘Switch role’ facility for ‘contribute’ and ‘access’ roles in published sites, (’view site as a student’ facility)
• Addition of ‘Podcasts’ tool
• Notifications now user email account (instead of postmaster@weblearn.ox.ac.uk) users can now reply to notifications.
• Addition of ‘Nexus’ link on every page

Sakai 2.6 Fixes – Highlights

For the full list of fixes please visit: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/Release+Notes+%282.6%29

Tools

• Assignments
  • Improved integration with Schedule and Announcement; when an assignment opens, expose link to the assignment from schedule and announcement items.
    
• Calendar Summary
  • Added indicator with number of events to each calendar day.
  • Correct icons now display
• Resources
  
  • SAK-7670: Notification of items with release dates now made at release time
    
• Worksite Setup/Site Info
  • Add option to import and replace content from another site (SAK-12433)
  • Create sites from templates (SAK-12868).
  • More configurable control over adding tools (e.g., Chat) multiple times to a site (SAK-7209)..
• WYSIWYG HTML Editor
  • Upgrade to version 2.6.2, which brings in bug fixes and Safari and Opera support (SAK-13844).

More Information

There is a separate document containing a more detailed list of changes.

• https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/access/content/group/info/step/adminsites1.pdf
• https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/access/content/group/info/step/hierarchy7.pdf

Here is a summary of the basic points:

• an Administration Site is said to manage one or more (regular) sites;
• members of Administration Sites are the only WebLearn users able to create new sites;
• Administration Sites have 2 roles: admin and member;
• participants with the member role:
  • can create sub-sites of any site where they have the maintain role;
  • cannot visit the Administration Site;
• participants with the admin role:
  • can create sub-sites of any site where they have the maintain role;
  • can visit and ‘maintain’ the Administration Site and therefore can:
    • add tools;
    • make changes to the participant list;
    • assign roles to participants;
  • have automatic maintain rights in a site that is managed by the Administration Site without actually being a member of the site in question.

First of all, the ”Schedule” on a site needs to be exported (click on the ”export” button). Copy the URL of this calendar into the address bar of your browser, then change ”’https://”’ to ”’webcal://”’ and press return. You should see a dialogue box appear asking what external program should open this file, select Outlook (or Sunbird or Thunderbird (with the Lightening plugin) or Entourage). The calendar will then open in your mail client.

These resources may be of some use:

• http://www.ehow.com/how_2058421_add-internet-calendar-outlook-2007.html
• http://ryanmaizel.com/2009/07/03/google-apps-outlook-internet-calendars-and-ssl

On occasions, it may be useful to display these images on a page, for example to give instructions on what buttons or links to click on,  or to add a dash of colour to written instructions.

The images are stored in a public area so can be used in all contexts. Look at the file 1-silk_icons_index.png to see which image is which.

Icons are stored here:

• https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/access/content/public/images/silk/

Subject: UK Centre for Bioscience: Funding available

The UK Centre for Bioscience is currently accepting bids for our Departmental
Teaching Enhancement Scheme which offers up to £15,000 to bioscience
schools and departments to develop and implement some aspect of practice
that will lead to an improved learning experience for their students. Deadline
for expressions of interest: January 15th 2010. Deadline for full proposal: 7th
April 2010.

In addition we are currently holding round 12 of our Teaching Development
Fund which provides support of up to £4000 to individuals to encourage the
development, establishment or validation of innovative learning, teaching and
assessment materials or methods. Application deadline: 29th January 2010.

Both calls are open to those working in Higher Education Bisocience Teaching
and Learning in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales.

For more information on both funding calls see our website
www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/funding/

The “search index” was completely rebuilt on Friday 6th Nov which solved the problem.

“We hope you will enjoy the new Sakai website. The idea behind the design was a better user experience. We wanted to make the content not only more appealing to look at, but to make it easier for you to find what you need by organizing the site into …

1. pages of information for those taking a look at Sakai for the first time with an eye to adoption
2. pages of links to the Sakai wiki as springboards for developers, educators, and instructional designers who want to participate in our active design and development community, and
3. information resources to help those of you already using Sakai.”

Take a look… http://sakaiproject.org

See: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2530/2303

http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/oucs/sakai-07102009-medium-audio.mp3

Sakai 3

The Sakai community is working on a major new version of Sakai. Among its many improvements, Sakai 3 will provide:

• A revamped user experience
• A powerful and easy to use content authoring capability
• Social networking features
• Improved teaching and learning workflows
• Increased scalability
• Ease of use for software developers

You can find out more by downloading the Sakai 3 Whitepaper or find out the latest information about Sakai 3 by visiting the wiki page.

Let Ed Garay from University of Illinois at Chicago explain:

SoftChalk is essentially an easy-to-use yet powerful authoring tool (Windows and Mac) for instructors to create simple, intermediate and even advanced (and interactive) class materials for Web delivery.  Each SoftChalk lesson can have simple hypermedia or one embedding Flash Video,

MP3 Podcasts and/or simple to complex interactive student activities or embedded quizzing.

For each lesson, SoftChalk produces a folder, which can be easily zip up and uploaded to Blackboard (UIC’s LMS at this time), or Sakai, Desire2Learn, Moodle or uploaded to anywhere.  Why, you can put burn it to CDs, if you wish.  At UIC, we recommend that faculty drag-and-drop their SoftChalk-generated lessons to their class WebDisks (WebDAV mount points) which we have seamlessly integrated with the rest of the Blackboard LMS.

Now, when/if the instructors want to capture/record the student activities embedded inside a SoftChalk lesson, only then it is really necessary to have SoftChalk package the lesson as a SCORM package that must be uploaded to Blackboard for proper integration with the Blackboard Grade Center.  The same would be true to feed the SoftChalk student interactions to the Sakai Gradebook.

With SoftChalk Release 5, SoftChalk has made available an additional LMS-specific integration simplifying the two-step process of packaging the lesson to Zip or SCORM and then uploading it to the LMS, into a single operation where the instructors or course builders publish their lessons directly from SoftChalk to Blackboard, Sakai, Moodle, etc. — a nice (free) feature appreciated mostly by mere mortals (i.e. nontech-savvy faculty).

At UIC and many other universities, SoftChalk is very well liked, just like Wimba Classroom and Wimba Voice Tools, Pronto, and a plethora of other peripheral Teaching & Learning Technology.