Box of Broadcast

BoB (Box of Broadcasts) National is an innovative shared online off-air TV and radio recording service for UK higher and further education institutions.

Staff and students can record programmes from 65+ TV and radio channels.  The recorded programmes are kept indefinitely in an media archive, which currently stores over 2 million programmes and are shared by users across all subscribing institutions. The archive also includes searchable transcripts and one click citation referencing.
The recordings can be set before or after the broadcast (30 day recording buffer). The programmes can be edited into clips and shared with others. They can also be embedded into Moodle.
To start using BoB, log in with your UCL user details http://bobnational.net/

 The winning bids for E-Learning Development Grants (ELDGs) 2014/15  have been selected. 

Congratulations to all!

E-LEARNING DEVELOPMENT GRANTS (ELDG)

Many Lecture spaces at UCL that have been equipped with Lecturecast are now able to stream (broadcast live) lectures but this aspect of Lecturecast has yet to be introduced to the UCL teaching community.

In light of this, E-Learning Environments will be undertaking a limited exploratory study of live streaming, inviting a number (5-10) interested academics to use streaming in addition to recording their lectures.
If you are interested in taking part in this study or want to find out more read on..

Many of your will have seen notices come round reminding you that courses should be reset at the end of their period of use. This is ordinarily the end of the academic year, although this could vary from course to course. If you would like to find out more about getting your Moodle site ready for the next academic year please see our advice on the UCL Moodle Resource Centre.

There are many ways resetting your Moodle course can be helpful not only to you, but also to your students and to UCL in general. The process of resetting your course, at the default level, simply involves wiping student data and setting up new Turnitin classes (should you be using Turnitin). It does not involve removing or deleting any content, other than posts or submissions made by students. Should you need to refer back to a student forum post or assignment submission this can be done via the snapshot version of Moodle available via https://moodle-archive.ucl.ac.uk/

Here are just 5 reasons why it is important to reset your course.

1. Make it easier to find new student contributions/ submissions – you won’t have to wade through previous years to find what is happening in the new academic period.

2. The page will load faster – if you keep old student data then this will have to load along with the new data, causing Moodle to take longer to load.

3. Helps to prevent confusion – if students are still enrolled on previous years course then they might be confused by any amendments for the new cohort, instead point them to the Moodle snapshot.

4. It’s the neighborly thing to do – a smaller database means that everyone can access content faster, so it helps the whole of UCL have a faster Moodle.

5. It will keep Turnitin working – we have a defined number of licensed users, and if we exceed this Turnitin stops working. Without resetting the student numbers simply keep adding up and will exceed the limit.

For guidance on how to reset your course please see the mini- guide title M26 – Resetting your Moodle course from the UCL Moodle Resource Centre wiki. If you have additional questions please contact E-Learning Environments.

Clive Young and Jessica Gramp from the UCL E-Learning Advisory team talk about their work with E-Learning Champions. Join the conversation and help us plan our next steps  on the afternoon of July 17 at the E-Learning Champions Collaborative Design Workshop. UCL Champions and colleagues can sign up directly on Eventbrite.

Working with Champions from UCL E-Learning Environments on Vimeo.

What does e-learning look like in UCL from your perspective? What is working really well? What isn’t happening? What frustrates you as an E-Learning Champion? What are you particularly proud of?

Following on from the recent UCL E-Learning Champions Summits and Horizons event, this session on the afternoon of Thursday 17 July is designed to capture the views and opinions of UCL E-Learning Champion in order to baseline where we are now and to generate insights into what the next phase of e-learning at UCL should look like.

The workshop will be facilitated by Professor Stephen Brown (above).  Stephen is professor of Learning Technologies at De Montfort University, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Distance Education at the University of London, International Programmes, a registered expert in Technology Enhanced Learning with the European Commission, former President of the Association for Learning Technology and a higher education consultant with over 35 years of experience.

The session is the first in a series of planned collaborative design activities that will ensure that key stakeholders are in the driving seat for the next phase of e-leaning futures at UCL.

This will be an activity based workshop in which participants will be invited and helped to draw a so called “rich picture” that depicts personal perspectives on the UCL e-learning scene. These rich pictures will expose inevitable differences in the way participants view things and the differences will be used to spark a debate about what needs to be done to take forward e-learning policy and practice.

No drawing skills are required to produce rich pictures and no preparation is needed for the workshop.  Just turn up and be prepared to share your thoughts with colleagues. We will formally invite Champions to participate next week.

This short Flash animation by The Open University provides an interesting Rich Picture about Rich Pictures.   (Click on Rich Picture in the top menu bar)

Bibliography

Bronte-Stewart, M. (1999) Regarding Rich Pictures as Tools for Communication in Information Systems Development.  Computing and Information Systems 6, 83-102

Bartholomew, P, and Freeman, R. (2010) The T-SPARC Stakeholder Engagement Model