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This is happening because these themes are out-of-date and not suitable for all computers.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.
At the recent Learning and Teaching Conference, the Learning Design team hosted a ‘cracker barrel’ table to help staff think about how to approach course (re)design. Those that came to the session were also given an action planner document, which included key dates in the academic calendar between now and the autumn term 2017, when most programmes will be expected to be running in a format appropriate to Waterside delivery.
For anyone that missed the session, you can find the planner here: Planning for Waterside timeline (PDF, 275KB)
If you would like any help with your planning, please contact the Learning Designers at LD@northampton.ac.uk.
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.
At recent events, including last week’s Learning and Teaching conference, the Learning Design team have been trying out some new activities to help teaching staff think about how they design for learning. You may have seen some of these new tools and activities described in earlier posts in this category, or had the chance to have a go at using them in development events. In this post I’d like to look at the bigger picture of how these might fit together with some of the other services we offer.
At the conference, we hosted a ‘cracker barrel’ table. The staff that came to see us were offered giant post-its (no small motivation!) in exchange for drawing us a picture of what they value most in their teaching. You can view these in our online album here (we’ll be adding more from other events to this album too):
 |
| What I value most in teaching |
The resulting images were not just works of art. They could also be seen as ‘teaching metaphors’ (McShane 2005). We asked participants to expand on these, and break down what was happening in the image using three key questions:
- what is the role of the tutor?
- what is the role of the student?
- what is the role of technology?
Common themes in the role of the tutor included motivation, guidance, facilitation and enabling, linking learners together and lighting ‘sparks’ and ‘light bulbs’ of understanding. There was also an emphasis on pastoral roles, being ‘approachable’, ’empathetic’ and a ‘confidant’. The role of the student was widely agreed to be participative, with comments noting the importance of engaging, contributing and becoming autonomous. Some comments also noted that the distinction between tutor and student is not so dichotomous, and that learning happens in a community where the participants all learn together. Comments on the role of technology mostly focused on supporting access to learning, as well as ‘fostering community’ and enabling sharing. You can see all the contributions in this PDF file (3.5MB, captured using the Post-It Plus app).
Sadly that was all we had time for on the day, but we did ask them to go away and think about how their image related to their own programmes and modules. Is that ideal teaching moment what’s happening in those modules now? And if not, what could they change that might enable them to do more of what they value?
This led me to think about a model that I had been introduced to by our very own Deborah Forbes, in a staff development session on Thriving in a Changing Environment*. The model is Appreciative Inquiry (AI), and as a positive approach to change management it has a lot to offer as we prepare for Waterside. Here’s what some of the experts have to say about AI:
“The traditional approach to change is to look for the problem, do a diagnosis, and find a solution. The primary focus is on what is wrong or broken …Appreciative Inquiry suggests that we look for what works in an organization …Because the statements are grounded in real experience and history, people know how to repeat their success.” (Hammond, 1998, pp.6-7)
And:
“[Appreciative Inquiry] deliberately seeks to discover people’s exceptionality – their unique gifts, strengths, and qualities. It actively searches and recognizes people for their specialties – their essential contributions and achievements. And it is based on principles of equality of voice – everyone is asked to speak about their vision of the true, the good, and the possible.” (Cooperrider, 2001, p.12)
Although there is no one definitive model for AI, the 4-D aproach is widely used. This consists of four main steps:
- Discover: The identification of organisational processes that work well.
- Dream: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.
- Design: Planning and prioritising processes that would work well.
- Destiny: The implementation (execution) of the proposed design. (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2005, p.17)
In terms of programme and module design, the steps we covered at the conference were targeted at the ‘discover’ and ‘dream’ stages – by helping staff to think about what works really well for them and their students, they can begin to think about what their programme or module might look like if they did more of it. This begins a process that then feeds in to the beginning of the CAIeRO, where staff are asked to outline their aims for the programme or module, create a mission statement for it, and think about the ‘look and feel’ (see this post for more on this). The CAIeRO process then leads the course team through the ‘design’ stage towards the ‘destiny’ or delivery of the new or re-designed modules.
Do you have positive stories to share about what you love about teaching, what’s working well, and what it should look like in the future? Would you like to contribute to the conversation? Then why not add your comments, send us a picture (along with a brief outline of what’s happening), or write us a case study? You can comment on this post, or email the Learning Design team at LD@northampton.ac.uk.
References:
Cooperrider, D.L. (2001) Why Appreciative Inquiry? In Cooperrider, D.L., Hammond, S. and Royal, C. (eds) Lessons from the Field: Applying Appreciative Inquiry. Plano: The Thin Book Publishing Company.
Cooperrider, D.L. and Whitney, D (2005) Appreciative Inquiry: A positive revolution in change. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
Hammond, S. (1998) The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry. Plano: The Thin Book Publishing Company.
McShane, K. (2005) Metaphors for University Teaching. Learning and Teaching in Action. 4(1). Available from: http://www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/ltia/issue10/mcshane.shtml [Accessed 29th May 2015]
* Look out for future sessions on the Staff Development site on NILE (note, you will need to be logged in to NILE for this link to work).
Or, how can Lego help you to build a course or module?
Introduction to Programme Design is a one hour staff development session for new academic staff. The session covers key information that staff need to know about how programme and module design works at the University, including signposts to the frameworks and regulations and an overview of the support available.
To help staff start thinking about the complexity of course design, we gave them some lego and asked them to work in pairs to think about the elements that need to be considered, and how they relate to each other.
Why lego?
Why not? Lego is a simple to use, non-threatening tool that helps to externalise people’s ideas in a visual way. It provides a framework for storytelling, and as you will see from the results below, can help teams to synthesise and communicate big ideas. It’s used in many companies as part of a design thinking approach, to help find creative solutions to complex problems*.
Here are some of the elements that Lego helped us to discuss. Each team was given a standard set, along with a single ‘random’ piece. Click on the thumbnail images to view the full scenes:
This team used the lego to show the lecturer and students working within and co-creating a framework, which included other elements like NILE and QAP. The bridge between the students indicates social learning. The scene also includes ‘steps to success’ and a diving board to launch them into their career. The little eyes indicate institutional oversight, and the web is used to catch the students who are not engaged and enable them to ‘bounce’ back in to the course.
This scene has a student at the centre, as the course design starts from their expectations and needs. Alongside the student is an academic and a member of support staff, indicating working in partnership. The shark is about risk: in the form of competition from other universities, and of distractions from learning – the wall is a protection against this. The raised platform indicates student support, including academic standards, facilities like NILE and IT, and skills for employability.
Stakeholders in this scene include service users and commissioners, who are central to programme design for Health courses, as these must consider the needs of the local area in terms of health provision. Other elements include the resources available (lecturers, skills), and the constraints e.g. professional body regulations and quality frameworks. The elephant is Waterside, which will have a ‘massive’ influence on how we move forward with programme design.
The students in this depiction were widely scattered around the room, indicating the ‘geographically dispersed nature of learning communities’. They are connected by mobile devices. The staff member has a movable ‘office’ (which could be at home, a hotdesk, overseas etc). There are signposts for learners throughout the course. The purpose of the course is to help students achieve educational, career and social mobility, indicated by climbing the ladder.
In this scene, the students (on the left) arrive at different levels and some progress faster than others. The programme lead is looking towards them to help them progress. Ahead is the University management and governance, leading the direction of the University. The horse is University strategy, leaping obstacles and providing support to students. On the right is a platform – both for celebration of success (award ceremony) and as a launchpad to a career.
The exercise helped participants to start thinking about the stakeholders that need to be considered in programme design, the aims of their programme or module, and the ways that students are supported. The discussions showed the complexity of the course design process, and shaped our conversations about how it should be supported.
If you were in this session and would like to expand on your model, or if you weren’t but you’d like to respond to the models (or create your own!), please leave us a comment below.
To sign up for a session, visit the Staff Development organisation on NILE (note: you will need to be logged in to NILE for this link to work).
*Although we didn’t have time to use it in this session, the Lego Serious Play website outlines a full methodology for this approach.
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
As part of the University Institute of Learning and Teaching funded Parklife project, Nick Cartwright has been piloting the use of a hybrid laptop. The project involved students working in open spaces of their own choice with Nick’s support, so a device capable of taking notes and sharing information with small groups of students was considered worthy of inclusion to support the process.
The device used – a Lenovo Yoga 2 11.6″ – was selected on the basis that it was capable of using the University’s common applications installed on staff and student PCs and that it appeared to offer flexibility in its physical use – it has a touch screen and can be used in stand, tent and tablet configurations, along with a standard laptop layout.
As many of the activities Nick would be carrying out mirrored some of the potential practices that might be used at the new Waterside Campus, LearnTech agreed to record Nick’s experiences to share with Waterside stakeholders. This is the first of a number of reviews we intend to publish – though we are not recommending the University or members of staff purchase this or any other particular model of laptop. We are just seeking to identify the strengths and weaknesses of such devices in the workplace and classroom.
The Yoga has been used to record notes and observations during Parklife sessions but – in practice – it has been relatively little used to share information with small groups of students. While Nick was impressed with the ability to be able to hook it over a chair back as an informal display, in practice the small screen didn’t make it practical to share with more than two or three students.
Aside from general web browsing and Office applications, Nick found it an excellent device to prepare Prezis with but found Turnitin did not respond well to the touch screen. That said, he did complete all his marking using the Yoga successfully. Its particular strength seemed to be that he could quickly move away from an area of disturbance to a quite corner with minimal disruption. Battery life was acceptable – enough for 3-4 hours and a fast one hour recharge was useful. Ultimately, Nick would like to be able to dock to a large screen with a full keyboard for more intensive text work but has found that almost all his work has been possible on the Yoga.
Its main drawbacks are the small screen and weight when used as a tablet – compared to an iPad (around 500g), 1.4 Kg would be uncomfortable to use for a long period – but the flexibility may well be worth this if the device is used in more than one mode. Some reviews suggest that the 802.11n only wireless connect might be an issue, but Nick has noticed no significant wireless connection problems. The mini-HDMI port is the only physical way to connect to an external screen or projector, so this needs to be borne in mind when considering use cases and the available infrastructure. But the fact that a colleague purchased the larger screen version of the Yoga 2 for herself after trying this machine over a period of time is a clear indication that this is a useful device.
Nick is continuing his evaluation in his Law teaching and hopes to try out Panopto at some point as the included web camera appears to be of very good quality. We will follow up on his experiences later in the year.
