streamnews

New role in Moodle

One of goals of the original Stream project was to increase support for educational technology.  The employment of Teaching Consultants (Online) (previously FLaTCs), a Moodle developer, Change Manager (LMS), multimedia developer and designer, more dedicated helpdesk support and recently the Stream User Hotline underscores the extensive  support structures that have been established since the Stream project began in 2009.  While new positions have been created existing support services i.e. NSATS (now called Student Management), Library and Learning Consultants have always provided support to staff and students.  With the University’s strategic direction for teaching and learning makes specific reference to the use of technology there is a need to ensure that all the support structures, new and old, are able to provide the help they are asked to.  To assist the Library and  the campus centres for teaching and learning, a new support role (Support admin staff) in Moodle has been created.  Staff added to this role will appear in every Moodle site to staff, but will be invisible to students.  The privileges that come with this role are restricted to viewing Moodle sites that are available to students and resources i.e. files, web links etc that are visible to students.  Activities such as forums, wiki, assignment dropboxes etc will be inaccessible to those in the role.  In the Participants list the people who are added to the role will appear only to staff and their activities will be logged in the activity log.  As there are over 6000 Moodle sites in the Massey install it is very unlikely that staff in this role will access sites that they do not need to provide support to.  By sorting the participants in the Participant list you can see who has access to your sites and in which role,  instructions on how to sort are included below.

Instructions on how to sort the people that appear in a Stream environment.

Step 1: Click on the Participants block in your Stream environment

A list of people who have recently accessed the environment will appear.

Step 2: To sort this list so as you only see certain groups i.e. students, or teachers etc, click on the Current role dropdown (see Figure 1 below) and choose the role you want to sort on.

Figure 1

Upgrades

Over the last few weeks a number of the tools in the Stream tool set have undergone an upgrade.  Most notable is Adobe Connect which moved to the latest version late in November.  The new version of Connect comes with a cleaner interface, enhanced functionality including the ability to drag and drop to increase participant privileges, more functions in the whiteboard and enhanced usability.  Another upgrade that took place on the 6th of December was myPortfolio, Massey’s ePortfolio system.  We are a couple of versions behind so an upgrade was needed.  Included in the upgrade is a better, easier to use interface, the ability to integrate with Moodle 2 and changes to names of activities i.e. Blogs are now called Journals.  If you would like to learn more about Mahara (which is the product that powers myPortfolio) then visit http://mahara.org/features.

Licence renewals

Over the past three years the Stream Project has purchased a number of Adobe product licences.  Adobe Presenter and Acrobat (Pro 9 extended) were provided to staff free of charge.  Unfortunately the licence arrangement for these products have come to an end.  A newly negotiated licence agreement sees the University continuing to provide these products (Presenter and Acrobat X Pro) for free to a set number of staff.  If you took advantage of the offer of these products as part of the Stream Project please get in touch with the Educational Technology Manager with the products you have.  The new licence agreement will require users to uninstall the products provided as part of the previous arrangement and reinstall the new (or same) product.  The National Centre for Teaching and Learning will be able to provide support to staff who may be uncomfortable with the uninstall, reinstall process.

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