What tasks (digital literacy) would you like to be able to do?

The three teams within Learning Resources (Elevate, Learning Development and the Library) are redesigning their staff and student support package in line with the changing and growing needs of staff and students. The new approach will be based on problems or common scenarios which people encounter and would like help. For instance,

• how can I design an effective poster for an assignment or conference?


• how do I include multimedia in my presentations, reports and learning materials, and what should I consider when doing this?


• what are the possibilities of enhancing my teaching and assessment through the use of classroom technologies?


• how can I stay informed within my subject discipline? Harnessing Library searching and social media tools

The new workshop programme will replace the e-Skills programme which is currently available to staff.

We are keen to ensure we focus our workshop activities appropriately, therefore, it would be really useful to gather your needs, problems and common scenarios you face at work. We would really appreciate if members of staff at UCS would take 5 minutes to complete the following survey:

• http://bit.ly/ZT1tZv

 

 

Roll up, Roll up for the Augmented Reality Special Interest Group ....

We are in the process of putting the finishing touches to the UK wide Augmented Reality in Learning and Teaching Special Interest Group (http://moodle.rsc-eastern.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=216). This is aimed at all educational sectors and is a place to share ideas and experiences to help us all fathom out, what does augmented reality offer educators as a learning technology?

The aims of the SIG are:

• To develop a self-sustaining SIG and ‘community of practice’ for ‘Augmented Reality in Learning and Teaching’, that adds value, builds capacity, and stimulates partnerships and networks;


• To facilitate discussion and dissemination of the learning and teaching use, purposes and benefits of augmented reality, and to consider its future uses.


• To provide a staff development focal point for Augmented Reality practice, from ‘novice‘ to ‘expert’;


• To integrate ‘the student experience’ and ‘student views’ into these activities and deliberations;


• To be a resource for evaluation and investigation in the areas of educational augmented reality


• To coordinate a network of practitioners;


• To provide information and guidance on practice.

We’ll be launching on Friday 26th April, 11.00 to 12.00 (GMT). For more information registering for the launch, see:

• http://bit.ly/13UvV9t

We hope to see you there, the more the better :-)

Introducing "Inline Feedback" part of the LearnUCS Summer 2013 Upgrade

The following video was created by Aaron as part of a wider series which focusses on highlighting the enhanced tools we'll be expecting in the LearnUCS Summer 2013 upgrade.

We think the inline feedback facility is a really important development as it allows staff to annotate a piece of student work through the web browser. Therefore, there is no need for you to download the student submission, add the feedback via track changes and upload it back to LearnUCS. This is now possible in the upgraded version to do this through the web browser :-)

The linked video illustrates some of the ways you can annotate a submitted piece of work.

• http://www.screencast.com/t/SAZJVLrY4Z7

If you have any questions on this tool, please email the Elevate Team.

The expectation is we'll upgrade LearnUCS during late July / Early August. The date has yet to be finalised.

LearnUCS - The Numbers : March 13

LearnUCS Statistics for March 2013

Application Insight

(Course views are all pages within a course, non course page views are pages outside of courses, such as the LearnUCS home page, announcements page)

Page Views in and out of courses have continued to climb since the Christmas dip, as has the number of logins.  Active courses have started to rise, due to the new semester starts.

Total Monthly Logins	39,694
Total Page Views	1,672,970
Average Page Views Per Day	Non course - 40,270 Course - 15,495
Most Active Date	Non Course - 67,936 - 20 March 2013 Course - 27,334 - 20 March 2013
Total Number of Courses	6143 (including historical courses form 10/11 and 11/12)
Total Number of Active Courses	1545

 

The large dip on the 31st March was due to the system downtime at our hosted datacentre.

Mobile LearnUCS Statistics for 3rd March 2013 to 2nd April 2013

The mobile app was only released on an end user licence basis in mid September, this allows students and staff to use the mobile app even though UCS doesn’t licence the service directly.  Users are now able to download and pay a small fee to use the application themselves.

Total unqiue logins for the period was 208.

The iOS platform is still the most use mobile operating system.

It will be very interesting to see how the numbers add up next month.