LearnUCS Upgrade - Complete

The LearnUCS upgrade is complete and login is now active again.

As will all upgrades we have tested the site as much as possible and believe the system is working as expected. If you do find any issues please contact the Elevate Team at elevate@ucs.ac.uk

Below are a number of changes that you may notice when using the system:

Staff and Student - Profiles

If you have uploaded a profile photograph or connected LearnUCS to Twitter or Facebook you will need to agree to a new set of terms and conditions for Blackboard and their Cloud Profiles.
This is a very simple process and only takes a few minutes. You need to access your profile by clicking the dashboard button, top right of your screen, where you would normally see your profile picture, as seen below highlighted in red:

Once you click the profile you will see the screen below, this is where the new terms and conditions are:

When you have agreed to the terms and conditions, your profile will reconnect to the one previously setup.

Student - Assignment Submission

There have been a couple of changes in the upgrade that you may notice, the layout of the submission screen has slightly changed, with the grades 'points possible' and the due date being boxed near the top.

New functionality now means that all work is directly submitted to SafeAssign, the plagiarism checking tool used at UCS.  You will notice a new tick box asking you to agree to submit your work to the 'Global Reference Database'.  

Agreeing to this is in your benefit.  It means that if you agree, a copy of your work is held securely in a database.  That all future work from any worldwide University/College using SafeAssign is then checked against, to make sure your work hasn't been copied.

Below is an example of a new submission page, showing the new location for the points possible and due date, as well as the agreement for SafeAssign's Global Reference Database.

Staff - SafeAssign

As above, SafeAssign is now fully integrated into the Submission process.  You are now able to see the plagiarism score in the GradeCentre's Inline Grading view, as shown below:

Please see links below for additional info on some new grading features:

The latest version will provide some enhanced functionality around common tasks, often requested by Staff and Students. These include:

• Student Preview - An actual student account created on the fly when required
• Anonymous and Delegated Grading
• Deeper SafeAssign Integration

LearnUCS Upgrade - Testing Phase

We are pleased to be able to announce that phase 1 of the upgrade has completed.

This now means we can move to phase 2, the testing phase. The Elevate team are currently testing the upgrade to make sure the system is responding as expected.

Phase 3 will be testing the new features, ready for allowing users back on to the system.

Check back later this afternoon for further updates.

LearnUCS Summer Upgrade Underway

The LearnUCS upgrade has started, login access has been removed, both directly into LearnUCS and from MyUCS.

We will be updating this bog as the upgrade progresses, please check back Saturday afternoon for more updates.

Great Yarmouth: HE Professional Discussion Day

The Elevate Team ran a two hour discussion as part of Great Yarmouth College's "HE Professional Discussion" day on the 16th July.

The slides are available below. The intention was to start lots of conversations around current and potential use of technology enhanced learning within their course design. The focus was to pitch it around how people could discover and share ideas. Therefore, we spent time unpacking support routes and communities of practice, fed by information from the Elevate Team blog.

From my perspective the session went very well, we managed to surface lots of practice which was currently going on across the course teams, and explore how we could implement a very straight forward learning design based on the flipped classroom model.

The learning model seemed to find lots of traction within the group (unless they were agreeing in the hope I'd go away). We worked through:

1. tweaking the menu on LearnUCS so it is really clear what students need to do (so lots of task 1, task 2).
2. including clear instructions at the start of each task
3. embedding a youTube video (which they might create as a talk over powerpoint) or a twitter discover and share activity
4. followed by a short quiz which asks questions about the embedded activity, including a free text question
5. the final activity (post taught session) was to use a course blog to capture what key concepts the student took from the session (similar to a two minute essay)

The discussion then shifted to using tools and strategies to help ensure this became effective. Including the effective use of the retention centre to help communications, rubrics to speed up feedback, and how to use pre-session activity could be embedded with the taught session.

The session was left where we would follow up at start of next academic year, unless we could help over the summer.

If you'd like a similar session with your course team, Department of Learning Network, then email the elevate team (elevate@ucs.ac.uk)

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Yarmouth

Issuing Open Badges at UCS - Where are we?

After the development and completion of the Open Badges Generator (http://goo.gl/Vj0ymZ) we trialled the use of open badges at various events over the last few weeks here at UCS. These included the annual Learning and Teaching Day, AMC Development Day and the Research Colloquium as well as badges for attendees to our Digital Literacy Programme courses.

The objectives needed to obtain the event badges were not to simply turn up, but to submit a short (~150 words) reflective piece reflecting on a key message that you had taken away from the event or workshop and how you could use that in your everyday work. This method also helps to provide event organisers with a source of feedback.

These reflections were captured using a Google Form and attendees were given two weeks to submit the form.

After the two weeks had past, a member of the Elevate Team would simply open the Open Badge Issuer selecting the correct badge and using the form information to issue badges to those who submitted their reflections.

We issued 41 badges in total over the various events and workshops.

Here is a brief overview of the process:

1. Initial meeting with event/workshop organiser explaining 'What are Open Badges' and how they could be used for their sessions - 15m
2. Create Google Form (Name, email address, reflection) and send link to organiser- 5m
3. After event, Issue badges - ~30s per response

We have a main open badges page which can be found using the link below which details how we are using Open Badges at UCS.

http://www.ucs.ac.uk/openbadge/How-are-we-using-open-badges-at-UCS.aspx

Looking back over the whole process it's clear to see that for quite a significant result, I.e issuing an Open Badge, the process it self was very administration light.

The only issue we had with this process was one recipient having issues logging into their Mozilla Backpack, the issue was resolved by getting the recipient to use a different browser such as Mozilla FireFox or Google Chrome rather than Internet Explorer.

Each badge that got issued points to a 'Criteria' page on the UCS website where information about the badge is stored. 

Some questions for future use have arisen from the recent use of badges for these events. These include:

• Does there need to be a review of the quality of reflections before issuing of badges and if so, who would do this?
• A need to revoke or expire badges if the badge is for a re-occurring event or CPD which continually needs updating.

The expiring of badges is on the development list for our next sprint with this project. We will also look at scripting in some unique identifiers for each badge to help us track and maintain a clean and error free database. 

With word spreading and interest climbing for the use of Open Badges for face to face workshops and events, scripting in some sort of analytics would help us track 'number of badges issued' for individual events/workshops.

If you are a member of staff at UCS and would like to know more about Open Badges or how you could use them, feel free to contact us :)

LearnUCS Upgrade - Staff Awareness Drop-in Sessions

The Elevate Team are offering staff awareness drop-in sessions to those lecturing staff that would like to see the next release of LearnUCS before it goes live.

The sessions will be primarily looking at:

• Student Preview - An actual student account created on the fly when required
• Anonymous and Delegated Grading
• Deeper SafeAssign Integration

The session will run on the following dates and times:

• Wednesday 16th July - 10am to 12noon
• Thursday 17th July - 12noon to 2pm

The session are being run on a drop-in basis, so please turn up at any point during the time period.

The Elevate Team will be running these sessions from the 4th floor of the Waterfront building.

Please see this link for further upgrade information.

What is LearnUCS and how might it be used?

What is LearnUCS?

LearnUCS is the name for the University Campus Suffolk's virtual learning space. It is a password protected area for staff and students at UCS to share materials, interact with staff and students, communicate and complete tasks.

You can access LearnUCS, using your UCS username and password at http://my.ucs.ac.uk or directly via http://learn.ucs.ac.uk.

How might it be used on my courses?

LearnUCS can be used in many ways on your course during your time at UCS.

Most commonly you will find module information such as, handbooks, reading lists, timetables available from the "Information" menu inside of the module homepage. Most lecturers will also add their lecturer notes, presentations and resources available from the "Learning Materials" menu.

You may also be asked to submit your assignments online through LearnUCS, this feature also allows for plagiarism checks to safe guard your work from being copied.

An increasing number of courses are starting to take advantage of the many features available, you may be asked to participate in:

• Online Discussion Boards
• Using blogs and journals
• Tests and Quizzes
• Listening to Podcasts
• Watching Videos

Another feature that will be very important to your studies is the Assignment Toolkit. The library contains a very large e-Resources area, allowing you access to many e-Book, e-Journals, databases as well as offering help on referencing for your assignments. The Learning Services also offers a vast collection of resources that will help you through your studies, guides on academic writing, presentation skills and many more.

You can access both the Assignment Toolkit and Learning Services resources by clicking the resources menu option in your module menu.