Teacher Manual
From Ourvledocs
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Contents |
Getting Started
We are assuming that you are a user with teacher privileges and you have already been assigned to a new, blank course. If not, please follow this link to request a course container. Only UWI staff members have access to this resource, provided they have logged in. If you have any issues requesting a course container, please contact the MITS help desk for assistance at 927-2148.
You will need to be logged into the course as a user who has been assigned a role as a teacher (with editing rights) on that course to use most of the features below.
Now onto the real details. You will find that the course homepage is broken down into Course sections. A course is created by adding resources and activities. When entering text in OurVLE you have a range of Formatting options; including using HTML in OurVLE.
You are not required to add students to your course, students are automatically enrolled into courses that they have been given academic approval and financial clearance.
The example below shows a new course set up page. It looks mostly empty because no resources or activities have been added as yet.There are a few of OurVLE's many blocks on the right and left sides of the topics, such as "Latest News" or "Administration".
At this point, the teacher is all ready to add resources and activities or a few new blocks to their brand new course.
Course Layout
Each course homepage generally contains blocks on the left and right with the centre column containing the course content. Blocks may be added, hidden, deleted, and moved up, down and left/right when editing is turned on. Examples of blocks can be seen in the Getting Started image above; "Latest News", "Blogs", "Upcoming Events", and "Recent Activity" are a few examples.
A wide range of over 16 different block types can provide additional information or functionality to the learner by the teacher.
A teacher with editing rights will also have a course administration block.
The image below shows how additional blocks are selected and added(editing has to be on for you to see this feature).
Editing Course Section
To add or alter activities or resources, a teacher will need to turn editing on and off with a button on the course homepage.
The Switch role to... drop down menu allows the teacher to get a general idea of what members under each role will see.
There is also an "editing on" link in the administration block. These buttons and links toggle between on and off. When editing is on you will see the following icons:
- the Update icon lets you alter/update whatever resource or activity it is next to by taking you to its setup page.
- the help icon will pop-up a relevant help window.
- the open-eye icon means an item is visible to students. Clicking it will make the item invisible to participants and change the icon to the closed eye.
- the closed-eye icon means an item is hidden from students. Clicking it will make the item visible to participants and change the icon to the open eye.
- the right icon is used to indent course elements. There is also a left icon for outdenting items.
- the move icon allows course elements to be moved up or down throughout the course.
- the delete icon will permanently delete something from the course after you confirm a warning on a second page.
- the marker icon allows you to make a section current.
- the one icon hides all other sections of the course, showing only this one.
- the all icon redisplays all sections in a course.
Activity Modules
There are a number of robust interactive learning activity modules that you may add to your course.
Communication and collaboration may take place using Chats and Forums for conversational activities and Choices to gain group feedback. Adding Wikis to your courses is an excellent way to allow students to work together on a project.
Work can be submitted by students and marked by teachers using Assignments or Workshops. The Quizzes offer several options for automatic scoring.
Lessons and SCORM activities deliver content and offer ways of individualizing your presentation based upon a student's choices. Key words can be added to Glossaries by yourself or, if you allow it, your students.
Surveys and Databases are also very powerful additions to any course.
Resources
OurVLE supports a range of different resource types that allow you to include almost any kind of digital content into your courses. These can be added by using the add a resource dropdown box when editing is turned on.
A Text page is a simple page written using plain text. Text pages aren't pretty, but they're a good place to put some information or instructions. If you are after more options for your new page then you should be thinking about adding a Web page and making use of OurVLE's WYSIWYG editor.
Of course the resource may already exist in electronic form so you may want to link to an uploaded file or external website or simply display the complete contents of a directory in your course files and let your users pick the file themselves. If you have an IMS content package then this can be easily added to your course.
Labels allow you to add more information between activity or resource links in your course.
General Advice
- Subscribe yourself to all of the forums in your course so that you can keep in touch with your class activity.
- Encourage all of the students to fill out their user profile (including photos) and read them all - this will help provide some context to their later writings and help you to respond in ways that are tailored to their own needs.
- Keep notes to yourself in the private "Teacher's Forum" (under Administration). This is especially useful when team teaching.
- Use the Logs link (under Administration) to get access to complete, raw logs. In there you'll see a link to a popup window that updates every sixty seconds and shows the last hour of activity. This is useful to keep open on your desktop all day so you can feel in touch with what's going on in the course.
- Use the Activity Reports (next to each name in the list of all people, or from any user profile page). These provide a great way to see what any particular person has been up to in the course.
- Respond quickly to students. Don't leave it for later - do it right away. Not only is it easy to become overwhelmed with the volume that can be generated, but it's a crucial part of building and maintaining a community feel in your course.
- Don't be afraid to experiment: feel free to poke around and change things. It's hard to break anything in an OurVLE course, and even if you do it's usually easy to fix it.
- Use the navigation bar at the top of each page - this should help remind you where you are and prevent getting lost
