Andy Bright

Female student looking at a laptop and drinking a hot drink

Student Access to Blackboard

Leave a Comment / Blackboard /

As students return to the University for the new Semester, we thought it would be a good idea to create some guidance covering getting access to Blackboard and Blackboard modules. Although this is primarily aimed at brand new students, returning students will also find some of the information useful also.

Feel free to distribute this guidance to any students who are having difficulty accessing Blackboard. It should answer their questions about the steps they need to take and who to contact if they are still experiencing difficulties.

Student Access to Blackboard Guidance

Organisation Access

Many course organisations are scripted so that students get access automatically depending on the modules they have enrolled on. If your core module codes have changed this year, please contact us at TEL@worc.ac.uk and we can ensure that the scripts will capture the correct students.

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September is Coming!

Leave a Comment / Blackboard, Training /

We bring dire news form the North! Winter (or September at least) is coming! Do you have everything in place, ready for the Wildlings your students to arrive? Here is our checklist to help you survive prepare.

Have you enrolled on your modules?

As has been the case for the last few years, you will need to enrol on your modules via the Blackboard 2022-23 form, which you will find on the staff portal after signing in. Please allow 24 hours for your request to be actioned. Please note that course leaders also need to complete this step. If you are no longer a course lead but are still receiving enrolment notification emails you will need to let Registry know so that SITS can be updated.

There is also a Blackboard Access 2021-22 form still live on the staff portal. If you are taking over a module this year, it may be useful to enrol on last year’s module.

Have you transferred your content?

As ever, modules will be empty and you may want to transfer content from the 21-22 instance of the module. Do not transfer the Assessment page as assignments need to be set up afresh each year. Migrating assignments can cause serious problems in the grade centre of the new module, so it really is best avoided.

Instructions for transferring content can be found here.

Sharpen your skills

We run a range of courses designed to help you get the most out of Blackboard. These are published on the Staff Development Workshop page and will be advertised via our Twitter, blog and the staff newsletter.

If you require one-to-one training on a specific area of Blackboard, email us with details at TEL@worc.ac.uk

Clapper board

Blackboard Rollover 22-23

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Blackboard modules for the 22-23 academic year are now available and ready for you to start working on.

As in previous years you will need to re-register for access to the new modules (even if you are the module leader) from the staff web pages – instructions can be found here:
https://lttu.uk/support/Blackboard/Manual/accessing-new-courses.html

You may want to consider migrating content from last year’s modules. If you do this, it is very important that you do not roll over the assessment tab or any of the assessments within, as this will cause problems within your grade centre. If you roll over any tests or quizzes please note that these will not be automatically deployed, so you will need to insert them into the appropriate area within your module.

Whilst consistency is an important factor, we recognise that all modules are individual and you may want to look at some of the other tools and functionality available in Blackboard – we have a full online Blackboard guide but if you need any further support from the TEL team, or would like us to provide an advisory review of your online learning resources, please contact TEL@worc.ac.uk to arrange a session with an Academic Learning Technologist.

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To all Blackboard users – VLE Review

Blackboard, Uncategorised, VLE Review /

Our VLE will be changing from September 2024 and we would like to start the conversation with users now to gather feedback, which will inform how we move forward with this important platform.

As an initial step we have created a short survey to gather your thoughts on what features and tools you find useful and how you use the VLE in your learning and teaching. The survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete and we would like to gather responses from as many users as possible so please follow this link to complete the survey https://ucw.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/virtual-learning-environment-review-2022

We will also be holding some open workshops for staff to come along to and take part in more detailed discussion. These workshops will be held on June 14th, 17th and 23rd and you can register your interest on the staff development booking system. The workshops will be face to face and facilitated by the TEL Unit and include a range of interactive activities and discussions so please come along and join us if you can.

Libby Symonds

Head of Technology Enhanced Learning Unit

microphone

Auto-Captioning in Collaborate

Leave a Comment / Uncategorised /

Collaborate Virtual Classroom now offers options for providing captions on recordings, offering far greater accessibility for hearing-impaired students.

How to Create auto-captions

Collaborate is leveraging AI powered speech to text recognition to generate a transcription of what is said during the session. While automated captioning can’t match captions created by humans, it is an easy solution to start with.

The speech to text service and the resulting captions are hosted in the same data center as your Collaborate session.

Use the Auto-generate captions to have captions created for you, as the session owner:

  1. From Collaborate scheduler, select Recordings and find the recording you want.
  2. Select the Recording options menu and select Recording settings.
  3. Select Enable captions, if not already on.
  4. Select Create auto-caption and Save.

It may take time for the auto-captions to generate. You can leave the screen and come back later to view and share them.

Collaborate virtual classroom settings menu

After the captions are created, you’ll see that captions are available from the recording list. The captions will also immediately appear in the recording player for anybody having access to the recording.

Moderators can review the captions. If you want to improve or correct anything in the captions, download the caption file to edit. Upload the new file when you are done.

If you have any queries, please contact the Technology Enahnced Learning Unit at tel@worc.ac.uk

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External Examiner Access to Blackboard 2022

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With marking season underway, we thought it would be a good idea to provide updated guidance for getting EEs access to Blackboard so that they can moderate student assignments.

The first step is to ensure that examiners have their University of Worcester single sign-on account set up (this can be arranged via HR). They will need this to access all university systems.

Once this is in place, external examiners can request access to modules via the Blackboard Access form. As with all University systems, it is extremely important that users use Chrome or Firefox as their browser.

The process for this is:

  1. Navigate to the University of Worcester Staff Portal – the link to this can also be found at the bottom of the University website.
  2. Log in to the portal via the \’Sign In\’ button at the top right of the screen using University of Worcester account username and password.
  3. Click on the relevant Blackboard Access link. Usually displayed are the current year and the previous year. This will take the user to the Blackboard Access form.
  4. Complete the form for each module required. When entering the module code, it is important that there are no spaces before, after or within the code. Under type of access, select \’External Examiner\’.
  5. Access to the modules will be granted within 24 hours.

To access Blackboard:

  1. Navigate to the University of Worcester Staff Portal – the link to this can also be found at the bottom of the University website.
  2. Log in to the portal via the \’Sign In\’ button at the top right of the screen using University of Worcester account username and password.
  3. Under Applications, click the Blackboard 9.1 link.

Accessing Assessments

Once in the system, and the Access Request forms have been processed, External Examiners will see the modules they need to mark on the Courses tab (which you can see has been selected in the image below). Clicking on the module name will open the course.

\"View

Accessing the students\’ work for marking/moderation depends on the system the assignment is using. The course tutor can verify this if required.

The finer points of how marking/moderation is to take place should be agreed at a course level.

Turnitin

Turnitin is the most commonly used system for assessment and is the best system for text based assignments such as essays, reports and presentations.

Within the course, unless stated otherwise, Turnitin points can be found under \’Assessments\’. The External Examiner will click into the assessment that they are moderating. This will open the Assignment Inbox. Clicking on one of these documents will open students\’ work.

For further information, see our sections of the Turnitin Workflow that cover finding assignments and online grading and feedback.

Blackboard

Blackboard Assignments are used for portfolios and non-text based work, including Panopto video assignments.

To moderate Blackboard assignments, External Examiners will need to enter via the grade centre and navigate to the correct assignment. Some guidance from the course tutor may be required for this.

See our guide on Grading and Feedback for further information – please be aware that this guidance is intended for tutors.

Using Vevox for Q&A

Leave a Comment / Vevox /

You may be familiar with Vevox as an in-class polling tool, but you may be less familiar with its utility for conducting Q&A in both online and face-to-face sessions.

Benefits of using Vevox Q&A

  • Allows for and encourages interactive engagement between session / class host and student participants.
  • Perfect for creating topical ‘sub conversations’ which in-turn helps to reinforce collective learning.
  • Unlike the chat panel in Collaborate or Teams, the Vevox Q&A panel is anonymous. This puts everybody on a ‘level playing field’ and empowers even the quietest person in the room to have a voice and ask questions.
  •  Great resource for consolidating questions and interactivity coming in from multiple audiences  (online / remote & physical audience).
  • Moderated Q&A allows the host presenter / lecturer to easily control the flow of questions and decide what questions to publish.
  • Q&A can be left open indefinitely to allow participants to post into the Q&A board, even if the session is not being presented live.
  • Can also be a highly effective tool when conducting a group work exercise.

How to get started

First, check that the Q&A panel is visible on your Vevox home screen. If you do not see this, go to the settings and you will see an option to switch the Q&A panel on. Then, using the Q&A panel is like any other Vevox session, generating a code for students to enter on their personal devices in order to participate.

Moderation

  • Moderation is a powerful tool to use when appropriate and sometimes may be necessary depending on the situation.
  • Moderation provides your Q&A with an extra layer of ‘Quality Control’ as submitted questions must first be reviewed & published before appearing on the Q&A board.
  • It gives much more control to the host and works particularly well in a ‘co-hosted’ environment.
  • Moderation can be toggled on/off at any time during a session (see below).
  • All moderated questions still appear in the data report
  • If using Moderation, you also have the ability to share a ‘Moderation Link’ with external users (does not require a Vevox License).
  • Important Note: Even if Moderation is not switched on, Questions can still be actively hidden on demand.

\"How

As we all know, the majority of teaching is carried out by one person without a moderator to keep on top of the questions being asked. One way around this is to structure your teaching into sections, moderating and dealing with questions after each section.

Case Study

Below, Dr Christina Stanley at the University of Chester explains why she favours using the Vevox Q&A panel over the chat panels in the VLE or in Teams.

“I found that when asking questions in live Teams sessions, students just weren’t responding, either vocally or by using the chat, so I tried using Vevox (the Q&A board) instead. Suddenly, responses flooded in; from having no responses at all in the chat, I instantly had about half the class responding using Vevox. Student feedback indicates that many prefer to ask/answer questions using Vevox due to the anonymity it allows them. This is especially important for those students who suffer from anxiety, or just lack confidence. Vevox is therefore a powerful tool for ensuring our online teaching is both engaging and inclusive.”

Dr Christina Stanley
Senior Lecturer
Dept of Biological Sciences
University of Chester

If you have any queries about using Vevox, including the Q&A panel, please contact us at tel@worc.ac.uk 

Releasing Turnitin grades in the Grade Centre

Leave a Comment / Turnitin /

The move to Ultra based navigation has seen a number of changes to the way Blackboard looks when the user first logs in. Primarily, this is built around a clearer, cleaner look and feel.

One result of this is that the Grades panel – which replaces the My Grades area in classic Blackboard – is now far more visible to students. Consequently many more students are accessing this area to obtain their grades and feedback.

While Blackboard assignment results have always been released by unhiding the corresponding column in the grade centre, there was no imperative to do so with Turnitin assignments, as students almost always accessed grades and feedback via the submission point. Although this is still the method we would recommend to students, you may now find more students using the Grades panel. This means it is a good idea to release the columns for Turnitin assignments on the feedback release date to prevent confusion and unnecessary queries.

To do this, simply perform the reverse of the method you used to hide the column:

  1. Go to the Grade Centre
  2. Select Full Grade Centre
  3. Locate the column that relates to the assignment in question. Hidden columns will display the icon with the red line below.
  4. Click on the circle/arrow icon to bring up the menu.
  5. Select \’Hide from students on/off\’. When visible, the icon above will no longer appear.

If you have any queries, feel free to contact us at tel@worc.ac.uk

Vevox mini workshops

Leave a Comment / Vevox /

Have you used Vevox yet in your teaching? It\’s a fantastic online polling software that really boosts student engagement and interaction.

We will be collaborating with the Vevox team to provide two 30-minute mini-workshops, which will take place online.

One of these sessions is intended to look at and discuss the Q&A board within Vevox and some of its more advanced features, while the other is a ‘Brunch And Learn’ session, which is set to include some information around past and upcoming release features, as well as guest presentations from two University colleagues, Amy Cherry and Rob Herbert, around how they use the platform in their teaching methodologies and their own personal experiences with the product.

Please see full details and registration links for the two sessions below:

Utilising Vevox Q&A  (Wednesday 30th March: 14:00  – 14:30)

Register interest

 

Brunch & Learn (Friday 1st April: 12:30 – 13:00)

Register interest

What to do with your recordings in Blackboard

Leave a Comment / Blackboard, Collaborate, Panopto /

As you are probably aware by now, video files should not be simply uploaded to Blackboard. The files are far too large and will rapidly use up your module\’s data quota. Instead, videos should be uploaded to Panopto.

However, some staff have enquired about managing their Collaborate recordings, which raises a number of questions – how to link to them, whether to upload to Panopto – so we thought it would be a good idea to explore this.

Data Storage

Let’s start by looking at the way the systems manage storage.

Blackboard

Every Blackboard module has a default data quota of 1000MB. Where there is a genuine need, this can be extended, but the data quota of the entire University needs to be carefully managed, as exceeding this has a significant financial implication. Removing videos is an easy way to bring this down. Remember that any resource you delete from a module must also be deleted in the files area in order to impact on the data quota.

Collaborate

Collaborate videos are stored outside of the module on which they were recorded, so do not impact on the data quota. However, there is an overall data quota for Collaborate that also needs careful management. As a result, we are required to archive older videos, having recently deleted all videos recorded prior to January 2021.

Panopto

There is currently no data quota for Panopto storage as we are charged by the number of views. However, this is likely to change in the future as Panopto moves to a charging by storage model.

Should you move Collaborate recordings to Panopto?

Given that Collaborate recordings eventually need to be archived, some staff have asked whether it would be better to move all Collaborate recordings to Panopto as a matter of course. This is probably not necessary but there may be instances when it would be a good idea:

  • Will the recording be required for a long time? If students will need to access the video for longer than a year, then it might be a good idea to download the files and upload to Panopto.
  • Will the recording need to be deployed on future modules? Some resources may be of use to students on future modules, in which case a move to Panopto may be a good idea so that resources can be shared between modules.
  • Does the video need captioning? One drawback of Collaborate is that it does not provide closed captions, which may be required for accessibility. If you have students on your course who need closed captions, then uploading videos to Panopto may be a good idea, as Panopto does have excellent captioning options.

Bear in mind that uploading videos wholesale to Panopto is a significant undertaking for you as the course tutor, so you should weigh up these issues before you decide what will work best for you and your students.

Also consider that, although there is currently no data quota on Panopto, this is likely to be introduced in the future, so we as an institution will also need to manage Panopto usage. Therefore it’s probably a good idea to only upload resources to Panopto where you think it is really necessary.

If you have any queries feel free to get in touch at tel@worc.ac.uk

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