Teaching on ULearning
After developing your course in ULearning, it is time to start teaching! There are several topics that need some attention to make sure everything will go smoothly. Please have a look.
Enrolling students in your course
Students register in Osiris in advance for the course. The course coordinator receives the list of registrations and email addresses of the students from the administration (infoBMS@umcutrecht.nl).
The key-user of ULearning creates a sign-up link of the course and mails this link to you.
Send an email with the sign-up link to the students before the course starts so they can register themselves for the course. You can use the text below:
Dear student,
You are enrolled in the course [name course] which will start [start date]. The course is hosted on ULearning and you can login and register for the course and platform using your Solis-id via this link [sign up link].
After registration you can change your profile and settings and, for example, add a photo to further personalise your profile page.
For content-related questions about the course you can email me [name and email teacher].
For platform-related technical questions you can email the support team ( ULearning-support@uu.nl)
Enjoy the course,
Kind regards,
Support during the course
Technical problems may occur during the course, for example problems with registering, starting up a video or submitting assignments or giving peer feedback.
You can send an email to ULearning-support@uu.nl for direct help and support.
Moderation suggestions
In a course on ULearning, there is a great deal of interaction possible among students and between students and the teacher. You can add a discussion forum to any learning activity and use it as a learning activity as well. This great feature does require moderation skills from the teacher. Here are some general tips to get you started.
Clearly communicate if you (or a student assistant) will read and interact in the discussion forums. Our advice would be to do so, so that you keep informed about what is happening between students and between students and the content. Be clear on the amount of time you will check the messages. Will this be every day or once a week for example.
Just like face-2-face education, the success of an online course depends on the students. Some groups are very interactive online and others find it harder to react on each other and only do so if the interaction is mandatory. It is possible to make it mandatory to open a discussion topic or to have to react to 2 discussion topics before the activity is switched to complete. You can choose these settings yourself, depending on the amount of students. It might feel a bit forced, but your dependency on group interactivity lessens significantly.
Send a weekly message (or twice a week) through News (via the menu bar at the top of the page). Don’t make the message too long, but update the students on relevant information, deadlines and give general feedback on how they are progressing. You can consider referring to a comment of a student to show them that you are reading everything and they are not only talking to their peers. It will keep the students more engaged during the course.
This depends on the design of your course, but most courses work better if the students invest time in the course multiple times a week. Tell them they can’t do everything in one sitting in the weekend. Most courses depend on interaction between students during the week. Setting deadlines during the week can help with this.
For more moderation suggestions see this training course How to design my education on ULearning.
Course evaluation
Course evaluations are handled via Caracal. For more information, please visit the GSLS Caracal website.
Registering course results
Once the course results are known they can be registered in Osiris. More information can be found on this site about the procedures .
Completion of the course and update
Once the course and assessment procedure has been completed, the course including user data (participation in discussion forums, submitted products, etc.) will be archived. A copy of the course will be made for the next edition. Archiving and copying of the course is done by a key-user of ULearning.
Before the course starts again, adjustments can be made to the course based on evaluation results or for other reasons, such as to make the course more scalable.