UELconnect Blog

I attended the London Blackboard User Group at the College of Law yesterday. It was housed in a very nice building in Moorgate and was an interesting trip into the city for a number of attendees. The event was entitled ‘Making the most of what you’ve got’ and was designed to showcase powerlinks and building block for those using Blackboard Classic or CE Vista who do not yet want to make the move to Blackboard 9.

In the CE Vista session we covered two different powerlinks, one for Txttools and one for the learning object repository Equella. If we had got any further with our use / installation of Learning Objects, it might have been useful for us to show that to the group.

Txttools

Stephen Vickers from the University of Edinburgh presented on the edutxt powerlink he has developed for the text messaging system Txttools.  Stephen has developed a number of different powerlinks available from his SPV Software site.

The current version of this powerlink enables a course leader/instructor to send a text message to the students in their module via the VLE. Students are requested to insert their mobile phone number in the user profile of the VLE and it is from there that the powerlink collects the information. As UEL has a txttools account, it looks very much like a Powerlink worth investigating as it would enable staff members to send text messages to a specific module cohort or group within it.

Further developments are being made to the powerlink to enable a polling option to be set up. Students could text a key word and their answer to enter into a poll. A very useful option for users who do not have access to lecture voting kits.

A couple of questions that arise for UEL would be how the credits system would work. We have to pay for every message sent, so some form of agreement would have to be made as to acceptable use for academic schools. Also, we would need to investigate whether the mobile phone data we hold on the student records system could be integrated into the VLE to enable us to contact the students without them having to submit their mobile phone number.

Equella

Jonathan Blatchford from Imperial presented on their use of the learning objects repository Equella and the Web CT integration. The aim of the integration is to enable a user to seamlessly access the repository without logging into an additional system. There were a few issues noted with the PowerLink e.g. being unable to view an Equella resource in Student View.

 An interesting use of a repository system, but at the moment, the level of use of Equella was lower than had been hoped. An interesting point noted was that after the release of the repository system, the IPR and copyright concerns of staff were increased even though the issues are the same as those faced with using the VLE.

A couple of other interesting points out of the day were:

• The LERSIG (Learning Environment Review Special Interest Group) is an interesting group formed out of ALT for those institutions planning on reviewing their learning environments.
• There was a request for those institutions considering or undertaking a review of their VLE to share their approaches / matrix of questions with the rest of the group. This could be very useful to ensure we all aren’t reinventing the wheel… again!