Learn Ultra Early Adopters – Moving your course materials
Dr. Alex Thomas, Senior Lecturer, School of Geosciences moved his year-long course Practical Geochemistry and Data Analysis into Learn Ultra early as part of the Early Adopters programme.
Here, he explains the process of moving and rebuilding his course into Learn Ultra.
Where to start?
The course I moved into Learn Ultra as part of the Early Adopters programme is quite complex. In a recent audit of our School’s courses, which looked at how many folders they had, this course was found to be the second most complex on this list.
The move to Learn Ultra gave me the opportunity to have a look through my course content as I moved it into the new, flatter course structure. There was a lot of stuff in that course which I just completely got rid of because I realized that I had too much extra content that students were either not finding or not using. It is a nice reminder of, ‘hey, you’ve got quite a lot of stuff in this course and nobody’s reading it.’ Much of this extra content was a legacy of previous course content revisions.
So, the best place to start is by looking at your current course content and figuring out what you do and don’t want to take across into your new course.
How long did it take?
It’s a full year course, so I did the first half initially. I set it up, had a play around, and then modified it. In total, it probably took me a day to get it set up to a version where we could just open it up to students and run it.
I probably then spent more time going through it again and reorganising the content into the format that uses Ultra documents rather than folders. The more content you have to move, the longer it’ll take. I’m confident though it won’t be a huge amount of work for the vast majority of staff.
Moving my course and rethinking content structure.
I should point out I didn’t do the training before I started to move my course. So, the first thing I did when I got my course was just to copy the entirety of my old course in one go. I would strongly advise against doing this – it makes a mess, especially if you have a lot of content in multiple levels of folders. I had around 300 errors doing it this way and I had to manually go through each error to fix it. It was simple to fix the errors but a bit of a time sponge. I would recommend setting up a structure that you want in Learn Ultra and then copying in content to this section by section to save time on reorganizing things later on.
When copying content into the new Learn Ultra structure there are were two issues I had to overcome, folder depth and embedded videos. Folder depth is limited to two. If you move over folders more than two levels deep, they will unpack themselves, but it can be messy, so probably easier to define your folder structure in Ultra before trying to move content into them.
You will also need to plan in time to add your Media Hopper videos back in – they are lost when you copy content (YouTube videos appear to be fine). This can be a bit of a time consuming process so make sure you have a clear out of old stuff before starting and only add back the videos you need.
If you’re copying bits of content that have links embedded in them, the links do copy over so that’s a nice surprise.
I think from a staff perspective, once you’ve engaged yourself in learning about how Learn Ultra works and how to use it, it is much easier to build content than the older version.
To watch a video on how to move course materials into Learn Ultra, please visit the Learn Ultra SharePoint.
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