Virtual Learning Environments in PBS
The University of Portsmouth adopted WebCT Vista to be the university VLE around two years ago, not long after WebCT was taken over by Blackboard. Wimba Tools have been added to the system, principally Wimba Classroom, Wimba Create and Wimba Voice. Turnitin plagiarim detection software has also been integrated with the software.
PBS virtual learning environments include unit sites and course portals. They are maintained and developed either by the PBS eLearning Team, or by academics themselves, dependent on owner's desire and academic skill level. Sites serve either campus-based units or courses, distance learning courses, or corporate education programmes.
Requests for a unit site or course portal to be developed may be submitted to eteam@port.ac.uk, and an eLearning Team developer will contact the academic making the request. The full initiating procedure can be found on the 'Engaging eTeam Services' page of this site.
At the University of Portsmouth, we call WebCT Vista, (now Blackboard Vista Enterprise License), 'Victory'.
Blackboard Vista Enterprise License (Victory)
Victory sites can have include a range of features and tools
Victory Tools
Using the Mail facility to communicate with students means they get a consistent service from you, and you get a complete record of their questions and work progress reports. This can be very useful later in the semester.
Discussion areas can be easily set up to provide moderated discussions threads on a range of topics relevant to a unit or course. These can be assessed, and the very similar blogging facility allows streams of consciousness to be placed online to allow student peers to stimulate group thinking.
Assessments can be created online by adding questions to a question bank, and then creating tests by drawing randomly on that bank of questions.
Question types include:
- Calculated
- Combination
- Fill in the Blank
- Jumbled Sentence
- Matching
- Multiple Choice
- Paragraph
- Short Answer
- True False
One you have created and named an empty assessment, you can create a range of questions, or add existing questions from a drop down list, using the buttons ‘Create Questions’ or ‘Add (Questions) to Assessment’. Questions can be put into Question Sets and stored in categories as desired.
Assignments allow question papers or task sheets to be uploaded to Victory, and a brief description of how to use an assignment can be created. Students can then upload work to Victory using the file upload facility.
The assignment includes a selective release and closure facility, whereby an assignment appears in the ‘Assignments’ home page at a certain date, and the upload link disappears after the submission deadline passes. Note that details of the assignment hand in dates will appear in the site Calendar if the check box ‘Create a corresponding event in the Calendar tool’ is ticked. Students can either upload text and files, or a zip file containing their assignment files. The assignments can be graded, and the grade can be released to students via the Grade Book facility in Victory. Alternatively, they can be graded via Grading Form, which can be added when the Assignment is created.
Note that additional instructions for particular groups can be created and attached via the ‘Assignment recipients’ section. This permits groups created in Group Manager to receive instructions that are specific to groupwork that only they are doing (as opposed to work set for other groups), if the academic chooses this route. See the ‘Group Manager’ section below for more information on managing groups.
The Calendar facility allows course deadlines to be posted online. Key visiting speakers can also be scheduled, and the topics of the weekly lecture programme can feature too. An academic may also choose to show all lab dates and venues, to permit students who miss a lab to find another later in the week. Having this information centrally starts to build a community, and this is what will make a VLE more useful as a learning tool.
Chatrooms are available as part of Victory, but once Victory sites make use of the Wimba Collaboration Suite, chat rooms will become a bit second rate. However, they are there for students to interact on a project from different geographic locations, where an answer is needed quickly, such as when working on a group project. See the Wimba page for more details of that software.
The Media Library is one way of displaying videos and other media files. However, users may find that uploading videos to the university streaming server in WMV file format and then using embedding a link to the file in PowerPoint slides, or a Victory web page, or the Web Links module works best for me. Clicking the link sees the file play in Windows Media Player as a new window, and also prevents several videos starting to play at once – which can happen if the code to embed a video in the Media Gallery is incorrectly written. Files can be uploaded to the streaming server by one of the PBS Media Technicians (Ian Plant or Michelle Kane), who are located in the Richmond Building Floor 1 Information Services Office.
Web Links is a module where you can provide students with useful links (i.e. ‘URLs’) to websites and files to download etc. These links can be filed in categories, to make them easier to manage/use.
The Who’s Online feature provides site users with information about who is currently online and could therefore be collaborated with via chat rooms or discussions and blogs.
Your MyFiles folder is a place to which you can upload/download work. If this fills up, file uploads will fail with an ‘Exception Error’. The solution should be to move your files to other folders, or to delete unwanted files. This may be particularly important for academics wishing to download submitted assignments for marking. DCQE have doubled the individual ‘MyFiles’ folder capacity for academics to alleviate this problem where it has existed previously.
The Group Manager provides a sign up sheet for students to choose a group to join for purposes of undertaking group work. The sign up sheet is created by the academic at the start of the group work, and the number of groups participating must be defined then. Inventive uses for this tool include the creation of an extra group to which students can be fired from other groups. So students who fail to participate in their allocated or chosen group may be fired back to the ‘un-hired students’ group, from where other groups can choose to hire them. This can be a powerful motivator, while allowing good students to avoid being dragged down by lazy ones.
The use of Portfolios in Victory (accessed via a tab on a student’s My Victory page) allows student work to be collected in one place, and made available to both external examiners and potential employers. If assessments are themed, the portfolio can demonstrate a body of work which shows an employer that ‘this student can do this for me’. This is very valuable to students seeking employment. They can create curriculum vitae that prove they have been a student at Portsmouth, and which help them show their true potential succinctly.
Victory Designer Tools
Manage Course allows you tick a box against any tool that you want to be available for use in your Victory site. To remove a tool, just untick the box next to it.
The Course Menu allows you to change from vertical to horizontal menus, to have text and icons in the menu. Just icons, or just text. It also allows you to show or hide course tools in the site menu. You can also add a custom hyperlink to a module or web site you want to call from the main menu by clicking the ‘Add Custom Link’ button and entering a name for the site and its URL. Don’t like the Victory menus? Make up your own!
If you paste the link to another Victory site in this box, when you click that link in the main menu it will take you directly to that other site – but you will have to add your login details to get there. To be able to do the same thing to return to the site you are leaving, do a similar thing in that site for the link to the previous site.
Colours lets you customise the colours of the page and menu backgrounds, header and text. Click ‘Custom’ and change the colours by clicking the icons and choosing a new hexadecimal colour code. For codes you might want to use, see the URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Safest_web_colors
Course Content Icons allows you to change the icon for an element of course content, such as the ‘Assessments’ menu. Click the action menu, and ‘Replace Image’ and find one on your hard drive.
Settings allow you to edit several basic settings for the various tools being used on your Victory site. There are three categories: Tools; System Integration; Administration. The systems integration menu is locked – there are no user settings in it, as are some of the other tools and admin settings.. You will not need to use these menus much, if at all.
Import gives you a ‘WebDav’ file upload facility where you can view what files you have in the ‘Class Files’ folders for the currently viewed Victory site, or the centrally maintained files for the University of Portsmouth in the ‘Repository’. You can also browse files on your local computer for uploading to Victory by clicking the ‘My Computer’ icon. Note that you can upload files without clicking the ‘My Computer’ icon by clicking the link ‘Click here to select files individually’. Using this allows you to upload files one at a time – which may be useful if the ‘My Computer’ file selection function does not work for some reason.
Backup allows you to click ‘Back Up Course’ to create a backup of your course. This is useful if you in error delete your student list, or content you meant to keep. If you haven’t backed up your course, do it soon, and do it regularly to be safe! It may save you heartache in future. Note that you will be told upon initiating a backup that your site is in the backup queue.
Course Preview Page Setup allows you to create a web page that can be uploaded to the ‘Public Files’ folder of Victory using the ‘Browse for Course Preview Page’ button. This opens a limited version of the ‘My Computer’ file browser that allows you to upload and make available a page telling potential users of your site what the site is about, without their having to be registered for the unit or course involved.
Date Rollover allows you to change the dates of the site so that it is re-used for the next cohort. It is suggested that non-expert users let the DCQE eLearning Team or PBS eTeam do this for you.
The Course URL at the bottom of the ‘Manage Course’ menu can be pasted into a URL box during an ‘Add Custom Link’ setup – which was explained above in the ‘Course Menu’ section. It gives a direct link to the currently viewed course, which if added to the menu of another course and clicked by that course’s user, will take them straight to the currently viewed course (although at the time of writing it will ask you to enter your Victory login details).
File Manager allows you to see all the files that have been uploaded to your ‘Class Files’ folder. These files may include lecture slides, case studies, PDF documents, even multimedia files. Click the ‘Public Files’ tree item to see your course preview page file, and the Imported Resources’ tree item for any files imported or created to that area. Click the ‘File Manager’ link at the head of the tree to return to viewing ‘Class Files’.
You can create folders to store sections of files in, or just keep them all in the ‘Class Files’ root folder. A big site should probably make use of sub-folders to make it easy to manage and maintain. If you are going to do this, create the sub-folders using the ‘Create Folder’ button before you upload your files. Upload your files using the ‘Get Files’ button.
Create Grading Form allows you to set up any number of marking criteria in rows of a table, and then to add performance indicators in columns. Each of these indicators can be given a mark, which is totalled up. You can remove existing indicators or criteria and add different ones, or edit those already present. A ‘Grading Form’ allows you to show students what they can get marks for, and how they can improve their performance. Access or even build these forms in the ‘Teach’ tab when showing student unit or course elements via your Victory site.
Selective Release allows you to see which members of a cohort can see the content in the site. What it is even more useful for is seeing quickly who is actually enrolled on a course, if you just want a quick list of students and their Netware usernames. You can copy and paste this list into Windows Notepad or other simple text editor, and it gives you a quick list of cohort members to print out.
Getting Help with Victory Menu Usage
For help using any of these Victory elements, contact the eTeam in person by visiting Burnaby Terrace 0.06, or via email, via eteam@pbs.port.ac.uk. Alternatively, refer to the DCQE eLearning website, which offers an online manual for Victory, plus quite a few tutorials and knowledge base items on different aspects of using Victory.
Find the DCQE help elements at the eLearning Centre website at the following address:
http://www.port.ac.uk/departments/services/dcqe/eLearningCentre/eLearning/
Victory Instructor Tools
While you create your course in the ‘Build Tab’, you make use of your site with students in the ‘Teach Tab’. This adds some additional menu items to the ‘Instructor Tools’ area of the main menu. The following describes those tools that don’t appear in the ‘Build Tab’.
The Assessment Manager allows assessments set to appear in the ‘Graded’ section once the tutor has marked the work, or in the ‘Not Graded’ section if the work has been uploaded (submitted) but not marked. All assessments set appear under the ‘All’ Tab. Hence the Assessment Manager tool is a useful way for a tutor to see the progress of student work to completion.
The Assignment Dropbox offers a similar facility for Assignments, but additionally allows students to see work done by their peers (and hence gain acceptance of the standard of work and of marking) by being able to see work allocated to the ‘Published’ tab.
The Grade Book has a number of functions. One function is to allow the enrolment of students (teaching assistants, auditors, or section designers too) onto an instance of a Victory site. This can either be done for individual students (even by Teaching Assistants taking student for labs), or for who cohorts by listing the students in a spreadsheet as comma separated values.
The ‘Import from Spreadsheet’ menu button initiates a means of browsing for the CSV file that contains name and Netware username for each student.
The second function of the Grade Book is to show the following data for each student in a table:
- Last Name
- First Name
- User ID (e.g. hrm123456)
- Role (Student, Teaching Assistant, Auditor or Section Designer)
- Overall ‘Midterm’ Grade (if any)
- Overall ‘Final’ Grade (if the grade book is in use).
- Unit Feedback (if the Unit Questionnaire in the Assessments section has been completed)
- Assessment Marks (for each assessment, by name or number as designed by the tutor)
A third function of the Grade Book is to allow any student or other person with access to the site to be emailed using the standard email facility, but by ticking selective tickboxes for those who you would like to be recipients.
A fourth function of the Grade Book is to grant access to view site content, deny access, or unenroll a students from a site, again by selective ticking or the tickbox against each student’s name.
Group Manager allows you to create a single group and define the students allocated to it, or to create multiple groups based on student numbers where you add students later or permit random formation of groups by Victory, or where you create group sign up sheets, and allow students to add themselves to a group of their choice. Setting up groups of any of these types is straightforward and a good way of assigning students to projects within your unit or course.
The Tracking facility allows the tutor to get reports on which files are accessed by students, what a particular student has looked at on the site, what tools are used most often, etc. Reports can be tabulated or graphical in format.
Notes can be created at any time. Think of these as ‘post it’ notes to remember things to do.
Victory Student View
This shows the home page and menus as the student will see them. Tools that have not been hidden will appear in the menus. If you are assessing students in groups, then by having a ‘demo student’ in a group, you will be able to see what is being done via student view. If you have chosen to make the menu horizontal not vertical, it will appear like that in this view.
The Student View Template is created by your Online Course Developer. It can contain images and documents specific to a department, or have a common home page image/look/feel as desired. We have recently consulted on revising the initially launched templates to more nearly match departmental requirements within the faculty. If you have elements to add to your departmental template, please let the eTeam know via email.
Victory Student View
This shows the home page and menus as the student will see them. Tools that have not been hidden will appear in the menus. If you are assessing students in groups, then by having a ‘demo student’ in a group, you will be able to see what is being done via student view. If you have chosen to make the menu horizontal not vertical, it will appear like that in this view.
The Student View Template is created by your Online Course Developer. It can contain images and documents specific to a department, or have a common home page image/look/feel as desired. We have recently consulted on revising the initially launched templates to more nearly match departmental requirements within the faculty. If you have elements to add to your departmental template, please let the eTeam know via email.
