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Here are a few things we need to tell you about your NILE sites for the 15/16 year. Please take look as there will more than likely be something that is relevant to you.
Making your site live
Don’t forget that sites are not automatically made available to students. You need to make them available once you’re ready. To do this, you can use the Quick Actions box which is on the Sites & Organisations tab. Click Site Availability, then use the toggle switch to make sites available/unavailable (ie. turn them on/off) to students.
Contacts
To make things easier to copy contact details from site to site you can change your contacts section from using the Contacts Tool to a standard content area. This will enable you to copy individual items/contacts between sites instead of all contacts at the same time. However, if you have spent some time on your contacts area already (using the Tool) and just want to ensure the Student Desk details are correct, you can create a new contact and use this URL as the link: https://nile.northampton.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/xid-2138093_1?target=blank
For more information on using a Content Area for your Contacts have a look at this guide
Reading lists
Unfortunately we have discovered that there are some 15/16 sites that have not automatically got a link to the Reading List (Talis Aspire) site. If you find that there is not a link in the Reading List section of your site then follow this guidance to add it. It is only a few clicks.
Turnitin update
Updates to the Turnitin integration with NILE over the summer has resulted in the frustrating issue where the Primary Display in the Grade Centre reverts to displaying the number has now been resolved. If you make changes to a Turnitin assignment (eg. changing the post date) the Primary Display settings are retained.
Kaltura update
If you are using videos for assessment then the product (Kaltura) behind this has been updated. This new guide provides details of the slight change in the way that students should submit video for assessment. Look out for more details soon.
The long awaited upgrade to Xerte has arrived, with a new look and plenty of new features. This includes a full text editor, improved media gallery and new page templates. For the first time you can change the style of your learning unit using themes or create your own CSS.
A new support and training plan is currently being prepared, but we do have a very quick guide for impatient users available.
There are a couple of small bugs to contend with, the most obvious (yet trivial) is that regular Xerte users may need to refresh the screen using Ctrl-F5 once they have logged in to see their projects. As ever, make a copy or archive of a valued project before experimenting!
It’s that time of year when ‘My Sites’ are being edited to reflect next year’s modules, so we are seeing a number of reports about a script warning that pops up on NILE – ‘Batch already begun’ when visiting the home and Sites & Organisations tab – it fires as organisations load.
It appears that this is a ‘known issue’ (sigh) with Blackboard Learn. What it doesn’t like you doing is hiding sites you’re enrolled on and using the ‘group by term’ feature at the same time.
Probably best to just turn off your ‘group by term’ for an immediate resolution using the settings cog. If you do wish to group by term, the only way around this would be to un-enroll from courses you didn’t want to see listed. Do this on the Sites & Organisations tab, using ‘Manage your NILE Sites’ – click the module you want to escape from, select yourself from the instructor list and ‘Submit’. There isn’t a quicker way for us LearnTechs to do this for you en masse – sorry!
The preparation of sites for the 2015/16 academic year is now starting in earnest and you may find yourself copying material from last year’s sites. Usually this is fairly easy using the ‘copy’ dropdowns, but one section that is a little more difficult is ‘Contacts’. It isn’t possible to copy individual contacts from one site to another, but you can copy the whole Contacts folder even if this isn’t immediately obvious. Especially as you probably only ever do this once a year!
One advantage of this full copy process is that you can create a ‘Master’ contact list to import into all your modules with every contact, then just delete those you don’t need on a particular module.
We have created a quick one-page guide to jog your memory and help you speed things up. The same principle can be applied to large content areas with lots of content. Rather than copying items individually you can move across all the content of a menu item on the left side. Just select that item instead of ‘Contacts’ for the Export and Import content.
At the start of July MyPad will be updated. If you’re a user, staff or student, with a blog (or blogs), please read how this may effect you and what action is needed.
To begin, it’s important to stress no content will be lost during these changes. It may, however, look a little different; here’s why…
Out with the old
A theme controls the look of your website (the colours on the page, the position of elements, the fonts used, etc). Around 50 of the oldest themes in MyPad are set to be retired.
This is happening because these themes are out-of-date and not suitable for all computers. For instance, use on mobile devices is now an important consideration, which these older themes don’t support.
This will affect many users, but not everyone. To see if your theme is amongst those marked for deletion, please check the full list below.
73 Class
Almost Spring
Ambiru
anarchy
Andreas10
Anubis
Arclite
Batavia
Benevolence
Black-LetterHead
Blak Magik
Blix
BlogTheme
Blue Green
Blue Moon
Blue Zinfandel Enhanced
Bluebird
Borderline Chaos
BuddyPress default
Cellar Heat Dark
ChaoticSoul
Citrus IslandWP
CleanTidy
Color Paper
Color Splash
Connections
Contempt
Copyblogger
Cordobo Green Park
Crop Circles
Cutline
Daisy Rae Gemini
Day Dream
Deep Blue
Deichnetz
Diary-cute
Digg 3 Columns
Dignity
Dixie Belle
Doc
Edublogs Classic
Edublogs Premium Homepage
Edu Campus
Emptiness
Fadtastic
Falling Dreams
Fauna
Fjords
Flex
FrameTheme
Fresh Bananas
Freshy
Fusion
Garland
GenkiTheme
Gentle Calm
GloriousDay
GlossyBlue
Golf
Gonzo Daily
Grassland
Green Marinée
Greenday
Greenery
Gridlock
Hemingway
Hero
iBlog
Jakarta
Japan Style
Journalist
jQ
K2
Kubrick
LetoPrime
LetterHead
Light
Liquorice
Magazeen
man~ja
Mandigo
Minimalist
MistyLook
Monotone
Mystique
Newsportal
Nikynik Blue
Northern-Web-Coders
Ocadia
Ocean Mist
OceanWide
P2
Pink-Kupy
Pixel
Pool
PressRow
PrimePress
Primitivo
Quadruple Blue
Quentin
RadMod
Reaching Darkness
Redoable
Regulus
Retweet
RoundFlow
Rubric
Runo Lite
SeaShore
Simpla
Simplr
Skinbu
Solipsus
Steam
Strange Little Town
StripedPlus
Suhweet
sumenep
Sweet Blossoms
Tarski
Technical Speech
TerraFirma
Thematic
Thoughts
Trevilian Way
Tropicala
Twenty-eight Thirteen
Twilight
Vertigo
veryplaintxt
Vistered Little
Waterlily
White as Milk
WordPress Classic
WordPress Classic
WordPress II Silver
WP-Andreas
WPMU Dixi
WPMU Nelo
WPMU Triden
Know your theme
MyPad dashboard
To know which theme you’re using:
- Login to MyPad
- Go to your dashboard
- Look in the ‘this blog’ box (top left)
- The theme in use is listed
How to change
Theme settings
If your theme is one marked for deletion, you’ll need to change it.
To do so, in the left-hand menu choose:
- Appearance > themes
All the themes listed are usable, so pick one you like the look of (those marked for retirement are hidden from view).
If you’d like to see all the new themes in more details, have a browse of the gallery.
To activate, hover over the thumbnail and click activate.
What if?
The deadline to make this change is 7th July. If you haven’t changed by then your current theme will be deactivated and will be changed to the new default – Twenty Fifteen.
No content will be lost, but your blog or website will look different as a result. You’ll simply need to login again and rearrange the display.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email LearnTech for advice.
The June 2015 roundup of LearnTech news is now available
'Type' by Victoria Pickering is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
When it comes to publishing online – on NILE, MyPad or other websites – copyright legislation is an important consideration that can too often be overlooked.
Arbitrarily using text, images, audio or video from other websites in your work runs risk. It’s not great to use NILE’s password protection, or ‘it’s for educational use’ as legitimate excuses.
So to help you produce trouble-free online content we’ve put together a quick guide to what you can and cannot do, and good places to find great resources.
Copyright Basics
To help ease you into this complex world, the Copyright Hub has an interactive guide with a vast wealth of resources.
It’s worth remembering Copyright sits alongside Trademarks and Patents and Designs and is overseen by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO).
This is not to be confused with Data Protection and Freedom of Information which fall under the remit of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)
Copyright exists to protect work and permit its owner to dictate how, where and when this is used. It doesn’t always prevent republishing, but will dictate the terms of use.
Creative Commons
A common way to find and use material online, legally and for free, is by using Creative Commons content. Where applied, a copyright owner will permit the use of their work in the following ways:
- attribution only, with no further restrictions,
- no commercial uses of the work,
- no derivatives (adaptations) can made of it.
You may have already considered using this when posting your own copyright material on the web.
Websites
Information which is freely available on the internet isn’t necessarily free to copy. Websites are protected by copyright and some sites may also be considered as databases and be protected by database right.
The material published on a website is protected by copyright in the same way as print material. Most will have a copyright declaration or specify how material from the site may be used. Although if missing, it’s best to assume the usual restrictions apply and only use a small amount for private, non-commercial purposes.
If the information on the website is not easy to access – it’s password protected for instance – then this implies the owner is protecting their work and does not want it to be copied or distributed freely; even if there is no charge for using the site.
Not all the information on the internet has been posted legally, so be careful to check the source of the information where it is possible, and use your own judgement where it is not.
Images
When looking for images it’s tempting to use anything that’s readily available! Jisc’s interactive guide gives you a safer approach.
It’s better to use a search engine that displays only Creative Commons licensed images, or those that have been made available rights free.
- Creative Commons search
- Flickr (advanced search)
- Everystockphoto
- MorgueFile
- Open Clipart
- Xpert
- Canva
If you use Google Images, narrow the usage rights with an advance search. For further advice read Jisc Digital Media – Copyright of still images.
TV, Radio & Sounds
There’s a wealth of videos on sites such as YouTube which you may wish to use in your teaching. Although be mindful it’s not legal to download a video to upload it to your NILE site, or redistribute it in any way. However, it is legal and straightforward to add a link or embed the video in NILE.
The Educational Recording Agency (ERA) licence permits staff to copy, access and use broadcast output for non-commercial educational purposes. This means all scheduled free-to-air radio and television broadcasts may be recorded for the purposes of making ERA Recordings.
To save you the trouble of having to record programmes yourself, as well as providing guidance, the British Universities Film and Video Council also runs the Box Of Broadcasts (BOB) service, to which the University subscribes.
This makes available programmes from over 60 UK channels dating back to 2007 and can to be used in your teaching. What’s more, clips can easily be embedded into NILE.
For further advice read Jisc Digital Media – AudioVisual copyright
Books, Journals and Newspapers
All the electronic resources provided through NELSON are covered by licences. Most e-journal and e-book suppliers prefer their material to be deep-linked within NILE. Guidance on this is available in the downloads section of the Library webpage on the staff portal.
The same licences allow users to make single copies for educational purposes, so you could refer students to a reference or deep-link in these cases. Be suspicious if you find online copies of books or journals you would normally expect to pay for. They could easily be illegal copies.
The University’s CLA licence also allows digital scanned copies of both book chapters and journal articles to be placed into NILE legally (whether we own them already or not). Contact the Digitisation Team for help.
Open Educational Resources
Many institutions from around the world have made available Open Educational Resources (OERs). These are teaching materials including lesson plans, documents and media available for reuse.
It can be time consuming to adapt and localise materials created in other countries, so we recommend you use UK repositories in the first instance, where possible.
To sample websites that offer complete free open courses, have a browse around MIT OpenCourseWare and Saylor courses as examples.
Open Textbooks are available from BCCampus in Canada and a good selection of links are listed on Open Access Textbooks. These are free, open, reusable textbooks in HE and FE.
OMICS provides a list of open access journals in different languages and subjects. The OER Knowledge Cloud also offers many research reports and articles about OER.
And finally – did you know?
- Copyright does not need to be registered and subsists automatically from the moment an original work is created.
- Owning a piece of work, and owning the copyright of that work, are not the same thing.
- Commissioning work by a third-party doesn’t grant you copyright ownership – unless it’s stated in the contractual terms.
There were significant changes to copyright in 2014. Here are some links to explain further.
We have heard of some synchronisation issues with the Turnitin iPad app, particularly when large numbers of (or very large) student submissions are being handled. Joe Mills of LEAP at Hull helpfully identified that the problem can arise when an iPad ‘sleeps’ during synchronisation – this will prevent the process from completing, resulting in missing papers on your iPad. So, while marking with Turnitin, Joe recommends:
1. Go to Settings>General
2. Scroll down to Autolock
3. Turn Auto-lock to OFF (your iPad will not now go to sleep unless you press the power button)
4. Plug your iPad in to a charging source (you need to make sure your iPad does not run out of charge)
5. Open Turnitin App
6. Go to your class
7. Touch the ‘i’ icon top right to bring up the information about the class
8. Turn “Sync submissions” on
9. Press on screen to come out of the “i” panel
10. The submissions will now start to sync
11. This will take time…!
12. Do NOT switch to another app, open another app or generally do anything that puts the Turnitin app in to the background.
Joe also points out – rightly – that you will need enough space on your iPad to ensure that you can complete your downloads. Check ‘Settings’ / ‘General’ / ‘Usage’ to see your available storage. As a general rule of thumb, 1GB+ will probably be fine. You can use ‘Manage Storage’ to identify any apps that are using a lot of space.
A number of old themes are being retired in MyPad in June and have already been replaced with a new set of responsive designs that will work well on mobile devices. If you use a MyPad site for teaching or personal use it is worth checking whether you are using old themes (you will be prompted when you log in) and updating them or just consider one of the new themes to freshen up your site and make it smartphone friendly.
The NILE External Resources Site (NILEX), which lists free applications you can use to create content for use in NILE, has undergone such an update and continues to expand – there are now over 50 resources covered. Latest posts include Canva (an online graphics and infographics creator) and AppSheet (which creates free IOS and Android data-driven apps using Google Spreadsheets).
NILE sites have been, and continue to be, created for the 15/16 academic year for modules and programmes. We have changed the way that we roll out the sites, and are trialling automatically copying in content from last year’s site (with a matching site ID). There are a few exclusions to this which are mainly postgraduate modules. This is because the content that is copied is a snapshot of the 14/15 site at the time of copying . Therefore, for example, if we take a copy of the Spring NILE site last year into the Spring session for this year we could be taking content that is no longer used. It is more appropriate to wait and perform the copy from the Standard or Autumn cohort. This will need to be organised/managed manually.
Accessing and working on your 15/16 Sites
You can add sites to your NILE account by using the Manage My NILE Sites box on the Sites & Organisations tab, or get in touch with the NILE Administrator (Rachel McCart) to request the site is added to your account.
Your Learning Technologist (LT) will be in touch through Subject Leaders to organise workshop sessions where groups and individuals can attend and work on their sites to get them ready for the new year. Your LT will be in the session to help with any queries and provide guidance.
Submit your work
In performing the copies we had to choose to copy all the content or none. Unfortunately there is not a way for us to choose to exclude the ‘Submit your work’ area so we had to bring in that content too. As many of you may be aware this means that Turnitin submission links (Blackboard assignments are fine) will break, and therefore need to be removed from the 15/16 site (please DO NOT remove them from the 14/15 site), and new ones need to be created for assignments in the 15/16 year.
The NILE administrator (Rachel McCart) is working her way through performing this task on the new sites, but as I’m sure you can appreciate this is a lot for one person to do so it is taking some time. If you would like to expedite this process you can do it yourself. If you would like some guidance then check out the help tab on NILE and follow the link to Preparing your NILE site for the next academic year. Please just let Rachel know if you have done it, and which site(s) you’ve done it on so she can exclude them from her list.
What you will see in the new sites
You will notice that the content that has been copied in appears at the bottom of the left menu. You can click and drag this around to re-order it.
You will also notice that ‘Module materials’ has become ‘Module activities’, and ‘Assessments’ has become ‘Assessment information’. This is to move NILE sites in line with CAIeRO practice, and make it clearer to staff and students about what to expect when they click the link.
QAA Audit
The QAA audit is due to start at the beginning of August therefore your Sites need to be ready by the end of July: this is when a 10% sample of the 15/16 sites will be performed. For more details about the audit please get in touch with your Embedded Quality Officer.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please comment on this post or email us at learntech@northampton.ac.uk
