WebLearn - The University of Oxford VLE
1. General Information
WebLearn: Allowing members of the University to create and store materials to support their teaching and learning activities. Easy to create and upload materials, easy to foster collaboration and easy to secure access.
| "All of our course outlines, timetables, lecture notes, reading lists, and resources are available on WebLearn. [....] It makes communicating information and sharing resources extremely effective since anyone in our course, including the administrator, can provide or receive up-to-date information at any time of day." a Medical Sciences student interviewed as part of the Thema project |
1.2. About the New WebLearn Service
WebLearn is a web-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), which can be used to both support and enhance teaching and learning. It provides tools to enable University members with very little web experience to set up a structured web site and provide an excellent resource for their students.
WebLearn is a free service offered to any member of the University - areas are available for all departments, faculties, colleges, schools and other administrative units to focus their electronic teaching and learning activity.
On 30th June 2009 a new WebLearn service was introduced ("new WebLearn") which will run in parallel with the old service ("old WebLearn") for two years both to make the transition easier for users and to give ample time for material to be moved.
- make announcements;
- share, protect and search for hand-outs, course notes, presentations, podcasts, movies and other multimedia resources;
- set and submit electronic assignments (with optional 'Turnitin' plagiarism detection);
- disseminate reading lists with live links to OLIS;
- promote groups discussion with forums and chat rooms;
- carry out online opinion polls;
- deliver course evaluation and feedback forms;
- perform formative assessments with multiple-choice tests and the like;
- publicise events via the course schedule (calendar);
- enable collaborative authoring within a wiki (which also supports mathematical notation);
- sign-up for tutorials;
- store private files online;
- work with collaborators from other institutions who can easily be issued with their own username and password;
- much more!
WebLearn areas can be made publicly available or restricted to specific individuals or ad-hoc and predefined groups. It is also possible to stipulate exactly what site members are allowed to do once they have entered a site. The system contains information regarding course and departmental affiliation for all staff and students, and it is this information that can be used to restrict access. As all areas are arranged in a hierarchy that matches the University's organisational structure, this promotes casual browsing.
OUCS offers training, support and advice for all of the above facilities, details are given later.
Dr Stuart Lee, Director of Computing Systems and Services, who is also a National Teaching Fellow (2009) and Lecturer in Old English uses WebLearn as part of his teaching. At the WebLearn launch event he spoke about the new WebLearn service, some of the facilities that have caught his eye, and put WebLearn into context with other University systems that support teaching, learning and research. His engaging talk was recorded and is available for download here. He gives a number of tips on how he made his Old English WebLearn site lively and engaging and shows how up-to-the-minute technologies such as Twitter and You Tube.
New WebLearn is based on an open source Collaborative Learning Environment called Sakai. Sakai is used in many of the world's leading Universities such as Cambridge, Yale, UCB, Stanford, ANU and MIT. Ian Dolphin who is the Joint Information Systems Council International Director of the e-Framework for Education and Research, and former Sakai Foundation Board member gave an excellent talk about the international Sakai Community at the WebLearn launch event.
1.2.1. Establishing a Presence in the New WebLearn
To establish a presence in new WebLearn, your Head of Department or College will need to authorise somebody to become a 'Local WebLearn Coordinator' and complete the Request for an Administration Site form. Once your department has an Administration Site, it is worth consulting with colleagues and deciding on a mutually agreed structure for consistency, for example, information could be provided by year, by course, by year or by tutor: there are a number of options. OUCS is very happy to offer advice on good practice in this area.
The Request for an Administration Site form also includes a set of guidelines for use of the system. For example, heed must be paid to copyright issues and there is a legal requirement that all material posted for download by students should be accessible (SENDA). The WebLearn team have produced some guidelines to producing accessibility material; the University have also written an accessibility standard which gives tips on how to comply with SENDA.
It is no longer possible for a department to request an area in the old WebLearn.
1.2.2. Help With Creating Material
OUCS is happy to offer expert advice about building up an effective departmental presence. To request a one-to-one meeting please contact the WebLearn team by email. Unfortunately, OUCS is not able to actually create course material for departments, however, a commercial service is available from the Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning Unit (TALL) which is part of the Department for Continuing Education.
1.2.3. Moving From Old WebLearn
New WebLearn has a number of advantages over the old system. Many of the improvements are listed here. There is a separate section in this document outlining the process of migrating content.
1.2.4. Linking to WebLearn from your web page
The following HTML code, when clicked, will load the front page of WebLearn. The target of the link can be manually edited to jump to a specific department of college area if desired. It is quite acceptable to change the size of the WebLearn graphic; alternative graphics are available from the graphical resources section of this document.
1.3. Old WebLearn
At the end of the 2011/12 academic year the old service will be withdrawn, until this time, both services will share the same URL, (http://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/) so in many cases it will not be necessary to change links in documentation. There are routes into both systems from the new home page which also contains instructions to students to help them find their course areas if they have not been given an explicit URL.
- 30 June 2009: the new WebLearn service begins, this comprises both the old and new WebLearns
- June 2011: old WebLearn service becomes deprecated (read only)
- July 2012: old service is decommissioned
As a result of the switch over, almost all development effort is now concentrated upon the new service; the only enhancements to the old WebLearn service will be in areas related to the migration of content and security. The VLE team will still fix any serious bugs but will, in general, not be adding any new facilities.
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