Holyrood Park Hub

For those who took courses before this academic year, you will want to know that the University’s support for WebCT will come to an end at the end of this month (June 2013). Old course sites may continue to function after that, but there is no guarantee, and if anything goes wrong with the service it’s unlikely to be fixed. So, if you have material in WebCT that you know you want to return to, you should download/save this in the next few weeks. You can access these courses at https://www.vle.ed.ac.uk/webct/entryPageIns.dowebct

Readings can be saved in the usual ways (downloading the PDFs, etc). Other pages can be saved as PDFs or HTML pages. And if you want to keep a record of discussion board content, here’s how:

Discussions and their attachments can be selected individually or as a whole thread, select printable view and then download instead of printing.

If you have questions or need help, contact the IS Helpline – is.helpline@ed.ac.uk

Hello,

I am sure you are all very busy but I wonder have you about 1 hour to spare next Thursday 6th June?

The University is deploying an upgrade to Moodle in July 2013 in time for the September 2013 restart. We are looking for student testers to test the Moodle upgrade at any time over Thursday 6th June. Testing would be done from your home / office and should take no more than an hour. Feedback is due back to us on Friday 7th June 10am BST.

We will provide all testing scripts, log in, and details for you if you are interested.

Please email fiona.littleton@ed.ac.uk if you have time and can assist. We really appreciate your time and input and this feedback will be invaluable to us moving forward with deployment.

Thank you in advance,

Fiona

10-30 June 2013

Did you get a great mark and want to work up your assignment into a publication?  Or perhaps it didn’t go as well as you hoped, and you’d like to tackle the topic again to help with future writing.  Either way, the three-week summer school in June on Academic Writing will give you some tools for looking at your assignments with a fresh eye.   By thinking about how to write about your topic for an academic publication, you’ll investigate the differences and similarities between requirements for your lecturers and journal editors.  The course is entirely online using Moodle, and would involve 5-8 hours a week.

Free for all MSc in E-Learning students!

Open only to current students of the MSc in E-Learning, and limited to 10 places.  Priority will be given to those who haven’t attended previously, but others are still welcome to apply again.

Please note that this is not a credit-bearing course.

For further details, contact Christine Sinclair at Christine.Sinclair@ed.ac.uk

The Summer School is now fully subscribed, but do get in touch if you’re interested and want to be put on a waiting list.  Christine

Hi there

As part of a EU-funded project, I’ve got a group of Polish educators coming at the end of May. The project explores the use of e-textbooks and so we are looking for individuals and organisations in Edinburgh that would be interested in sharing their experience in using e-textbooks, e-books and broadly understood multimedia is the teaching process (preferably in the context of vocational education but not necessarily).

If you think you could help in any way (most probably by giving a presentation – there will be some money for that) or know somebody who could, please send me an email: annarolinska@yahoo.co.uk If you’d like to know more about the project, get in touch too

Best

Ania

hi all,

The University of Edinburgh is doing quite a lot of work around its central support and systems at the moment, with online distance learning, and students, in mind. Your input is being sought in a couple of ways right now:

1. Careers Support for Online Distance Leaners – survey

The Careers Service is reviewing the support it offers to online distance learners at the University of Edinburgh.  They want to ensure that the service they offer is tailored to the needs of odl students.  They have launched a short survey for current students to find out what you think.  The survey is at: https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/odlstudent

2. Tell Communications and Marketing what you think about University communications!

Distance learning students: take part in some online discussion groups on 15^th & 16^th April.

The University’s Communications and Marketing Department is running a series of focus groups on student communications. We are really keen to hear what you think about how the University communicates with you via things like the website, email and social media.  This is a great opportunity to shape the University’s student communications strategy, and to help improve the ODL student experience.

What?

The group will last about 1.5 hours and participants will be reimbursed for their time (with a £20 Amazon.co.uk voucher).

Taking part is very easy and no specialist knowledge is required.  The discussion will be facilitated, all you have to do is tell us how you feel about the communications you receive from the University.

When?

The groups will take place on:

7pm (BST), Monday 15^th April

7pm (BST), Tuesday 16^th April

Where?

The groups will be run online. If you are able to take part – we will send you a link to a Collaborate discussion.

How do I sign up?

To take part we will ask you to complete a short questionnaire detailing your programme of study and your availability.

If you are interested in taking part or have any questions please contact Kate.Glencross@ed.ac.uk

Hey everyone,

I’m hoping to put together an asynchronous community building activity (mid-March) for all online learners across the University and I wondered whether anyone would like to help brainstorm a few ideas and create a small landing site to bring together activity on different platforms, e.g. googlemaps, twitter etc.

If you’re interested, drop me an email – s0679873@sms.ed.ac.uk

Thanks!

Wednesday’s Alumni Seminar Event in Second Life was a wonderful success, with two brilliant talks from Michael Gallagher and Nicola Osborne, attended by a delightful mix of students, alumni, programme team and friends. Some photographs of the event are here – thanks to Clara and Austin for taking and sharing these.

Michael’s talk and slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/gallagher.michaelsean/multimodal-composition-via-mobile-technology. The title of his talk was Mobile Material Texts: Composition in the Humanities and Legitimate Peripheral Participation.

Nicola’s slides from her talk, “The course of online events never did run smooth”: lessons learned running the Will’s World Online Hack, are available at http://www.slideshare.net/edinadocumentationofficer/the-course-of-online-events-never-did-run-smooth.

Many thanks to all who attended, to Marshall Dozier and Fiona Littleton for their work in setting up the space and making it so welcoming, and most of all to the “awesomesauce” Michael and Nicola.

Alumni Seminar Event, 20 February 2013

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the University of Edinburgh’s second annual Innovative Learning Week! There are a few things going on this week that you might want to get involved with, in addition to your regularly scheduled course-related innovation. MSc in E-learning courses are running this week as usual – and it’s week 6, for those who might be losing track!

1. Alumni seminar event – Wednesday 20 February, 7:30pm, Second Life. All are invited – please come and join us! More info on the events page.

2. Remixing the manifesto for teaching online. Experiment, explore and work with the manifesto text. Rory is leading two Second Life workshops this week for those new to remixing – all the details are in the manifesto remix wiki. Share your creations in Twitter using the #manifestoto hashtag.

3. Live tweet during the Bruno Latour Gifford Lectures – using the hashtag #blgiff.

Know of any other great things people should get involved in this week? Let us know in the comments and we will add to this post.

Next week is the University of Edinburgh’s Innovative Learning Week, 18-22 February 2013, and as part of it we thought we’d try remixing the Manifesto for Teaching Online and sharing the results. If you enjoy playing with words, pictures, videos, screencasts, web pages, and any other digital object that lends itself to mashing up or remixing, why not grab a line or an idea from the manifesto and join in? Use your own words and images, or sample some Creative Commons or public domain sources and some Web 2.0 tools. Check the manifestoto2013 wiki on the 18th for more ideas and inspiration.

Throughout the week you can tweet remixes to #manifestoto and post them to the wiki, and visit Second Life for two drop-in workshops with virtual host Algernon Twang to talk about and experiment with remix ideas:

Beach tent at Holyrood Park, 12:00-14:00 UK time, Tuesday 19 February 2013

Beach tent at Holyrood Park, 12:00-14:00 UK time, Thursday 21 February 2013

Remember, online can be the privileged mode!