RITS Online Courses

Since November 2016 I have been working with teams in Research IT Services to develop online self-service versions of face-to-face courses.

I am responsible for constructing the courses, but RITS teams verify the content readings and formative quizzes, write the summative quiz questions and accompanying explanations, and produce a transcript for and produce and introductory video for each course.

Two courses have been fully developed to date these are:

The following courses are currently in development:

These courses have been built using the Morea framework developed by the University of Hawaii.

The development steps I undertake for the courses are:

  1. Convert Jupyter notebooks to markdown files
  2. Create markdown files in Morea enviornment and copy content across
  3. Format markdown files and review/add/remove content as necessary
  4. Create or source and insert images, videos and web links to Readings
  5. Upload Jupyter notebooks to Anaconda cloud and add links and descriptions to Experiences
  6. Create and insert links to H5P quizzes to Assessments
  7. Caption intro videos and add to course homepage
  8. Add links to Morea content from Moodle
  9. Create summative assessment quiz in Moodle
  10. Create certificate and set-up access criterion in Moodle
  11. Facilitate UAT and action test fixes

In addition I have been developing a wiki in GitHub that identifies which tools have been used for the development of which courses, links and login details to tools used and maintenance responsibilities for completed courses.

Evidence of tools used during course creation.

Row 1: H5P, YouTube and Moodle. Row 2: Markdown and GitHub wiki

Screenshot showing list of H5P quizzes createdScreenshot showing use of YouTube for adding video captionsScreenshot showing associated Moodle course for online RITS courses

Screenshot showing markdown file for Morea frameworkScreenshot showing GitHub wiki

Example H5P quiz created:

ISG Moodle Course

During my secondment to the Information Security Group (ISG) I initially assisted the Senior Information Security Officer (Awareness), then took on the role myself for 1 year.

One of my responsibilities was to continue the development of the ISG Moodle course, and to resolve user queries. I predominantly worked on version 2 of the course.

This work included:

  • Introduction of an additional topic
  • Seperation and re-creation of quizzes
  • Creation and inclusion of accessible supplementary materials

Some content was created using ThingLink (https://www.thinglink.com/), but  as this is not very accessible the same content was made available in an alternative format.

During the update process I sought feedback from the Disability IT Support Analyst Michele Farmer about what needed improvement, and on the accessibility of the changes made.

Assistance was required from the Digital Education to create a new course in Moodle and migrate the content from a sandbox course into the new course as I do not have admin permissions for Moodle.

Reflection

I am a compotent user of a range of software tools and e-learning technologies that have enabled be to develop multimedia learning resources for both blended and purely online learning.

My permissions for centrally supported e-learning technologies are those of an instructor. Although I can perform a number of tasks, I am not able to and would not know how to perform administrative functions in systems such as Moodle and Echo360.  It is not a requirement of my role to be able to support users, but I am aware of this lack in knowledge.

This was apparent when trying to create queries to extract the data I needed for learning analytics from a copy I had of the Moodle database.  I struggled to understand the structure, especially where some fields meant different things based on the value of the context field.  After failing to produce the correct query, I sought assistance from a colleague who had previously have a role as a Moodle database administrator.  I informed them of the data that I needed and they constructed the query.