Introduction

When creating a course in OpenCourseWare (powered by Drupal) for the first time, the ILTS team can provide a starting course template in Drupal either based 1) on the course structure and content from Learn; OR 2) as a blank template with an agreed structure.

In this post, we would like to focus on the options available for a blank template structure within Drupal. We will use courses, already available within OpenCourseWare, as examples of the types of course structure you can choose from. The following is not an exhaustive list of all courses within OpenCourseWare, but a small sampling of courses within our chosen structures. The home page of Open Course has a list of all courses for you to browse, if preferred.

Course Structures

A) Structured by activity (e.g. lectures, tutorials, readings, etc.):

• ARO and EPL

B) Structured by week (e.g. week 1, week 2, week 3, etc):

• CDI1; IRR; and SDM

C) Structured by schedule (e.g. a schedule table with links to slides, video, handouts, etc):

• CT; EXC; and IQC

D) Courses with a mixed structure (e.g. by schedule, activities and weeks):

• ANLP; CGGS; IQPS (aka QPS-11); and USEC

Further Information

When creating the course in Drupal, ILTS will provide support and guidance for you to choose a suitable structure for your course. This agreed structure will then make it easier for you to build your content and populate your course in time for Welcome Week.

If you’d like to discuss the options and contact ILTS then please visit the support page. We look forward to working with you.

The Teaching Hour, in the School of Informatics, on February 24th 2022, focussed on “How to use your teaching support budget to best effect”.

Abstract from the event: “In Informatics course organisers have a budget to spend on employing staff and students as teaching support: tutors, demonstrators, teaching assistants, markers and any other roles help to support teaching and learning on courses. In this session colleagues detailed what the various teaching support roles are and who can take them on. They then illustrated and discussed different choices of learning activities in examples of Informatics courses”.

The recording from the session can be viewed, via Media Hopper Create, at this link here. And the slides used during the session can be viewed, via Sharepoint, at this link here.

The Informatics Teaching Festival is back for a third consecutive year and will run Monday May 9th to Wednesday May 11th 2022.

The 2022 Informatics Teaching Festival will focus on the design of teaching and learning and consist of the following sub-themes:  

• overview of course design (Day 1, May 9th 2022)  
• design to develop student skills, including for the industry (Day 2, May 10th 2022)
• design of assessment (Day 3, May 11th 2022).  

Each day will include both presentations on school and university processes, tools and support, as well as the sharing of experience and good practice around different approaches to the design of teaching and learning, and internal (Informatics or university-based) as well as invited external speakers.

If you’d like to attend any of the following sessions, and are not a member of the School of Informatics, please register your interest here, and a Collaborate link will be emailed to you in advance of the session(s).

Schedule* –

Day 1: Overview of Course Design. Monday, May 9th 2022

Day 2: Design to develop student skills. Tuesday, May 10th 2022

Day 3: Assessment. Wednesday, May 11th 2022

* The schedule is still subject to change. As best we can we will not make big adjustments to speakers and timings.

The Informatics Teaching Festival is back for a second consecutive year. 

 Join us for the opportunity to:

• hear interesting presentations around lessons learned in the past year and good practice in online/hybrid teaching from colleagues and inspiring speakers from other schools
• listen to the feedback provided by student representatives regarding their experience with studying in an online/hybrid context
• listen to the feedback provided by teaching support and administrative staff as to their experience with teaching and administration this past year
• learn about new approaches to teaching and educational software
• share your own experience with teaching delivery, student support and course administration during workshops and informal GatherTown meetings
• reflect and come up with ideas together for improving our delivery of online and hybrid teaching, both as a school and in our different courses.

If you’d like to attend any of the following sessions, and are not a member of the School of Informatics, please register your interest here, and a Collaborate link will be emailed to you in advance of the session(s).

Schedule

1. Open the KalturaCapture App.
2. Check the screen feed, camera feed and audio feeds are on.
3. Hit Record.
4. When you want to finish recording, you can pause or stop the recording.
5. Give the video a title, description and tags (optional) and click upload.
6. When the video is uploaded, a link to the video on media.ed.ac.uk will appear. Click this link to check your video.\
7. On Media Hopper Create, if your video had a screen and camera stream, both will be automatically controllable by the end user allowing for full screen of either of the videos and multiple split screen views.

This is a reminder of the tools and services available to you in the event of disruption to campus based activities, such as the current COVID-19 epidemic.

If your *students* can’t access campus

• If students can’t come to lectures, they can access the lecture recordings via the Lecture Recordings link in Learn. Please note: this is only for those lectures delivered in a centrally supported room.
• Any room which supports lecture recording, also supports Live Streaming. Please get in touch if you would like to enable live streaming of your lectures.
• For those courses requiring to use submit, students can download and install Virtual DICE or remote access to normal DICE machines via XRDP or SSH. Please log a call with computing help for further information.
• For those courses which don’t require to use submit, remember that Learn has an assignment tool which will more than likely meet your needs. The Informatics Learning Technology Service can help with this – please get in touch.

If *you* can’t access campus

• The same product used for lecture recording at scale across campus (Echo360) has an application users can download from the website. Please note: the application is only available for Mac and PC. If you require a loan device, please get in touch.
• The Echo360 application – called Universal Capture – allows you to capture audio, screen + video. You can then publish direct to your course via the recording interface. This means students will access your recording in the same place as recordings of campus based lectures. See the bottom of the page for links to video and written guidance.
• The Echo360 player (the interface students use to watch lecture recordings) also has a nice feature where they can ask questions at specific points in the presentation. The lecturer can then review these and answer questions in the appropriate context. See Media Hopper Replay: Q&A discussions, flagging confusing content, and bookmarking for further guidance.
• You may want to deliver smaller, tutorial sized classes via Blackboard Collaborate. Collaborate sessions can be scheduled via MyEd or Learn. All sessions run in the browser (Chrome is recommended) and so there’s no need to worry about user devices.

Further Help

In addition to local help via the Informatics Learning Technology service, Blackboard are running sessions on Tuesday 10 March called “Preparing to scale online teaching and learning during Coronavirus”. This webinar is for anyone involved in administering or delivering teaching and learning, including but not limited to system administrators, eLearning technologists, IT managers, Heads of Teaching and Learning, faculty and academic staff. Register here: http://bit.ly/COVID-19EURUG

Media Hopper Replay’s universal capture tool – video instructions

Media Hopper Replay’s Universal Capture tool – Mac

http://www.docs.is.ed.ac.uk/skills/documents/Lecture%20Recording/Guides/3873_v2.pdf

Media Hopper Replay’s Universal Capture tool – Windows

http://www.docs.is.ed.ac.uk/skills/documents/Lecture%20Recording/Guides/3872_v2.pdf

Media Hopper Replay: Q&A Discussions, flagging confusing content and bookmarking

http://www.docs.is.ed.ac.uk/skills/documents/Lecture%20Recording/Guides/3887.pdf

An Instructor’s guide to Media Hopper Replay: Viewing course and student analytics

https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/An+Instructor%27s+guide+to+Media+Hopper+ReplayA+Viewing+course+and+student+analytics/1_rs96etgi