OA21: Lightning Talks (3) - Software Tips & Tricks

derek take it away i think derek might be having an issue with audio yeah i saw in the chat he said no audio all right so derek i have an idea for you try refreshing that’s what i had to do when i refreshed it let me go through the audio check derek was in just as a viewer so i just promoted him to moderator and it looks like he’s going through the process of reconnecting to the audio so if you could give it just a minute kathy to the rescue once again okay refresh did it wilma thank you all right good stuff all right now i just need to see what the presenter option here i heard you say that i could get presenter option i’m looking for that take presenter so okay yep you got it great all right can you guys see my screen okay yes we can okay sorry about the delay here so yes uh gonna do a quick presentation on some of the new features here in sakai 21.

so sakai 21 was released on 3 18 sakai 21. 1 will be released very soon try to get it out last week hit a few hiccups with the apereo conference this week um probably not going to get out this week but early next week should be doable via talking to some of the devs one of the first cool new features out there in sakai 21 that was stealth until right when 21. 1 comes out is dark mode it’s a feature that uh individuals can toggle on and off on their own those users will be able to toggle that from once they’re logged into sakai in the top right corner where their initials are they select that option come down dark theme and they can toggle that on and off as they see fit for themselves to use like i said 21.

0 i think stealth by default but there has been many bug fixes in dark mode over the past month i think there’s been somewhere around 12 or 15 in the past month resolved and those guys are still knocking those out so great on that uh we have the dashboard uh new in sakai 21 as well um it is stealthed um by default um so it’s if you have some faculty members wanting to use it or want to go through a small pilot phase you would add this to your site just as you would any other stealth tool and sakai by using admin workspace and sites setting it up gives the instructors some more flexibility in their dashboard a new kind of clean looking ui you see they have some options when they come into the layout to kind of choose some different options on how they want their uh over their dashboard to look so it’s kind of taking place the current overview tool so like i said though this is stealth by default in 21 uh here at longsight we do have a couple clients already on 21 on either production or dev and they’re starting to take a look at it so hopefully get some good feedback on it here shortly uh the gradebook got a couple new options here category averages are now exportable that’s going to be your left side image here so instructors when they go into export they have a new option here to export and messaging so messaging in the gradebook came out in sakai 20.

i believe adrian done that work and it just picks up some additional options for emailing students such as you can see here this is set up currently for graded students based on a certain score um and at any time if faculty members do use this option to email out students based on certain criteria there is a log so the instructor ever wonders you know i wonder what all students that did go out to they can come back in at a later time and view the log to see what all students should have received that email uh university of dayton contributed back some work for lessons um so as you see here um add edit dialog so as an instructor when they go in to create a lesson if they click that uh option at the top to add tools this is the new layout in sakai 21 plus here so a little cleaner ui and they also got a new layout option the layout option is at the top of the page if you’re familiar with lessons at all you have like the tools the more tools the settings icon there’s a new button there it says layout so instructors can come in and right when they start making a lesson page select add new layout and choose from one of these default options uh reorder if you’ve used reorder in the past in lessons it’s you know a little bit unappealing to the eye like some of these items are real close together the spacing’s not well the items aren’t outlined very well some of the items in lessons it’s kind of generic it’s hard for the instructor if they have a large lesson page it’s hard for them exactly to see what some of the items are such as links and text so it’s cleaned up in sakai 21 plus nice breaks between each item and easily distinguishable between them and easy to move those around and delete if needed time release indicators in previous versions of sakai when an instructor set an item to be released on a certain date it would show something like you would see here on the left not released until once that date is met that indicator would just go away and it would be available um in sakai 21 plus you’re gonna get another indicator that shows you that it actually was released so just another indicator to the instructor that the item you know was a date time released item and it has been met so derek that is your five minute time limit that was quick i apologize for the audio issues um i’m going to put these slides up in resources in the apereo slack but i can try to i think i got another minute here let me squeeze in the rubrics ability to search pretty easy there um you know as as time goes on uh you know you can get a lot of rubrics put in so you gotta search rubrics weighted criteria um the option here um it’s it’s not real clear right now but the percent sign so you see here that’s your standard rubric if an instructor presses that you can change it over to weighted rubrics some lti advantage improvements um a big one here is lti assignment type so that the instructor can link an assignment tool to an lti tool and copy these items here if you got a 1.

3 there’s a lot more information it’s hard to move all that around so there’s copy buttons in the lti tool itself to pull some of those ids so a lot of information short amount of time i’ll put these slides up um in a resource item anyone can grab that’s in the site all right thanks derek next up will be stephanie schluttenhofer and i probably mispronounced your name i did my best i’m very sorry stephanie’s going to be speaking about the power of calendar subscriptions in unitime so stephanie you’re you’re welcome to grab presenter rights and get started and your your time starts now okay mostly um i’m going to talk we’ve got a useful little button on unitime that it appears and about anywhere you’ve got schedules displayed and this button allows you to export um items in an icalendar format and you can actually subscribe to these so they stay up to date as things change and actually let me go demo this now i share my screen and okay basically on this um one one place this is used is in the personal schedule i do a search on my personal schedule i’ve got a few demo events here i hit export ical it brings it up i’ve already subscribed to this one in my um my icalendar and you can see my demo events but what’s fun with this is you can go places like into the events and let’s say i do a room search i’m in charge of uh making sure the seats are lined up correctly in this ME room i can also export a icalendar for this i can also export it into pdf and other formats but i can put it into an ical i can copy that i can go into my calendar here things are slow and i can subscribe paste it in there subscribe pulls it in and now when my screen updates all of the events that are in that room show up on my calendar um so let me get out of this i’m gonna go back to my personal schedule in unitime and i’m going to show that this does indeed if i get rid of one of my demo events here i edit this i decide i want to cancel it and cancel this event and then if i flip back to my calendar here and refresh you’ll see that both the room calendar and my personal calendar will show this event disappearing and that’s pretty much all there is to this button it appears in lots of places it appears when the students look at their schedules it appears um whenever you’re searching for events there are lots of places where it occurs so let’s see if i can stop sharing here so if anyone has questions on this um feel free to put them in the shared notes and i’ll answer so we have about 50 seconds left in uh in stephanie’s slots so if there is a question we probably can pose it a succinct question with a succinct answer otherwise i’m happy to let someone else do their talk that’s right so questions can also go in the in the forum that’s attached to this lightning talk so you can post your questions for presenters there and they can they can respond as well all right let us move on then thank you stephanie for that presentation let’s move on to uh julien gribonvald um so julien has two videos that he’s going to show us uh one about uportal and web components and one is a web component showcase which i i guess is also related to uportal so julien you can take presenter rights and you can get your video started hi folks so let me launch in the view so the video is only a demo and i will talk at the same time um so firstly the demo is to on how to install u-portal and like you can see it’s begin by u clone during the clone i just want to apologize for my frenglish i hope that people also will understand me correctly so the demo is to to show that uportal can be installed quickly with less commands i mean with less than 10 commands you can install and run a u portal so during this tape we have again we have always to download the things yes okay good so now we can start to uh to begin to configure begin by the java version java 8 and from this step you can launch gradlew to obtain all tasks available uportal started as a client as a permit to install uportal easy the next step is to configure your install directory where you will install deploy tomcat and u portal and portlet services and after we you have to run and embedded database and you can launch the portal in it after that it will deploy all applications into the path that you define also it deploy and generate all databases provided into the client by default you have nothing to do wrong so all is created and deployed at the same time this client is very important and easy to use for deployment and you can add your custom apps from into it and so now you can launch the tomcat start so that’s a longer part it takes some seconds to run tomcats always tomcat but it’s not really completely complicated until now so waiting um let’s go so no it’s the browser running on localhost and you access to u portal it’s onboard a cas to authenticate and as you can see you have an admin uportal view with some elements still in style web components the administrator dashboard is a web component and before we we have seen the waffle menu that’s all no sorry thanks i will move to the next part my second demo video well so it’s more easy for me to uh to talk about uportal in this way because i’m not really familiar with english and it’s a bit difficult for me to concentrate and make your demo at the same time okay the second part is about web uportal web components on the git repository you have the main part of all web components and each web components have generally a documentation on how to translate it and it provides a demo page to show how they can be used and what they do it’s a simple way on the first moment we have the waffle menu and this part is a content menu the rich chest web component that i we have done i will show you how it’s easy to uh to complete and add more configurations this example is how to deploy the hamburger menu with which embed the tomcat menu a complete page and a complicated complex page that contains a lot of web components that permit to access to all services of all user services inside the portal available inside the portal so we are back to the portal after the deployment and we can see that the new hamburger menu the permit to access to a list of services with a custom page so you have some favorites and stuff around that now i will show you how to uh make some configurations uh to the admin dashboard to uh to change uh the filter on the publisher registry we can use we can show all services from category all categories but we can filter on other available settings like favorites and web components are really really easy to configure and and use from near so we re-import portlet definitions just some deployment of portlet definitions and after that we have only to refresh uportal i prefer the xml files to deploy but we can also deploy from cms portlets so on the previous on this page page you can see as that we have only favorites we can do the same thing with the waffle menu we can filter on favorites only it was on category quick links and after the update you will see that we’ll get only favorites from one buttons so web components are really really important for for me because they can they permit a lot of things without modifying uh u portal sources as an example but it’s a valuable for any projects and you can customize the ui easily with a simple component so that’s all all right julien thank you so much um there was a conversation in the chat about martin’s special deal with you that you got two five-minute slots so thank you for packing a lot of information into a pretty short period of time so we’re grateful all right um moving on now the next presenter is going to be wilma hodges from longsight who needs no introduction she’s going to talk a little bit about the new meetings tools so wilma take it away all right hello everybody um so my my five minutes are about meeting the new meetings tool um so just to kind of set the stage a little bit as we all know and have experienced this sort of upheaval that covid caused when it came onto the scene and it resulted in a a flurry of e-learning or remote teaching or um you know anything physically distant to help manage the pandemic which also resulted in a whole lot of zoom calls or webex meetings and sort of that virtual meeting took really a huge chunk of the learning that was happening online to be able to provide that sort of interaction so when we think about it in terms of the lms sakai specifically we wanted to think well you know online learning is certainly not going to go away it’s sort of blossomed into this you know mainstream thing now and so even beyond the pandemic we want to find ways to leverage that sort of um virtual interaction with folks and make it more social kind of make it easier to have people feel like they’re they’re part of the conversation and can easily talk to folks in their online courses so that’s kind of the thinking that came behind this so you know what makes the interface more social um so i thought about ways that you know you might surface the user profile make it easier to connect a friendlier interface to integrate with video or virtual meeting chat an easy way to notify users that there’s a meeting happening or one that’s upcoming so some examples might be being able to see the numbers currently in a meeting maybe coming a place that alerts you about coming events meetings you can join that sort of thing um so for those of you who don’t know there is a meetings tool it’s a contrib tool so not everybody is using it but we’re looking longsight is looking at a project to enhance this tool and we’re targeting these improvements for sakai 22 we’ve brought a ux design firm on board so we have somebody contracted to help us kind of imagine what this might look like make it a very attractive ui and um this is the meetings tool now it’s sort of the before picture right so this is current state um it’s currently the the big blue button api integration for those of you who use big blue button you may have seen this if you’re using something else maybe you’re not using the meetings contrib tool at all but currently you can create meetings in here they would be listed there when you go to an individual meeting you see any details there’s a spot for description and a link to join the meeting and then if there’s a meeting in progress you do see the number of folks in there and you see if they’re attendees or moderators but that’s really all the information that you get about the people that are in the session and then when there’s a recording it’s on a separate tab um and so there’s kind of a list there of any recordings in the site pertaining to that particular meetings so um brainstorming ideas for meetings um kind of 2.

0 if what if it could display events for more than one meeting on a single page because right now it’s very segmented and maybe it could display the users in each meeting in a more visual way and we looked at things like engagedly or congregate where you sort of see the little thumbnails of people and you know who’s in there not just how many and what if it could also work with your choice of tools so not just big blue button but maybe something that could also allow you to use the same meetings interface but hook it into zoom or teams or whatever other tool you want to use um and we also wanted to make it web component-ized it’s a made up word to be able to drop it into different places and not be kind of siloed in the meetings um tool so we’ve got some initial designs and i’m just going to fly through these really quickly these are some initial designs from our ux designer we’ve got kind of this table format idea where the thumbnails might appear gathered around a table you can see how many users are in there you’ve got future and past meetings kind of grouped on the page there’s also another sort of card style that we’re kind of playing with to see which one resonates more with with people um and again you’ve got your future in your past and if there’s any things that go with the presentation like a recording link or slides those could be surfaced we’re also looking at templates for creating meetings to have some sort of default setup so it’s easier to make a meeting um and then also the web component idea that you could actually have links to meetings from maybe maybe the calendar or the dashboard or other places a lessons page wherever you want to place those meetings so um so that’s kind of what we’re thinking and we’d love to hear what you would like so i kind of co-opted one of the ad hoc meeting spaces there are some ad hoc rooms available so i grabbed one and there’s the bitly for it or you can go i think it’s room one it’s in that ad hoc sign up sheet as well there’s the long link but at two o’clock today um we’d like to encourage you to come and meet with us there and talk a little bit about what you would like to see in an enhanced meetings tool for sakai so hopefully i made my time okay close enough so thank you thank you wilma that was that was great so definitely i encourage folks to join us at 2pm today for this meeting so come and give your feedback about meetings a meeting about meetings that’s we all need more of all right let’s let’s move on now to south africa where uh sam lee pan and Rainer Gehrmann are going to talk about open cast studio in action so you guys can grab presenter rights and take it away all right great great thank you very much can you see my screen not yet great it’s coming great we got it thank you all right sam uh it’s sam’s still in uh hi i’m yeah okay thanks thanks rai um so we’re gonna kick up with a question actually i’m popping it into the chat and last year um right i think there’s some noise coming through on your side okay i’ll mute myself for now all right thanks um so if we move to the next slide essentially um when we went online last year with covid um how did everyone find that they pre-recorded their teaching videos and that was quite a big yeah i think there was a lot of usage of zoom but there was also a lot of other screencasting software that was used so um right if we go on um so we were we didn’t have a lot of zoom licenses at that stage and we there were different softwares that we did look at um and some of the open source ones were nice but they weren’t that user-friendly um and some of them were like screencast-o-matic it was really user-friendly but then there’s limits like 15 minutes or there’s this annoying watermark so there’s this whole range of different softwares and licenses and um yeah you have to kind of know what to recommend to the lecturer um so if we move on we found opencost and we were very fortunate enough um to to host opencast locally but it does run in the browser um so there’s no there’s not that much overhead from the server side and we’ll even take you through a demo just now which shows you can even use it um on the on the live sites uh so it’s got your your camera your screen sharing it allows for simple trimming so that’s new features that’s been added it’s supported in five languages you can download the file um at that point or you can upload it into the lms if you have an open car server so that links up to the um opencast server um but the like the really nice thing is also it doesn’t have those limitations like um watermarks and the limitations will only be with regards to how like time limits according to how much your your browser can can manage um great thanks greg’s also adding um different language options uh that you can add to uh so now if we look at opencast at uct um we had about 16 000 video uploads last year at least 3 000 of these were from opencast studio directly as i mentioned you can also download onto your computer and then upload at a later time so a lot of people chose to do that so that um three thousand that like about one-fifth is probably a large under-representation so it was very popular um and though there were one or two niggly things where i can tell you about those i think overall people like like 90 95 or more percent people were really really happy about it it was great um and then if we go on to where do you find opencast so so to find opencast studio you can actually even find this on their apereo website um and the developer code is there for the developers in the room so there is thank you especially to the elan team which has done amazing work to get this all production ready especially last year um and then one of our previous developers duncan smith that worked on it to kick-start it like quite a few years ago so yeah it’s exciting seeing it live and in production and just really useful for our purposes um and then rai’s gonna take us through the link um which will yeah he’s gonna do a live demo for us hi everybody yes so hi uh so greg has put in the link there if you guys would like to try opencast studio yourselves uh but i’ll just gonna take you through a quick demo now just give me one second all right so this is opencast studio as sam said it is browser-based so you don’t necessarily need any fancy software or anything like that it just runs in your browser so you’ve got some options yeah you can either just record just the display so that will just be a powerpoint or a pdf or something like that display and camera which it will simultaneously record your display and your camera or if you just want to rip display your camera you can select the third option but for today’s demonstration i’m going to do the middle one display and camera all right so it will the browser will ask you which camera you would like to use so i’m just going to go with my webcam um and then nextly it after that it will ask you which application you would want to record i’m just running a very old webcam at the moment so it might not pick up immediately right i just want to know that you have about one minute left okay no problem at all um yeah i think it’s my camera that does the sometimes apologies i’m sure if i just restart this process it will there we go there’s the big face reveal everybody wanted okay then i’m just gonna go here to select my powerpoint presentation and we can go off to next then i’ll choose i want to record with my microphone and once again it will ask you which device you would want to record from so i’m just going to choose my webcam in this instance and you can actually see the audio levels there just to ensure that audio is coming through the system at the moment and next and we hit record and right once it’s recording you can go through your powerpoint slides as usual you can talk about your topics okay and then once you’re done with the recording you can click stop all right so here you can review your recording and it’s also got some basic editing functionality so it’s just the top and tail as i like to say so you can take off a little bit in the beginning and all that at the end it’s mostly for like when you’re trying to get everything ready or you click record and you’re getting your stuff towards yourself or if you end the recording and you close your app or you close your your powerpoint you can edit those things out all right then once you’re happy you can go next and then on the right hand side you’ll be able to download the videos in i think in firefox it’s webm format what could also be mkv and chrome i believe um and then if you have opencast links via your lms you’ll just be able to upload here directly so we can just say test recording and it’s the presenter name at the bottom and if i click here it should upload to directly to opencast and then once that is done um it will be published to your course site so for example over here you’ve got a list of videos at the bottom um and it will show you the list of videos here great um and that’s just a quick demo of opencast studio uh thank you very much any questions or sam would you like to say anything no i think at this point we should move on to our final lightning talk we have about five minutes left in this session so um so thanks to uh to sam and to rai for that uh that open cast demo definitely pretty interesting and i agree with dr chuck it’s uh it’s pretty exciting in its simplicity all right let’s uh let’s wrap up this session with with a uh lightning talk on demystifying tests and quizzes settings so this is the uh the team of john buckingham and tiffany stull john is from pepperdine university tiffany from the university of virginia so take it away guys awesome um let me see if i can take control of that oh i i did john oh you did okay okay do you want to um do you want to start yeah great okay all right all right well we’ll go ahead and get started um thank you all so much for um uh let me actually turn on my webcam here i just realized that it was not turned on so thank you for bearing with me here there we go all right thank you all so much for for um uh attending our um a little lightning talk here on demystifying the uh test and quizzes settings um basically what this is about is um at our institutions tiffany and i have encountered a lot of confusion around uh these settings in the tests and quizzes tool um there are a lot of options in that tool and there’s a lot of complicated and ambiguous text uh that these settings refer to and so um you know we’re coming from the position that if there is a if there’s a way to make a lot of these these items clearer um the users instructors will be able to choose the right settings for them at the appropriate times um so we actually have uh in that effort we’ve got uh you’ll see here on this this list um this uh this slide here for resources we’ve got um a few jiras uh one is uh settings text changes so there’s there’s some text changes a lot of text changes that we really wanna make make some of these we actually consider to be low hanging fruit that that is some of these could be can could be changed by a virtue of the the message bundle manager um but we’re also really proposing that all of these changes become standard um for all uh all sakai institutions and of course there would be there’s always going to be wiggle room for other institutions to update or change some of the some of the languages themselves again using that message bundle manager um and so the a lot of these these changes would require you know if it does become standard it would become uh needed to uh it would require a developer work and so here uh thank you tiffany for for putting those uh in the chat you’ll see um sak three four six seven four these are uh the settings text changes that we are proposing um and so you’ll you’ll be able to see some some good resources there we also have uh in this uh on the slide here message bundles for textual updates and this is actually where um all of the textual or changes can be found by virtue of using the message bundle manager and then at the same time there’s also another jira here for sak 34323 about making updates to the exceptions ui the exceptions ui is really really important exceptions i’m sure we’ve all a lot of us have gotten uh used to the use of this awesome feature lately and so uh there are some some suggestions and improvements that we’re proposing uh to make it so that exceptions is a little bit more clear and intuitive in using and of course this would also require a developer intervention and so um that’s just a very very quick introduction and so i’m going to go ahead and hand this off here to tiffany who will show you uh some of the items that we have in mind in a few examples yep so i’m going to share my screen here so i have here on the left uh uva’s instance of sakai 20 where i’ve made some of the text changes using the message bundle manager um that john mentioned um one of the the major changes that uh we’d like to make is to uh give the dates uh sort of meaningful labels that we can point users to and make them more accessible so for example in the nightly server here we can see it is available it is due and then we have this late submissions accepted until question uh with date fields associated with them so um the late submission date or uh due date the various assessment ending settings retract date can be either one of those so i’ve renamed them uh to available date due date and final submission deadline being either the due date or a late submission deadline depending on what the instructor chooses another piece that we get a lot of confusion about is the immediate feedback piece which is where feedback is revealed to the student while they’re taking an assessment so that is something that we’ve changed here to a long sentence to tell the instructor that that’s exactly what will happen they’ll see the feedback while taking the assessment and they can change their answers accordingly and finally i wanted to share the exceptions ui that mitch done at uva developer has done some excellent work on improving the exceptions ui in uh sakai currently is very confusing it has a very long explanatory text at the bottom explaining how to use it you should never need that in in a um a ui to explain uh the settings away um so right now you have these fields it has a time limit of zero minutes and zero hours uh to set it for unlimited time so um and also these these empty date fields are actually inheriting the dates for uh the overall assessment which is extremely confusing and it doesn’t tell you that in the exceptions table so there’s actually a due date and a late submission date enabled here and and that’s confusing so one of the things we’ve done at uva is to make it so that when you select a user it inherits all of the settings that’s visible on the screen for the overall assessment and this ui is exactly the same as availability and submissions where you have a checkbox to enable the time limit and so on and so please check out those jiras and uh and vote for them if you like them thanks all right thanks to tiffany and john i just want to say uh you know you guys and and others on the ux team have been doing a whole lot of work on what we called gnarly workflows a couple of years ago so just trying to find places where there are some some real great capabilities in sakai that need to have better ui and so thanks for all the work that you guys have been putting in these two are the brains behind auto groups which is already in sakai so you know nice to see them back at it all right so this brings us to the end of our uh our lightning talk session so thank you all for hanging in there with me so it is it’s 1 33 p.

m so we are a little bit past time but uh but well worth the extra two or three minutes so i’ve got a couple of of comments to give you before i set you free so one is that uh please please remember that there’ll be a meeting at 2 p. m to uh get your feedback about the new meetings tool so please come if you’ve got time uh there’s going to be trivia at 3 30 and uh the organizers remind me that there is a pro host so it’s not going to be one of us slackers doing trivia it’s going to be actually someone whose job it is to do really great trivia sessions so so come come at 3 30 enjoy some trivia and have some social time with your your fellow apereo community members all right and uh kathy reminds us also that we have a couple of open slots left at tomorrow’s lightning talk session so if you’ve got something that you wanted to talk about and you hadn’t had a chance yet there’s still so there’s still an opportunity to sign up and so there’s information in the chat about how you can submit your idea you can send it to kathy at apereo coordinator at concentra-cms.

com so if you’ve got an idea definitely feel free to to sign yourself up that way so definitely given that we’ve got slots and we’ve got lots of people with great ideas we want to make sure that we maximize the time that we’ve got to learn from each other all right that’s it thank you guys so much and we’ll see some of you at 2 and others of you at 3 30. all right take care all.