service-is-any | Thomas' Work Space

How to book LRC resources – explained in one screenshot

2011/12/02 plagwitz 3 comments

You can come to the LRC reception desk to book an item (you will still need to log into your NINERMAIL). But you can also self-help, and get immediate confirmation, from any device with access to your NINERMAIL:

If you have a basic LRC classroom booking scenario, send to the room lrcroomcoed434@uncc.edu what looks like “an email that includes times”: Go to your Ninermail inbox. Using the little triangle icon, unfold the “New” menu. Click menu item “Meeting request”. In the window, that opens, in the “Resources:” field, put lrcroomcoed434@uncc.edu. In the “Subject:”, put your course number. Enter start and end times of your classes visit. In the upper left, Click “Send”. Within a few seconds you receive a response email from the room in OWA: If you did not check the “Scheduling Assistant” tab, you may be asked to reschedule because of a conflict. If you fail to get a response, something went wrong, did you mistype the address? OWA remembers and suggests it after first use, but the first time you need to get it right.

For more advanced scenarios (beyond #3 below), first find the email address of our bookable resources, then book it like so:

How to start the term with making your Moodle courses available to your students

2011/11/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

Three simple steps:
Beats making courses available by default, when you might still refine them.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-learning, lms, service-is-training Tags: FAQs, moodle, settings, unhiding

How to duplicate assignments in Moodle course sections by importing

2011/11/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

Limitation: You cannot use other users’content. Use the backup/restore content procedure instead.
Benefits are:

You can save the time it would take to redo the assignment from scratch.
plus avoid breaking things when you try and copy the assignment over manually: this built –in way does not break links.

But have to jump through these hoops:
1. Start here:
  1. Choose your source course which has the assignment:
  2. Then choose what assignment you want to import:
  3. Jump
  4. through
  5. the
  6. hoops
  7. done:

Categories: assessments, audience-is-teachers, e-learning, lms, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-training Tags: FAQs, importing, moodle

LRC computer and other hardware inventory

2011/11/24 plagwitz Leave a comment

These lists document hardware owned by the LRC:
1. Symantec-Ghost generated.
2. A handmade overview (partially based on the previous) can be (permissions provided) viewed or edited here.

Categories: Area-is-any, audience-is-IT-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, documentation, e-infrastructure, hardware, Metrics, service-is-documenting, Spreadsheets Tags: asset-management

How to subscribe to an LRC calendar – in one screenshot

2011/11/21 plagwitz 2 comments

Subscribing to LRC calendars, e.g. for tutoring, will give you access from your Ninermail/OWA and always keep you updated of late-breaking changes. Here is how, starting from our list of bookable resources:

Want a longer version?

Categories: e-infrastructure, Screenshots, service-is-tutoring Tags: calendaring, meeting-requests, ms-exchange, OWA, resources, scheduling, subscribing, tutoring

How to poll for the best meeting time using Meeting Requests

2011/11/21 plagwitz 1 comment

Please also see the follow-up user-perspective video here: How to respond to a poll for the best meeting time using Meeting Requests.
A traditional issue around the LRC is getting busy teachers to agree on a common workshop time. Ideally, the scheduling assistant would automate this by allowing you to see the common free time slot in their busy timelines. However, this requires that the university calendaring system has already been widely adopted. In the meantime, meeting requests can still greatly facilitate finding this most common free time, by serving as a poll.
To find the most popular time slot, send a number of alternative meeting requests with the instruction: “If interested in the workshop, please accept those times during which you could attend. I will only not cancel the most popular meeting time”. (Make sure that respondents know that they can “Edit response before sending” to include a message, or else this will skew the tally).
At the end, you can easily tally the response in your calendar, and, as the meeting organizer, cancel the unpopular ones:
And you can spare everybody one final summary email: “ Mark your calendars!” . The interested parties’ calendar has already be marked.

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, documentation, service-is-training Tags: 2007, 2010, 2011, calendaring, meeting-requests, ms-exchange, ms-outlook, scheduling, scheduling assistant

How students access language learning materials on the Library ereserves system

2011/11/11 plagwitz Leave a comment

Note the important update in red below.
This has been tested at post date with Firefox. ereserves seems to be not compatible with Internet Explorer 8: i
On the Library home page, from the top menu: “Research & Course Help”, choose menu item: “Course Reserves” (or, if this menu changes again, I have a hunch that deeplinking may be more stable: http://library.uncc.edu/caos/coursereserve, what’s in a URL…),
sign in with your Ninernet ID,
enter search term
1. select from the dropdown “search by name”, an enter part of your course name in the textbox,
2. or click on tab:”Course Reserves Pages by Instructor”, and from the dropdown, select your instructor,
click search,
then select your course from the results grid.
Enter the password, which has been given to your by your instructor.
In the results grid, click on the desired chapter and tracks. Note: You need to disable your web browser”s “popup blocker”.
In the popup window, click on link: “More information”,
when offered, , like in this screenshot:
you cannot save the file, or rather: only a text file with links to the audio which you cannot play, like rtsp://dlib4.uncc.edu:554/e_reserves/CD1bonneforme12-16.rm). That is by design.
Instead of trying to save, select to “open” the file. You need have a streaming audio playing software installed, like Real Player or the open source VLC-Player.
instead of VLC, as offered by default, like so :
choose “Open with”, “Other”, pick “RealPlayer” from the list, like so:
Here is a more on what does not work with ereserves. The only combination I could get to work with eReserves streaming audio is – see resulting screencast (requires Windows Media Player) of streaming a long file successfully – is RealPlayer 14, Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP3, and that only after resetting the Winsock catalog which I can do for the entire LRC only nownext time the lab is reimaged. For now, use instead audio from Moodle metacourses where possible.