The Lecturecast service was upgraded over the summer and we have seen many more lectures being scheduled for recording so far this year – not just due to an increase in the number of rooms where Lecturecast is available, but also in the proportion of events being recorded. As we now draw towards the end of the year and to Christmas, we are glad to be able to share some of the improvements that have been made since the system first went live.

Lecturecast Moodle Connector block
The Lecturecast Connector block provides a new way to seamlessly link recordings held under a module code (or multiple module codes) in Lecturecast to a Moodle course.

Since the block went live, we have continued to try and improve its integration with Moodle and the Lecturecast system. On Thursday 7th December these changes will go live in Moodle, including:

• The Lecturecast Connector block will no longer overwrite the Moodle course short name. Previously, though it could be changed back, mapping to a Lecturecast section in your course would update the short name to match the section name.
• The block now displays all Lecturecast sections you have mapped to your Moodle course, which is particularly useful if you have lectures recorded under different module codes.
• If staff un-link a Lecturecast section from their Moodle course, the Connector block will update within 24hrs to no longer show this as a mapped section.
• Adding a Lecturecast activity no longer adds an item to the course Gradebook. (14/12/2017)

Our Lecturecast Connector block user guides have also been updated to include these changes.

Lecturecast Scheduler
The Lecturecast Scheduler ties in to existing CMIS timetabled events, reducing the need for duplication of information, and has allowed staff more direct ability to manage the scheduling of their recordings. Based on staff feedback, a number of changes have been made to both the functionality and the interface the tool offers.

These include improvements such as:

• Email notifications enabled when there is a change to event location or title in CMIS.
• More descriptive error messages with hover-over help text so staff know what to do next.
• A ‘Captured Events’ tab has been added with filter and sort options.
• Better filtering – based on event start times and the option to clear all filters.
• The ability to change capture options (recording and availability options) on the ‘Events’ tab, as well as on the ‘Scheduled Events’ tab.
• Addition of a ‘Version Information’ link in the Scheduler to allow greater transparency of improvements and changes.

You can find out how to make the most of these improvements using our updated Lecturecast Scheduler user guides

If you have any questions about the changes, please feel free to email lecturecast@ucl.ac.uk. We hope you’ll find that these changes make the service easier to use, but look forward to working to improving the service further in the coming months.

This summer the Lecturecast service received a significant upgrade when we moved from our previous lecture capture solution to the latest offering from our supplier Echo360.

For those who have used Lecturecast in the past, you will be pleased to know that the new system offers a more streamlined and user-friendly service that allows you to schedule recordings for your lectures, link your recordings to a Moodle course and manage and edit recordings through the Lecturecast Active Learning Platform (ALP) interface. In addition to upgrading the system, we also have more rooms that are Lecturecast Enabled. Currently, over 110 rooms are online with more being added within the next few weeks.

We believe that the new system will make it much easier for you to schedule recordings and share them with students. There are benefits to be had for both staff and students in ‘Lecturecasting’ events. In a recent survey of UCL students and their use of technology, the most frequent request was for Lecturecast to be more widely available.

The new Lecturecast system comprises three elements:

• The Lecturecast Scheduler: this allows you to schedule recordings for confirmed CMIS (i.e. UCL’s online timetabling and room booking system) booked events.
• The Lecturecast Connector block – available on every Moodle course when you ‘Turn editing on’. This allows you to link your Moodle Course to a section in Lecturecast that contains the recordings for your course.
• Lecturecast Active Learning Platform (ALP) – This is where recordings are hosted. The ALP interface provides functionality that goes beyond just hosting recordings and allows you to create and add resources that include interactive slides and view learner analytics. For students, it allows them to flag and bookmark content as well as take notes, participate in discussions and respond to interactive slides.

We have developed new training resources including video and step-by-step guides to get you started using the new system, and are currently developing more advanced guides which will be available soon. These are available via the Lecturecast Resource Centre

Training and guidance on using the additional functionality will be phased in over the next 12 months.

If you are looking for inspiration and on how you might incorporate the use of Lecturecast into your teaching, have a look at some of the case studies from institutions around the world using Echo360 (the developers) behind Lecturecast.

Below are a host of links to get you started in using the new Lecturecast system at UCL.

• Lecturecast Scheduler: Use this to schedule recordings for events that have been timetabled and booked through CMIS
• Create a Link on your Moodle Course to a Lecturecast Section:  guidance on how to share your recording with students on your Moodle course
• Lecturecast FAQs: view answers to some of our most frequent queries.
• Lecturecast Enabled Teaching Spaces – view a list of rooms that are online. This list is updated weekly as more rooms become available.
• Lecturecast Resource Centre: information and guidance  to get you started on using Lecturecast

If you have any queries or need support, please email lecturecast@ucl.ac.uk

This is our first communication to our Lecturecast community to let you know that this summer we will be upgrading the Lecturecast service.

The current platform provided by Echo360 under the UCL brand name of Lecturecast has been in service for 6 years. During this time, Lecturecast has provided students with over 2 million views and recorded over 17 thousand events.

That platform is now entering its end of life cycle and in order for UCL to provide the best experience to all our users – from our academics and administrators who create and manage content, to our students who use the material to support their learning – we need to replace the system. It is essential that we provide a system that will be fit for purpose and fit for use to meet the requirements and expectations of our Educational Strategy and UCL 2034.

This summer we will be moving to the latest version of the Echo360 product, which the vendor refers to as ALP (Active Learning Platform), however we will still continue to refer to the platform with the name Lecturecast, but if you hear someone mention the ALP platform we hope you will make the connection.

The new platform will provide all the existing functionality and benefits of the old lecture capture platform, but with an improved user interface and a greatly improved underlying technical infrastructure. The system also optionally offers expanded functionality in the areas of engagement tools and analytics that will integrate with the Lecturecast capture system and with Moodle, our virtual learning environment.

On top of upgrading the platform we will also be taking the opportunity to rewrite and enhance the online booking application, which we recognise can be a point of difficulty and confusion.

More details on the advanced features of the platform will be released over the next few months as our internal project and operational support teams continue to refine them. The project will also be actively engaging with you, our users, through various existing forums, focus groups and other events – as well as providing new online resources and training to support the changes.

We hope you’ll be excited to see the improvements to this popular service and included below are a few screen shots from the new product to give you a flavour what the new Lecturecast will look like.

A screen shot of the new Lecturecast player interface

A screenshot of the Lecturecast new course homepage

A screenshot of the personal media libray

Lecturecast archiving is now complete. This means that content that is required for use can now be unarchived – this is straightforward and details are given in the Lecturecast Guide here http://bit.ly/17m3JOX

Next academic year the usual monthly content deletion cycle will commence in October, according to the Lecturecast Archive Policy http://bit.ly/2bshOix

PLEASE NOTE: Archived material will only be deleted two years after the date of its capture/recording. Thus it is critical to move old material out of the archive if you want it retained for viewing
If you have any questions or concerns surrounding this procedure please contact the ISD Service Desk.

The UCL E-Learning Baseline is now available as a printable colour booklet. This can be downloaded from the UCL E-Learning Baseline wiki page: http://bit.ly/UCLELearningBaseline

The 2016 version is a product of merging the UCL Moodle Baseline with the Student Minimum Entitlement to On-Line Support from the Institute of Education.

The Digital Education Advisory team will be distributing printed copies to E-Learning Champions and Teaching Administrators for use in departments.

Please could you also distribute this to your own networks to help us communicate the new guidelines to all staff.

Support is available to help staff apply this to their Moodle course templates via digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

We are also working on a number of ideas to help people understand the baseline (via a myth busting quiz) and a way for people to show their courses are Baseline (or Baseline+) compliant by way with a colleague endorsed badge.

See ‘What’s new?’, to quickly see what has changed since the last 2013 Baseline.

As you may or may not know there is a lot of information on Digital Education and our services in the UCL wiki pages, including Moodle Resource Centre, Lecturecast Resource Centre or the MyPortfolio Resource Centre.

However, there are some resources you might not know about, such as the UCL Student E-Learning Services – which provides useful guidance for students on how to do things such as submit work and interact with Lecturecast recordings.

We also have a couple of pages that we use to update you, that you might want to ‘watch’. By watching a page on the UCL wiki you will get updates when it is changed. Think of it like subscribing to the page for updates. Just log into the wiki and then navigate to the page you want to watch. There you will find a ‘watch’ button in the top right, alongside the page title.

Digital Education pages to watch:

New Feature – We use this page to post about changes to Moodle whenever we carry out an upgrade. A lot of the time these changes are behind the scenes, so we don’t detail these. Instead we link to the official Moodle release notes for anyone who is particularly interested in the exact details. If there is anything notable that has changed this will be listed on the page. You will also notice that there are sub-pages dedicated to each of our summer upgrades. As these tend to be larger upgrades, with more changes we have dedicated spaces to detail all of these changes. ‘Watch’ the New Features page to get notifications when we update the page after a Moodle upgrade.

Turnitin: Service Status and Known Issues – This page is a great resource for anyone who uses Turnitin. The Turnitin: Service Status and Known Issues page can be used to monitor the state of Turnitin, and is the best place to check if you suspect there might be a problem with the system. There is an embedded version of Turnitin’s own service status Twitter feed, which is where they will post of any outages. The Twitter feed is somewhere Digital Education have to check ourselves as well, so it’s good to check. There is also a table of Known Issues, which we are currently working with Turnitin to resolve. This includes details of any workarounds that can be used whilst the problem is fixed. Additionally you will find a Turnitin Quirks table, this is a list of features in Turnitin that are working as intended but perhaps not as desired by some users. We would also recommend you ‘watch this page’ (see steps above) to be among the first to know if there are any problems with the Turnitin system.