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.

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

The Informatics Teaching Festival is a series of events aimed at addressing some of the issues raised by moving much of our learning and teaching online in September 2020.

The sessions will run in Collaborate and the link is the same – no matter which event(s) you wish to attend. An email will be sent to all Informatics staff nearer the time with the Guest link.

Sessions will be recorded and links to the recordings will be posted here.

Schedule

Below is a list of topics being covered in Teaching Hour events throughout May and early June 2020. Judy Robertson will lead, with the help of learning technologists and invited guests. An email was sent to all teaching staff on 6 May with links to the rooms in Collaborate, where they will be held.

Events will be recorded and the links to the recordings will be uploaded here. Please note: you will need to be logged in to Media Hopper Create (using your University / EASE login) to access the recording.

Mark Zarb, SISCA Director of Education has, with the following colleagues, recorded a webinar on best practices when transitioning quickly to online education: Danai Korre (Edinburgh), Areti Manataki (Edinburgh), Rachel Menzies (Dundee), Judy Robertson (Edinburgh) and Jeremy Singer (Glasgow).

In it, they deal with all manner of topics (suggested by the community), and hope that this will be a good resource in the days to come:
https://youtu.be/r2AGZHCMQ_s

The webinar roughly follows a three-point structure:

1. Migrating to Online Teaching
2. Considerations during the Module
3. Pastoral Care

Let us know what you think – in particular, whether you would like to see more of this style of content emerge from the Education community – or whether you want to be involved in its creation.

Feel free to circulate far and wide.

In my previous post, I listed some EdTech tools and services available to you in the event of disruption to campus-based activities – such as the current COVID-19 epidemic.

I would like to take this opportunity to list a few non-tech things to consider for the same scenario.

Communications

• Think about how you communicate with your students at present. How much do you rely on face-to-face communication? What are you going to use in place of this?
• Related to the above, it’s very easy for your message to be misinterpreted. Be clear, and say more than you think is necessary, to ensure students are clear about what you are asking of them. Check discussion boards regularly to get on top of mistaken beliefs early. Oh, and be friendly!
• If you don’t already have an online discussion board for your class, set one up now. There are various options – please get in touch for further guidance.

Managing online synchronous classes

• Running an online class takes longer than a face-to-face class – both in preparation and in class management. Build this in to your timetable now.
• Related to the above, if you are delivering a lecture / presentation in real-time online, you will need someone to manage the back channel of questions and discussions. Identify a TA or someone suitable who could perform this role now.

Recording lectures for online delivery

• If you have prepared a one hour, or two hour lecture, consider breaking this down before recording. Breaking up your lecture into smaller chunks (eg 20 minutes) will be easier for you (less editing required in post) and more digestible for your students.
• See previous post for the various supported tools available to you for recording lectures / smaller classes.

Further support

• Consider offering online office hours. I shall be running an Informatics Learning Technology service office hour. This will be online, via Blackboard Collaborate and will be every week day 10-11am. You can access here (Chrome or Firefox are the recommended browsers): https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/47b0a9ad52514aa28667b3dfab10b727

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

Learning Spaces Technology, part of Information Services, has recently launched a new website aimed at informing and supporting colleagues using teaching spaces.

Please note: content is still being added to the site. If you have a question relating to teaching spaces, you can log a call with the IS Helpline or speak with your local Learning Technologist.

Further information

• http://www.teachingspaces.ed.ac.uk