Wooclap is an electronic voting system that was brought in by the University to replace TopHat. We recommend it for lightweight, synchronous teaching activities, such as in-class polls or quizzes. There is a range of supported question types, so you can select which would work best for the type of activity/content. You can also include information slides between questions.

Wooclap can be integrated with a course Learn page using the LTI, if you want to connect it that way. You can also keep it separate from Learn and just create an event directly through your account that students can join.

If you are interested in using Wooclap, feel free to contact us with any questions you have about it. We also strongly recommend that you attend the Wooclap training sessions offered by IS.

(For asynchronous formative quizzes, we recommend using Gradescope or Learn tests, rather than Wooclap. Please get in touch with us, to discuss options or if you want help setting those up for your course.)

Note: One lecturer has fed back an issue that when the host/presenter changes slides on Wooclap, participants’ text being actively typed in what is now the previous slide is lost. So, be careful not to ‘peek ahead’ at slides, for example to remember what comes next, because returning to the previous slide does not restore participants’ partially typed text. One way to avoid this issue is to tell participants to type non-trivial text answers into a text editor or word processor and then paste into Wooclap.

Related links from UoE Information Services

Introduction to Electronic Voting Systems (i.e. Wooclap)

Wooclap Sharepoint (with full instructions and how-to guides)

Wooclap Participant Guides (you may want to share this with your students)

The University has recently brought in an institution-wide license for Miro, which is an online whiteboard/canvas tool that allows for collaboration. You might find it really useful for some teaching activities where you want to gather students’ thoughts or for them to work with each other in a digital space. There are a range of templates you can use based on what type of project or activity the students are doing.

Miro also integrates with a number of the other University tools, such as Teams and OneDrive.

For further informtion on how to log in to Miro (using your UoE account), set up and manage boards, etc., please see the University’s IS pages on Miro.

Feel free to get in touch with us, if you would like to discuss ideas for using Miro (or other digital tools) in your teaching.

All teaching staff will need to interact with Learn Ultra, even if the course materials are hosted on Drupal. We have compiled links to instructions on the most common tasks you will need to perform in Learn below. If you do not see what you need below, please check out the following page, which has additional instructions and guidance materials on a range of other aspects of Learn Ultra: Using Learn as an Instructor.

Introduction to Learn Ultra: a series of short videos providing an overview of Ultra and how to navigate the site.

Adding and organising content:

• Types of Course Content – start here to get a definition of the terminology used for content types in Ultra
• Learning Modules and Folders
• Adding Documents
• Web and course links*
• Copying content in Learn Ultra
• Add a video to your course

*If you want to share a link with students to a file you have uploaded to the Content Collection for a course, you will need to adjust the permission settings in the Content Collection folder following these instructions from Blackboard.

Assessment and marking:

Please remember that the Course Secretary is now in charge of setting up most assignment submissions (other than things like CodeGrade or authoring quiz questions), so please contact the ITO about the creation of assignment submission boxes. Below we have provided links for guidance on accessing student submissions and how to give marks and feedback.

For Learn Assignments:

• Marks and Gradebook, Feedback, additional information on marking and the Gradebook
• Uploading marks (and feedback) to Learn Ultra
• Creating and managing tests

For Turnitin assignments:

• See the Marking, Feedback and Grading section here

For Gradescope assignments:

• See our blog post Marking an exam or homework assignment in Gradescope

Tools:

• Communicating with your students (incl. Announcements and how to email a Group in Learn)
• Managing Groups and Group Import and Export
• If you don’t use Piazza for your course, you can set up a discussion board in Learn. This can be linked to Groups, so that students can talk to their group members: Create and manage Discussions
• Adding tools to your Learn course (e.g. Zoom, CodeGrade, Noteable): Adding Tools via Content Market; for more on Zoom, see Adding a Zoom session to your Learn Ultra course

Note: All students, the Course Organiser, and Course Secretary will be automatically enrolled on the Learn course via a feed from EUCLID. All other teaching staff (i.e. additional lecturers and teaching support staff) will be enrolled via a feed from the School’s own databases; teaching support staff will only be enrolled in Learn once their contract is confirmed in PiP.

To embed a video from Media Hopper Create (MHC) into a Drupal page for your course, please follow these instructions.

Note: you can mostly follow these steps for embedding a video from another platform  e.g. YouTube, but how you find the embed code on that platform will be different than the steps for MHC.

If you haven’t used Media Hopper Create before or need a bit of help, IS has extensive documentation and help guides here.

1. Log into your MHC account at: https://media.ed.ac.uk/
2. Make sure that the video you want to embed in Drupal is set to either Unlisted or Published. (Not sure how to check or change this setting? Please see IS’s guidance on Understanding privacy levels in Media Hopper Create.)
3. Open the video you want to share in MHC and below it, you will see several tabs. Click on the tab “Share” and then select “Embed” (N.B. do not select oEmbed) and then select and copy the full embed code that appears in the box. (Note: you can use the options below the code to choose a different sized embedded player or start/end times for the video. Do *not* use Responsive Sizing at the present time.)
   
4. Go to the Drupal page where you want to embed the video. Make sure that the Text Format for the Body field is set to Full HTML (this is the default). Then use the three vertical dots on the right of the editing toolbar to open additional tools and select “Source”
   
5. Paste in the embed code you copied from MHC.
   
6. Use the three vertical dots to open the expanded toolbar and click Source again to go back to the main editing view. It may take a moment or two to load, but you should now see the video you just embedded.
   
7. You can, of course, add text before or after the video or embed multiple videos on a single Drupal page. Once you are done with the edits on the page, just remember to press Save at the bottom.

Important! You must have captions available on any video you use for teaching. MHC has auto-generated captioning available and it is very quick (just a click or two) to request this for your videos before sharing them with students. Please see this guide from IS: Requesting subtitles for your content.

If students are permitted extra time on timed pieces of coursework as part of their extended time adjustments, then you will need to set this up for any timed quizzes/tests on your course.

If you are a member of teaching staff, please ensure that you talk to the ITO about this before enabling it for any student on your course, as there are different types of extra time adjustments that a student may have and they will help clarify for your course how these need to be applied.

Below are links for how to add these extended time adjustments in the two commonly used coursework quiz/test platforms. For both Gradescope and Learn tests, you can set up an adjustment for a student that extends across a whole course and any timed assignments within that course or grant an adjustment just for one or more individual assignments.

Gradescope: Extending assignment release dates, due dates, and time limits

Learn: Accommodations and Exceptions in Blackboard Ultra (with thanks to Teeside University for writing much better instructions on this than Blackboard itself provides)

Note: Due to an ongoing bug in Learn Ultra, if you upload feedback to submission box in Learn, it will not be visible to students. If you want to upload feedback for an assignment that students submitted to via Learn, follow the instructions below to create a new “item” directly within the Gradebook itself, which (for some reason!) allows students to view the feedback you upload. Update: This bug appears to have been fixed, but let us know if you encounter any problems with the visibility of feedback for students.

1. Go to the Gradebook in the course Learn page.
2. Add a new Item to the Gradebook by hovering over where you want to add it in the list and clicking on the purple (+) when it appears and then select “Add Item”.

Then make the following adjustments when the item settings window opens:

• It will give the item the default name of “New Item and the current date”; change this to the actual assignment’s name to ensure that students can locate it easily.
• We recommend keeping this item hidden from student view for now.
• The due date doesn’t really matter for this, so you can leave it as the default of the current time.
• Set the marking as required (points, percentage, etc.) and, if points, the maximum number possible for this assignment.
• For “Mark category”, choose Assignment.
• Add a description if you want, but it’s not required.
• Press Save.

3. Download the Gradebook, selecting just the new item that you created. Make sure to tick the option to include Feedback (unless you just want to upload marks, in which case, leave it unticked). Choose to save it as an xlsx file and save it to your computer.

4. Open the file on your device.
5. Make sure that the header for Column G is the assignment you want to be uploading marks for (i.e. the item you just created in the Gradebook).
6. Input the marks in Column G.
7. Input the feedback in Column J, if you need to share this with students.

Note: Make sure you do not change the header of any of the columns or Learn may not be able to read the file properly when you upload the marks. If you need to copy and paste data from another spreadsheet, make sure that it aligns with the columns as laid out in the file you downloaded from Learn.

8. Save the file.
9. Return to the Gradebook in Learn and now select “Upload Gradebook”.

10. Choose “Upload Local File” and select the spreadsheet you have just saved. Once it has loaded, untick the option for “Select All” and just leave the assignment you want to upload marks for ticked. Click “Upload”.

11. Once Learn has uploaded the document, you will see how many students there are not marks for (i.e. those who did not submit the assignment) and also the option to post the marks that you just uploaded.

12. Before you post the marks, it’s worth quickly checking that your upload worked. Click on the assignment name and you will be taken through to a list of all the students on the course. You can then check the a few of their marks and feedback in Learn with your spreadsheet to make sure that the upload worked properly.

Note: If you only want to post marks to certain students, you can do that from this view. Just click the “Post” button next to the name(s) of the student(s) whose marks you are to post.

13. Once you are ready to share the marks with the students, Click to Post the marks. And then “Post All Marks” when the dialogue box opens.
14. Go back in to the Edit view of the assignment (by clicking the three dots … at the end of the row for it) and from the drop-down menu choose to make it “Visible to students”. Press Save. The students will now be able to view their marks and feedback for this assignment.

With the introduction of Drupal as the host for course materials in Informatics, we want to provide clear guidance about how best to communicate with students in order to ensure they see all important information and to avoid duplication of effort or confusion about where to find what.

The Informatics OpenCourseWare site built using Drupal does not have a communication system built into it. That means that there is no way to draw someone’s attention to something posted on it via Drupal itself. The only sorts of things you might want to put onto Drupal is, for example, an “Errata” page to alert both students and any members of the public to something you realised was erroneous in the lectures slides you’ve shared.

For any communications you want to have with the enrolled students on the course, you need to do this via the course Learn page. The tools for this have changed a bit with the move from Learn Original to Learn Ultra, so we have outlined what your options are below.

We do recommend checking out our blog post on Signposting to students for some advice and examples of how best to communicate with students (and ensure they read what you say!)

Announcements (ILTS recommended tool)

Learn has a useful Announcements tool which allows you to post messages to students enrolled on your course. Announcements remain on the course site (unless you delete them) and they also appear in Activity Stream on Learn. When creating an announcement, you can select to send an email to all students with the same message. In a change from Learn Original, any new announcements appear as a pop-up the first time students log into your course after you have posted it. Students need to manually close the pop-up before they can view the rest of the course Learn page.

We recommend using Announcements (and opting to send them as an email, too) as the most reliable method to ensure that students on the course receive the information.

Sending a message to a particular group

You can send a message to a particular group in Learn Ultra. Instructions here: Learn Ultra: sending a message to a tutorial group.

Notifications

Notifications alert the user to activity on the course site. This may include new content being added or due dates for assignments. The default for notifications is a daily digest sent out after 5pm, however, these can be configured by each user so don’t assume a student has received a particular notification.

Other tools in Learn Ultra

You will see these tools, like Announcements, across the top menu bar on your Learn Ultra course page. Unfortunately, there is no way to hide the links from students for the tools which you are not using on your course (although this has been raised with Blackboard as something that would be very useful for them to introduce).

• Discussions: This is Learn’s built-in discussion board tool. We strongly recommend using Piazza instead of this.
• Messages: This is what IS has to say about the Messages tool — The Messages functionality allows instructors to send messages directly to students. However, as announcements are a more streamlined and comprehensive communication tool, we do not recommend the use of Messages.

TL;DR: We don’t recommend using Discussions or Messages. Announcements (with email option ticked) should be used for important things that you want to ensure students don’t miss and Piazza for more general chat/answering questions.

Where and how do students get notified?

IS have put together a helpful table comparing where students will see notifications for the different ways that staff might communicate with them. Some of these tools will be used more/exclusively by teaching staff and others by ITO/admin, but it’s worth being aware of all the details.

Get in touch

lt-support@inf.ed.ac.uk

Related links

Information Services Good Practice Guidance on Learn Ultra

Learn Ultra: Sending a message to a (tutorial) group 

Top right menu

In the top right of each page are links to the 2023-24 Learn instance for the course, as well as the DRPS entry. If your course uses Piazza, a link to the course Piazza page will also be added here.

Course homepage

e.g. PI: Professional Issues – this is the welcome or home page for your course. You will see that it has an image identical to the image on the 2023-24 Learn page.

The information on this page is a combination of some of the items on the “Welcome” and “Course Information” areas on the old Learn pages. It will vary a bit by course.

Course Information

If there was an extensive amount of information on the Drupal homepage for your course, we have split some of this out into a separate “Course Information” page. Feel free to move things around these two pages, as you wish.

Right-hand menu

The right-hand menu is how you and students will navigate quickly around your course. The expands to include any child pages nested within a parent page. This keeps the menu from getting too long and overwhelming.

Course Materials

This is the area where all the teaching materials will be. It will vary a lot by course. Some courses just have a schedule page with links to all files, others have weekly pages with longer text and various files.

Tutorials / Labs

Some courses have tutorials and/or labs separated out from the other course materials; for other courses, they are sitting under Course Materials. You can move / create these pages for your course, if you would prefer to structure it differently in Drupal than you had in Learn.

Assessment

This is currently a standard template, directing students to the Assessment folder in the Learn page for the course. In the future, we also plan to push automated content (such as coursework deadlines) to this page.

All assessment instructions, dates, examples of previous students’ work, etc. must be added to the Learn instance for the course. If you want to share a copy of the assessment instructions on Drupal for curious members of the public, that is OK, but remember that what is in Learn will be considered the “golden copy” for our students. Please see the “Learn vs. Drupal” document sent out to teaching staff for more information.

Resource List

We strongly encourage you all to start using the Library’s Resource List tool and we must ensure that any third-party content you use in your course materials are cleared for copyright. You can choose to make the list itself open to the public to view, but any copyrighted materials on your list will only be accessible to someone with a UoE log-in.

For courses that already use Resource Lists, we have updated this to the 2023-24 link.

Copyright of content on Drupal

By default, we have added a statement at the bottom of every page assigning copyright to the University. If you prefer to share your content with an Open Educational Resource license, (which some courses already do), you can change this for your course. If you are unfamiliar with Open Educational Resource licensing, you can find out more here under Creating and Sharing OERs: https://open.ed.ac.uk/how-to-guides/

To upload files to your course Drupal site:

• Go into “Edit” the page where you want to add the files.
• Scroll to the bottom of that screen and you will see a field called “Files”, as shown below.

• Click “Choose Files” to add one or more files from your computer.

You can see in the screenshot below that I’ve uploaded two files to this course now. For each one, you can give it a “Description”, which will act as the document label, if you add it; if you do not add a description, then the document title will be the label.

• You can choose now to “Display” to one or more of the files to students, which means that they will appear at the bottom of the page for students to acces once you have saved your changes. This is how that would look:

• However, you might just want to share links to the files within the body text on the page. To do this, leave the “Display” option unticked and then Save your changes. You must save your changes now before the next step to ensure that you have proper links to the files and not just a temporary upload link.
• Go back in to the Edit view and hover over each file you have uploaded and copy the link to the file URL (how you do this exactly will depend on your web browser; in the image below I have right-clicked on it in Firefox).

• You can then navigate up to the body text of the page and insert the link you just copied as a normal hyperlink in any area of the text you want. (Shown below, I want make the text “Introduction and Logistics (KG)” link directly to my lecture slides file.) Now when you save the edits you’ve made, students will not be able to view the files as individual downloads at the bottom of the page, since you chose not to display them to students, but they can access them via the hyperlink in the body text.

Note: If you want to replace a file you have uploaded, please use the same steps above and click “Remove” next to the appropriate file (as shown in the second screenshot). You can upload the replacement file and share it with students following these instructions. Please make sure that you let your students know if you upload a new version of a file! Some may have downloaded/accessed the older version and will not realise that there is a new, updated version.

It is vital that any third-party content you use in your teaching materials is cleared for copyright. This includes readings that you might set your students, images in your slides, or videos you share with them.

For course materials published on Drupal, the Course Organiser must ensure that all material posted on their course pages is copyright compliant.

Take a few minutes to read through this fantastic (and brief) summary from the University’s Open Educational Resources team about Copyright in Teaching and the three sub-pages detailing more about using book journals and texts, videos, broadcasts and sounds, and images. (If you need some background, check out What Is Copyright?) The University’s Open Educational Resources team run workshops on these topics, which you may be interested in attending; you can find more information about them here.

Readings

You should use the Library’s Resource List service for any essential / suggested readings. If you do not currently use this service, please familiarise yourself with it at your earliest convenience. It offers a lot of flexibility in terms of structure and layout to suit your course design. More information can be found on our blog post about Resource Lists.

Broadcast recordings and images

Some materials (often images or videos) are published under Creative Commons licenses, public domain, or other copyright cleared conditions and these may be available for you to use. However, ensure you that you check all the policies for the relevant license before you use them. If you are new to looking for images or other media you can use, Creative Commons is a great place to start. They provide great explanations, instructions on how to attribute what you use, and a search engine, which searches across a whole range of other platforms.

Below are a couple places you might be able to source materials to use in your teaching:

• Are there any TV or radio programmes you want to share with your students? Check out Box of Broadcasts, which provides recordings you can share with your students (and unlike, say, BBC iPlayer videos, these won’t get deleted after a set time period!). This is service that the UoE subscribes to and which all students and staff can access.
• The University’s Image Databases list is a great place to find other useful resources, some of which you will have access to only through your UoE account and others, such as Pixabay, Unsplash, and Creative Commons, anyone in the world can access.