A patch was applied to WebLearn this morning (17 Jan 2012) which fixed the teething problems that Humanities students will have experienced when trying to use the Student Enrolment System over the last 7 days
We apologise for any inconvenience that these issues may have caused.
We hope that this morning’s reconfiguration and restart of WebLearn will stop the problems of instability that have dogged WebLearn over the last week.
We apologise for the unscheduled breaks in service and really hope that these are a thing of the past.
A variety of taught courses are offered by OUCS free of charge, to support the use of WebLearn and (as from this term) the plagiarism prevention and detection software Turnitin. In most cases, the course books can also be downloaded for self study. The courses are all aimed at staff members, not students. Places are limited and bookings are required via the links provided. Bookings open 30 days in advance, but you can express an interest in a course and receive a reminder to book when booking opens.
Thursday 26 January 2-5 pm (week 2)
Tuesday 28 February 2-5 pm (week 7)
WebLearn is a web-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), which provides tools to support teaching and learning, assessment, collaboration, communication and sharing of resources. This course is at a basic level, aimed at staff members with little or no experience of the system.
WebLearn: Making your site work
Monday 30 January 2-5 pm (week 3)
After having attended the WebLearn Fundamentals course, and/or having used new WebLearn for some time, users need to know more about the planning, structure and design of WebLearn sites and the effective use of WebLearn tools.
WebLearn: Tools to support Teaching and Learning New!
Tuesday 14 February 2-5 pm (week 5)
This course focuses on WebLearn tools for tutors and lecturers to use in communicating with students, arranging tutorial sessions, conducting course evaluation surveys, providing reading lists, organising learning materials, and tracking site usage.
Plagiarism: Turnitin Fundamentals New!
Thursday 16 February 9.15 am – 12.15 pm (week 5)
Turnitin is an online software application which compares matches of documents and is primarily used to detect instances of plagiarism. This course, aimed at new users of Turnitin, goes through the process of setting up the software and submitting papers to it.
Tuesday 21 February 2-5 pm (week 6)
WebLearn Surveys (beta) can be used by staff members 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.
Wednesday 21 March 2-5pm (week 10)
This is an invitation for WebLearn users to meet with members of the OUCS WebLearn team to give feedback and share ideas and practices regarding the use of WebLearn. Ensure that your voice and ideas are heard and shared in order to inform the ongoing development and support of the system.
Lunch time sessions:
Plagiarism: WebLearn and Turnitin
Wednesday 15 February 12.30-13.30pm
The Turnitin plagiarism detection service identifies pieces of text in students’ work that match with existing electronic texts. It can be used to screen assessed essays and also for formative purposes to improve student academic writing skills. The WebLearn Assignments tool is integrated with Turnitin.
Wednesday 22 February 12.30-13.30pm
This course demonstrates the award-winning Mobile Oxford platform (m.Ox) and a selection of WebLearn tools that can be accessed via a mobile device. Participants will have the opportunity to use their mobile devices to try out various WebLearn tools via the mobile platform.
Plagiarism: Interpreting Originality Reports using Turnitin New!
Wednesday 29 February 12.30-13.30pm
What do the percentage matches mean? What about direct citations? Should I include bibliographies in the similarity index? This lunchtime session covers Turnitin Originality Reports and how to interpret the results.
New WebLearn was upgraded on 10th January 2012 to version 2.6-ox10. We had intended to move to 2.8-ox1 but unfortunately have had to delay this again, this time until the Easter 2012 release. Many apologies for the delay.
Over the last year or two, the most requested enhancement to WebLearn has been the ability to share the authoring of survey templates. The good news is that we have made enhancements to make this possible.
In this case, collaborative authoring works differently to most WebLearn tools; templates are shared by being passed from one individual to another. To do this, simply click on the ‘Change Owner‘ link on the ‘Templates’ page.
Next you are asked to supply an email address or username of the new owner.
When ‘Save’ is clicked the template will be transferred to the new owner. In order to be able to access the template, the new owner must be have the ‘maintain’ or ‘contribute’ role in at least one site.
A copy of all questions is made and added to the new owner’s Question Bank; if the questions are not used by the previous owner in other templates then they will be removed from their Question Bank.
The new owner can make edits and then pass the template along to a future owner (or back to the original owner).
OxCAP is a JISC funded initiative to expose data (as an XML feed) about courses at Oxford. This project has the explicit backing of the PVC for Education and the Registrar.
It is agreed that we concentrate on graduate training opportunities.
JISC want public information about courses in XCRI-CAP format so that they can offer a portal which aggregates feeds from “all UK institutions”. This will serve 2 purposes: (a) to allow hard-to-find distance learning courses to be found and, (b) to allow fee-paying students to compare what courses institutions offer so that they can make an informed decision about where to go.
Advantage for Oxford: this will show the world how much excellent graduate training is on offer and will help us to attract the best students
Individual training providers will supply details about their courses in electronic format (RSS, XCRI-CAP, CSV etc) to the Oxford Open Data platform which is managed by OUCS. Information about the courses will be stored and will then be available as a series of data feeds; there will be an authenticated feed for internal use (by WebLearn’s Student Enrolment System (SES) tool) and a public feed (containing slightly fewer courses) which can be consumed by anybody that finds a need. In addition, we will generate supporting software artefacts (improved SES tool and JavaScript library for displaying courses on departmental websites).
The service will be piloted from October 2012 and all aspects will be improved based on user and community feedback.
Process and policy guidance will be developed in conjunction with the training providers to ensure all the outputs from the project are sustainable.
Advantage for Oxford: this will allow students to take full advantage of the training on offer leading to better trained researchers and academics and will make improved use of university resources.
The project is managed by Adam Marshall (OUCS) and Bridget Taylor (Social Sciences) and overseen by the Student Enrolment System Steering Group, reporting to the Education Committee.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxforduniversitycricket/5786649005/
2012 sees the introduction of a brand new look for the WebLearn Guidance Site.
We have tried to make the site easier to navigate and also make it look more visually appealing. It should be easier to find what you are looking for as the front page contains links to all sections laid out in a clear and concise manner.
We have added a navigation panel to each and every page so it is easier to jump around the site.
All content from the previous incarnation of the site is still present and each page has been categorised so that it falls into one of six logical groupings.
The Site Administrator’s FAQ (an essential tool for all site participants with the maintain or contribute role) has been extended and given a new look.
We have also created many new pages such as this one which provides an entry point by particular task rather than specific tool.
The site contains the 40 ‘bite-sized’ videos that were completed last year. These are intended as rapid guides to a whole host of the most popular tools.
We are very keen to garner feedback so please drop us a line and tell us what you do and do not like by sending an email to the WebLearn team.
The site was created within Dreamweaver using WebDAV to synchronise with WebLearn. All pages are also stored within Subversion for version control and all photographs were taken by WebLearn’s own Dr Jill Fresen!
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
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