The WebLearn Service Level Description has been updated. The following changes have been made:
If you’ve ever fancied using Twitter then this hand guide for Academics from LSE may be useful:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/files/2011/11/Published-Twitter_Guide_Sept_2011.pdf
The following note was sent by OUCS on 13 December 2011.
WebLearn is unaffected as it uses oxmail to send messages and does not connect directly to smtp.ox.ac.uk.
As we can’t rely on people not to give away their SSO credentials in phishing attacks (the rate is very small already but it only takes one for hackers to have a spamming field-day!) we have decided to put the following into place on Thursday morning (15 December 2011) around 9.30am:
1. Each Oxmail node will rate-limit each sending address to 1000 messages in any 3 hour period. This is per recipient, not per message, so a message with n recipients will count n against that 1000 limit. This will ONLY apply to email sent to it from smtp.ox.ac.uk or from Nexus. Departmental and College systems that use oxmail.ox.ac.uk as their onward MTA will be unaffected. Nexus and smtp.ox.ac.uk users going over this limit will get messages saying emails are delayed that they will eventually be sent.
2. Nexus will change to allowing a maximum of 250 recipients per message. If messages have more recipients than this they will be refused with a message saying that there are too many recipients. In that scenario messages will need to be re-sent with fewer recipients by the user.
We appreciate that some of these measures may cause some problems and we may revise them after the Christmas break if it seems appropriate. If they are going to cause you or your users any problems before 3 Jan 2012 then please contact its3@oucs.ox.ac.uk for advice BEFORE the end of next week. The change itself should not interrupt service.
We are sorry about the short notice on this but we want it to be in place for a while before we close for Christmas to make sure there are no unforeseen problems.
Thank you for your cooperation, Tony Brett
At the start of November the OUCS Podcasting Service launched a new web portal to showcase nearly three thousand audio, video and eBook items freely available for download (http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk).
Replacing the previous directory, the improved site presents a rich set of pages displaying podcast series and items. At a glance visitors can see the most recent items added to the site and the most popular. The new portal enables material to be found, grouped and reviewed in a new myriad of ways, including searching by media type, speaker, keyword or department. Each item has its own unique linkable URL, making it easy to link to resources from reading lists, in emails or share via social media channels.
The site is enriched with advanced features to improve the discovery of lectures and talks from across all University divisions. Students can now effortlessly create a library of lectures to be played online in the browser or via a media player such as an iPod or iPad.
Recent series highlights include:
Material is constantly added to the site which now contains over 1,500 hours of talks, lectures, and conference presentations and a series of literature-related eBooks. A special area surfaces material that can be reused openly in schools and education under a Creative Commons license http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open.
The web site compliments the Oxford on iTunes U service for those who do not wish to use iTunes software.
The podcast team value your feedback and would like to hear what you think about the new portal and Oxford podcasts.
Contact them at podcasts@oucs.ox.ac.uk, or through the contact form on the web site.
Each year the Sakai Foundation runs a competition to recognise and promote innovation in using Sakai (WebLearn at Oxford) for teaching and learning. The winners have travel expenses and conference registration paid to attend and present their innovations at the Sakai USA Conference in June 2012.
Online entry will be available from 1 January 2012, and the closing date for submissions is 2 March. The WebLearn team encourages you to consider submitting an entry and is happy to provide assistance.
Here is the announcement from the chair of the organising committee:
“The intent of the Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA) is to recognize excellence in teaching and learning. Each year, since the first call for entries in 2008, educators from institutions around the world submit their courses in the annual competition. An innovative course or educational experience is defined as one that, by design, engages and challenges students, resulting in greater student interest, a deeper level of understanding and/or a lasting change in the students’ perception of an issue or topic. Of course, as this is a Sakai award, the innovation must be implemented within a Sakai instance.
Though technology is an important part of the evaluation process, the award is about more than simply using new technologies; rather it is an approach to teaching and learning that results in a much-enhanced, even transformative, educational experience for students.
The major goals of the TWSIA are:
The award has provided for winners to receive travel expenses and registration to the Sakai conference, and a responsibility to present their award winning course to the Sakai community so that other teaching and learning faculty and staff/administrators may learn from their excellent work.”
Please contact the WebLearn team if you would like to express an interest in submitting an entry.
Useful links:
After a rush of frantic work by the elves in InfoDev and LTG we have put together a beautiful open advent calendar: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/openadvent/
Each day until Christmas a door will be unlocked to reveal a piece of open educational content. Open educational resources from Oxford University are published with Creative Commons licences so you can download them, keep them, enjoy them, share them, re-gift them and use them in your own teaching or research.
Melissa Highton
The following IT Learning Programme (OUCS) courses focusing on WebLearn are scheduled for the remainder of the term. Please book by following the respective link to the course booking system.
Tuesday 22 November, 2-5 pm
WebLearn Surveys (beta) is a free survey tool that can be used to design and manage electronic questionnaires to be delivered online. Surveys can be created for general data gathering purposes, or for course, lecturer or tutor evaluation. They can be delivered to WebLearn site members, ad-hoc groups or the general public.
WebLearn: Tools to support Teaching and Learning
Tuesday 29 November, 2-5 pm
This course focuses on WebLearn tools for tutors and lecturers to use in communicating with students, booking tutorial sessions, creating reading lists, organising and creating learning materials, designing tests, conducting course evaluation surveys, and tracking site usage. The WebLearn Fundamentals course (or experience in using new WebLearn) is a prerequisite.
Plagiarism: WebLearn and Turnitin
30 November, 12:30-13:30
The Turnitin plagiarism detection service identifies pieces of text in students’ work that match with existing electronic texts. It can be used for assessed essays and also for general formative purposes to improve student academic skills. You will have a chance to submit a sample document via the WebLearn integration with Turnitin.
As a WebLearn user, you may wish to make your WebLearn calendar visible in other calendaring applications such as Outlook, Thunderbird (with the Lightning add-on), Google or iCal (Mac).
Subscribing to your WebLearn calendar means that a dynamic ‘link’ is created between it and another calendaring application. All changes made to the WebLearn calendar will automatically be reflected in the ‘other’ application which has subscribed to it. You can subscribe to a WebLearn calendar that is located in any WebLearn site.
The calendar URL that is generated by WebLearn is a private (secure) URL; there is little chance of anyone else being able to guess what the URL might be. If you think the URL might have become compromised, you can go back into the WebLearn Schedule tool and delete and/or regenerate it.
There are three steps to the process of subscribing to a WebLearn calendar:
The webcal:// format of the URL provides other calendaring applications with the hint that “this is a calendar”, so that they can handle it in the appropriate way.
The http:// format of the URL should work for nearly all calendaring applications and for most computer configurations; however the route is slightly more complicated. Using this format means that you copy the URL with the intention of pasting it into the other calendaring application using an option there such as “Add calendar from the Internet” (or similar).
Login to WebLearn and access the site and Schedule (Calendar) that you wish to subscribe to, click on ‘Subscribe‘ and then ‘Generate‘ to generate the calendar URL.
Either click on the webcal:// format of the private URL, or copy the http:// format, depending on circumstance.
Your WebLearn calendar is now displayed alongside the events in the other application:
You can choose to show/hide or maximise/minimise your WebLearn calendar, depending on the functionality of the other application.
You are invited to register for the upcoming Teaching with Sakai webinar series: Wikifolios, Wikiflections, & Exams for Online Participation, Understanding & Achievement Monday, November 21, 2011 8pm (3 pm EST; noon PST)
Daniel Hickey (Indiana University – Bloomington) is teaching fully online graduate education courses. He aligns three learning practices using IU’s OnCourse version of the Sakai course management system:
This webinar will illustrate how these practices are used in his Cognition & Learning in Education course. It will also introduce the underlying “Designing for Participation” model and point to other faculty using this model in undergraduate Telecommunications and Freshman Composition courses.
Teaching with Sakai Webinar Series
The Teaching with Sakai webinar series highlights effective teaching practices using Sakai. Each webinar in the series begins with a 20 minute presentation followed by facilitated discussion.
We hope to see you online!
Kim Eke, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Jon Hays, University of California-Berkeley
Kate Ellis, Indiana University-Bloomingon
We have applied a patch which we think addresses this problem
We think recent versions of Safari (and probably Chrome) on a Mac have a bug that is preventing files from being uploaded. This is affecting the Assignments tool (and Resources, etc.) and is stopping people from uploading essays.
Until we have had a chance to try out a fix, it would be very sensible to recommend that Mac users try to use Firefox with WebLearn.
For the more technically minded: https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-17255
WebLearn User Group talks