ReMarksPDF: now free for UC Staff!

Professor Stephen Colbran from the University of New England (UNE) has recently release Version 1 of his software, ReMarksPDF, for improving the quality and consistency of assessment and assessment feedback. The full version of ReMarksPDF is available to all staff at the University for three years, and is an easy-to-use PC and Mac PDF editor designed to annotate, collaborate and report on student assessments. It is the most advanced PDF marking system available. Some of its features include:

• Text and audio comments – mark by text or voice comments.
• Auto comments – automatic insertion of text-based comments – avoid rewriting repetitive text comments.
• Auto sounds – automatic insertion of voice comments – avoid rerecording repetitive audio comments.
• Marks, Criteria and Feedback – criterion based marking made easy.
• Automatic addition of marks – no more addition errors.
• Pen tools – use a tablet and handwrite comments on PDF’s. Convertible “tablet PCs” or graphic tablets can both be used.
• Drawing tools – draw diagrams and other types of annotations.
• Colour coding – highlight colours with designated meanings.
• Reports – histograms, spider charts, line charts with one click.
• Stamps – convey your meaning with stamps designed for marking.
• Style libraries – build your own specialist style libraries or simply use our supplied English Style library or edit it as you see fit.
• Internet sharing – create and share libraries of colours and text/audio comments..
• Languages – ReMarksPDF is available in English (UK and US), French and Modern Chinese.

ReMarksPDF has been produced with funding from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and several Australian Universities. The software has great potential to reduce the amount of time academics spend marking whilst increasing the quantity and quality of assessment feedback. The software can be downloaded from http://www.remarkspdf.com/downloads. Training films, manuals etc are also available from http://www.remarkspdf.com/support/training/remarkspdf/videos.

You will need full Administrator Rights on your computer to install ReMarksPDF, or you will need to contact the ICTS Support Team to assist with installation if you do not have Administrative Rights. Once it is installed, you can register on the website to obtain a full license for the software for three years, or you can contact Leonard Low at the Teaching and Learning Centre for a full license key (leonard.low@canberra.edu.au or phone x5303). Leonard can also provide additional information on ReMarksPDF and basic support with the use of this software.

It has been 18 months

Dear colleagues and Moodle users,

It has been eighteen months since we left WebCT, and it’s time to let go:
About a quarter of sites on LearnOnline (Moodle) are currently old sites we migrated from WebCT.
We would like to remove all these sites from the system and place them on offline storage. This means, that they will disappear from your myMoodle page. We anticipate that it is unlikely that anyone will need their ‘from WebCT’ sites restored, after all it has been more than six months since anyone has asked us for any of the old WebCT migrated sites. However, should you need to access them again, you would only have to contact TLC and we would restore them from disk.

You won’t have to do anything to help us with this archival process. On the 4th or 5th of June, you should find that any ‘from WebCT’ sites on your myMoodle have disappeared, which may clean things up for you a bit.
If, in the next week or two, you notice that you tend to access ‘From WebCT’ sites regularly, please let us know which sites they are and we’ll assist you make your own copy.

Good luck with the marking!

Cheers,
Minh-Tam

Scenario Based Learning Interactive

Here’s a new tool that I have been trying out for a week now, called SBL Interactive or SBLi. The development team of this particular software is located at the Centre for Biological Information Technology (CBIT) at The University of Queensland. This tool has been developed with a lot of focus on Tertiary Education yet it can still cater for a vast variety of scenarios. I have certainly been very impressed with its capabilities, as compared to those of the Moodle Lesson Tool. Lesson tool did the job, but SBLi specialises in the field.

So, SBLi installer software basically comes in 3 versions. ‘Player’ is generally used by students, installed on their computer to run a scenario provided by their teacher via CD or pen drive. ‘Builder’ is the part of the software which teachers use to create the scenarios, it also integrates a Player so that the building in progress can actually be tested anytime. Finally, there’s the ‘Server’ software, which is a management platform to deploy the scenarios to students online. Note that a SBLi server is already available for the University of Canberra. Below is an attached image of the SBLi Builder:

As you can see, it is divided into 4 windows to provide more facilities and to simulate real-life experience. In the top left windows are the available locations, which students can visit anytime. Also, locations may be unlocked automatically by carrying out a specific action, or answering a particular question and many more, set by the teacher. This is a very useful option which opens a lot of possibilities to real-life experience.

Whereas in the top right window, is a background image of the specific location. This provides the student with an idea of how the real place would look like. Furthermore, individual items or persons can be added to the background image, so that students may interact with them by clicking. Now, by clicking on a specific item or person, the lower left window provides the student with a list of actions that can be carried out and which will be displayed in the lower right window. Note that Items found in the top right window can also be collected for further references.

With those windows explained, do you now have a sense of the possibilities offered to you? If not, and if you want to use a simple or complex scenario based learning tool in your course, then contact us at the Teaching and Learning Centre and we would be more than happy to help develop your ideas. This is not all, there is also a wide variety of tools, options, programming, editing available so as to develop and fit your requirements. Don’t think about what you need to create a scenario based learning experience (we got that covered), but think about what it can do for your teaching…

Moodle integration with Live at Edu

This is a slightly delayed note about the integration of our instance of Moodle with Live@Edu.
In the second half of 2009 the Faculty of Education had highlighted the need for a certain group of their alumni to get continued access to specific areas of LearnOnline (Moodle). To date, this had not been possible as students' accounts are turned off after they graduated. However, the University had gone live with Live@Edu in January, which gave students accounts 'for life' with the Microsoft Live services.
We were lucky with the timing, in that Microsoft Education labs released their "Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle" just a few days later, on Tuesday the 21st of July (the day after a different area of Microsoft released some drivers for Linux under the GPL).

Ashley Holman from Netspot had a look at it for us and after a short time had installed it for us on the development instance of Moodle. Microsoft kindly acknowledged Ashley's bug fixes in their next update, and in early January we implemented the integration in our production environment. This means, that as of mid-January, people who once used to be students here can log in to or Moodle.

There are two limitations to this, though: As we only started using Live@Edu at the beginning of 2009, only people who were students in 2009 (or later) have been provided with accounts, so unfortunately this solution does not allow graduates from earlier ears to log in.
The second limitation is that there won't be anything to see on Moodle, for these ex-students. As they are not enrolled, they don't get access to courses, and almost all old courses are closed off after the end of teaching. So there are only a few ex-students who currently use our Moodle this way.

We have however received a number of requests from lecturers to create courses in Moodle for entire degree cohorts. As such, Ashley is working on extending our Moodle-Callista integration to allow us to enrol students based on their degree program. In combination with the Live@Edu integration, this could be used to develop strong links between alumni and current students, and areas such as Secondary Education are leading the way.

Recipes for Blended Learning

If your wondering how to get started with blended learning or just want to try out something new in your class, then have a look at the 'Recipes for Blended Learning' from the University of Glamorgan. They provide a video introduction and 'Smoothie pack' of ideas for download.

More Tips & Ideas available on the TLC Website

Sessional Staff

"Between 40 and 50 per cent of teaching in Australian higher education is currently done by sessional staff". Professor Rob Castle DVC (Academic and International) University of Wollongong.

If you are a sessional tutor at the University of Canberra, there is a Moodle site that contains session summaries, resource, links etc. If you have a UC username and password, you can access it by emailing: Peter.Donnan@canberra.edu.au