The University of Southampton

New theme for delivering module content

For the start of 2016 we’ve just released a brand new wordress theme  called “Southampton University Theme 2016” for those members of staff who wish to deliver innovative module content using wordpress.

Key points about this new theme:

  • It has the look and feel of the new University brand
  • Its fully mobile responsive
  • Content can be grouped into topics lectures and slides
  • Lectures have the following options:
    • Approx duration
    • Associated quiz
    • Key concepts
    • References
  • All media and videos are automatically collated and displayed in a references appendix

To enable this new theme go to your dashboard > Appearance > Themes and enable “Southampton University Theme 2016”.

If you’d like help using the theme or anything else get in touch by emailing iliad@soton.ac.uk

Alex and the eFolio team

eFolio upgrade and downtime. April 24th 8am-10am

We will be upgrading eFolio with some new features and an improved data feed on April 24th starting at 8am and lasting until approx 10am.

During this time you will be unable to login to eFolio. For more information see the page below:

https://www.efolio.soton.ac.uk/blog/blog/2014/03/21/efolio-upgrade-coming-spring-2014/

If you have any questions or concerns please email serviceline@soton.ac.uk

Alex and the eFolio team

eFolio upgrade coming Spring 2014

Sometime in April (hopefully!) we will be upgrading eFolio with several new features, and most importantly an improved and more robust data feed from banner, the central student records system.

Here is a list of some of the new features you can expect to see.

Module Blog Creation

When creating your module blog, you will be able to choose between a private or public module profile OR create a student blog for your module. The latter option adds your students as authors (instead of subscribers) allowing them all to write posts and comment on each others.

Tutor Dashboard

We are adding significant improvements and new features to your tutor dashboard.

Appraisals
You will be able to create appraisals for your students and attach performance reviews / documents / notes against each of these appraisal dates.  Students and tutors can view these notes at any time

Private Tutor Notes
You will also be able to attach notes and documents to a particular tutee. Privacy options allow you to make this totally private, or visible to you and faculty administrators. If the tutee students gets a different tutor in the future, any non-private note are then accessible by that tutor as well.

Skills and Competencies

We’ve given this an overhaul and added some new features so you can now do the following:

– Duplicate existing skill groups
– Enrol modules onto a skill group based around module as well as adding individual students and uploading a CSV file

eFolio for research

We are adding this brand new feature, previously only available to the School of Psychology. You can create research projects, add experiments and attach time slots to those experiments. This will allow students to signup to timeslots, giving you a simple booking system for recruiting participants.

You can indicate if your experiment is offering research credits or payment, mark attendance of those students who did not arrive, and filter by year of study, gender, age and even ethnicity if your study requires a specific demographic.

Each students will need to create a ‘Research Profile’ before they can sign up to research.


For more information on this new feature, or anything else mentioned above, please get in touch

 

eFolio disk upgrade. Downtime next Monday night

We’re running out of disk space on the eFolio server so need to swap it out for a new bigger one. This will happen on Monday 17th March between 5pm-6pm.

Please be patient if you can’t login between these times as eFolio will  be temporarily unavailable while the technical team perform the replacement.

Any questions or concerns please get in touch.

Alex and the eFolio team

New eFolio Features for December

Hi,

There are a couple of new features recently released you may be interested in

1. For Staff – printable versions of your student lists

There is not a ‘Print View’ of the students on your modules. (Module admin > Student List). You can choose how many students to display in a grid, and get an ordered by surname list with mugshots.

2. For All – Easy Soundcloud Embed in your blogs

There is a new plugin ‘Soundcloud oEmbed’ plugin available for your blogs, module sites and ePortfolios. If this is activated you can paste the URL of your soundcloud track and it will automatically convert it into the soundcloud player e.g.

https://soundcloud.com/ibrababa/daft-punk-get-lucky

 

Signup for our eFolio event / demo

On November 22nd, CITE will be hosting a lunchtime seminar entitled
‘eFolio – What is it, and how does it fit with the University Southampton Learning Environment vision?’

I will be presenting some new features (an external examiners interface) along with some lesser known applications within the system in the context of what I believe the Southampton Learning Environment (SLE) should aim to be.

I’ll be demonstrating how eFolio is being used currently by a number of faculties to improve employability, identify failing students early, showcase modules externally, provide alumni access to useful information and finally to pull data from a number of sources (eAssignment, banner, syllabus etc) to create a tutor dashboard.

I am hoping for a frank discussion about where we are currently, where we SHOULD be, and what is required to get there.

On: Friday 22 November 12:30-2:00
In: Building 32/3073 (Access Grid Room)

Light lunch will be provided.
All welcome.  Feel free to share this announcement to other mailing lists and colleagues who you think would be interested.

To signup for this free event (and free lunch!) please go to the following website:
https://www.eventbrite.com/event/9199711585

 

New Registers functionality

From Friday 1st November we’re making the registers even better and you will be able to do the following:

1. You can now create ‘custom’ registers based on a subset of your students. This was the most requested new feature and we’re pleased to say it will be available this week.

Very useful for creating registers for individual tutor groups

2. You can also customise the mails that get sent to tutors, students and other individuals if the default email messages are not to your liking. To do this go to your module Registers > Define Absentee Rules and you have a new tab for ‘Customise Emails’

As always, if you have any comments / feedback you’d like to make please get in touch.

Alex and the eFolio team

New wordpress plugins for teaching staff

This week we have released two new plugins for wordpress, that may be of use.

1. Academic Unit Conditional Content.

This lets you display content on your wordpress pages for specific Academic Units or faculties. An example would be if you had a generic page with multiple discipline specific examples. When students login they would ONLY see the content relevant to them

2. Learning Activity Box

Learning Activity Example

If you want to draw students attention to a learning activity on a page, you can make it stand out using this plugin. You have options to change the Activity title, and also (optionally) say ow long the activity will take. It produces a nice object as shown here.

 

 


Both plugins can be installed in the usual manner which is Plugins > Activate plugin

If you’d like more information on any of these please get in touch