Draft: note, Kaltura is a complex space and until we have worked the kinks out of the process this post will be considered draft.
What is a Group?
A group (e.g. Library) is a single manageable entity that represents a collection of users. Technically, a group is a unique type of user that can have individual users as part of it.
Groups can be assigned to a category/channel just like users can.
After a group is assigned to a category, all the individual users in the group inherit the permission of the group in the category. For example, if the group is assigned as contributor, then all users will be contributors as well.
Groups can also be set as the owner of media.
Groups – Email Notifications
Groups support email address notifications. Admins may add the email address or keep it empty. This feature allows for email notifications to be sent to a distribution list.
Important Group Rules
An individual user can be both directly assigned to a category/channel and via a group.
If an individual user is directly assigned to a category/channel and via a group, the permission of the direct assignment will overrule the group inheritance (even if it is lower permission).
In case the user is a member of 2 groups and the 2 groups are assigned to a category, the higher permission of the user will be counted in this category.
In KMS – members of a channel will not include the users in the group breakdown, but only direct users and groups.
Analytics are displayed for an individual user (and not the group).
Known Limitation – a group name cannot be identical to a userID in the group.
Channels are the main organizing structure. There are three kinds:
Public Channels which anyone can join – best to name channels by purpose (you get Town Square and Off-Topic by default)
Private Channels which are invite only by channel creator
Direct Messages note if you anticipate need to draw other people into a direct message then set up a private channel instead. Adding another person to a Direct Message channel creates a new one and the added person cannot see the history.
You can drag and drop files and other attachments.
Web urls will link when you hit enter.
You can also pin entries to keep them at the top.
Use @ plus the username to add users to your message. They will be notified. You can also use @all or @channel to fill up everyone’s email inbox.
Search is excellent. You can also use hashtags like this #mattermost-usage Clicking on a hashtag will isolate all the tagged messages in a search panel.
Text Formatting
Mattermost responds to Markdown text formatting commands for things like headings, bold/italic, bullet/numbered lists, tables, etc. See the link to the user guide below. Also see a Markdown version of these instructions below. (Useful for copy and paste into a Mattermost channel)
Big Blue Button conferencing
Two ways to access:
Plugin icon/menu in upper right by search. This drops a meeting button in the channel which any channel member can use. Create a limited private channel and access from within there to limit attendence.
Click on a users name/avatar and Start the meeting from there to have a one on one meeting.
Polls
Usage
/poll "Is Matterpoll great?" creates a poll with the answer options "Yes" and "No". You can also leave out the double quotes and just type /poll Is Matterpoll great?.
If you want to define all answer options by yourself, type /poll "Is Matterpoll great?" "Of course" "In any case" "Definitely"- Note that the double quotes are required in this case.
Poll Settings
Poll Settings provider further customisation, e.g. /poll "Is Matterpoll great?" "Of course" "In any case" "Definitely" –progress –anonymous. The available Poll Settings are:
–anonymous: Don’t show who voted for what at the end
–progress: During the poll, show how many votes each answer option got
–public-add-option: Allow all users to add additional options
# Usage
Channels are the main organizing structure. There are three kinds:
* **Public Channels** which anyone can join - best to name channels by purpose (you get Town Square and Off-Topic by default)
* **Private Channels** which are invite only by channel creator
* **Direct Messages** note if you anticipate need to draw other people into a direct message then set up a private channel instead. Adding another person to a Direct Message channel creates a new one and the added person cannot see the history.
You can drag and drop files and other attachments.
Web urls will link when you hit enter.
You can also pin entries to keep them at the top.
Use @ plus the username to add users to your message. They will be notified. You can also use @all or @channel to fill up everyone's email inbox.
Search is excellent. You can also use hashtags like this #mattermost-usage Clicking on a hashtag will isolate all the tagged messages in a search panel.
## Text Formatting
Mattermost responds to Markdown text formatting commands for things like headings, bold/italic, bullet/numbered lists, tables, etc. See the link to the user guide below. Also see a Markdown version of these instructions below. (Useful for copy and paste into a Mattermost channel)
## Big Blue Button conferencing
Two ways to access:
* Plugin icon/menu in upper right by search. This drops a meeting button in the channel which any channel member can use. Create a limited private channel and access from within there to limit attendence.
* Click on a users name/avatar and Start the meeting from there to have a one on one meeting.
## Polls
### Usage
/poll "Is Matterpoll great?" creates a poll with the answer options "Yes" and "No". You can also leave out the double quotes and just type /poll Is Matterpoll great?.
If you want to define all answer options by yourself, type /poll "Is Matterpoll great?" "Of course" "In any case" "Definitely"- Note that the double quotes are required in this case.
### Poll Settings
Poll Settings provider further customisation, e.g. /poll "Is Matterpoll great?" "Of course" "In any case" "Definitely" --progress --anonymous. The available Poll Settings are:
--anonymous: Don't show who voted for what at the end
--progress: During the poll, show how many votes each answer option got
--public-add-option: Allow all users to add additional options
## Complete Mattermost User Guide
For more instructions see the full user guide at: <https://docs.mattermost.com/guides/user.html>
Hi all, this upgrade to WordPress 5.4 brings a few handy improvements:
A four-screen “onboarding” style guide to using the block editor that appears the first time you open the block editor. It can be viewed again via the vertical three dots in the upper right of the window under the item “Welcome Guide”. (If you want a more complete intro to the Block Editor one can be found here.)
The addition of a Social Icons Block. This may well replace the two or three plugins that we currently provide this functionality with. This block lets you add icons/accounts to various social media services.
A new button block that enables the addition of buttons and button groups to your page.
New colour options and gradients.
General refinements to the user interface of the block editor.
More complete information about the upgrade can be found here. If you haven’t made the plunge to the block editor there is no better time.
Directions on how to enable and work with the block editor can be found at:
Currently we are witnessing the growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has contributed to the improvements of many technologies, including chatbots. Many vendors have successfully developed chatbots that go through a set process for a defined outcome: for example, customer service inquiries. Students are already using chatbots as they are integrated into many social media platforms. A ‘Teaching Bot’ could provoke broader group conversations, or provide students with tailored learning experiences. A chatbot could send out reminders of daily tasks and/or suggestions for self-study strategies. A ‘Teaching Bot’ has the potential to help faculty concentrate on high quality teaching or more complex questions made by students by answering common course queries.
This interactive workshop will provide an overview of chatbots in education and will involve attendees working in groups to identify a use case and build a paper-based chatbot. At the end of the session, participants will have gained an overview on chatbots in education and can reuse the paper prototyping exercise to help identify and design chatbots.
Session Agenda
Welcome and introductions
Chatbot presentation
Attendees form groups
Identify use case, audience and name
Create a list of questions the chatbot will answer
Design a chatbot conversation
Group presentations and reflection
Facilitated By:
Jamie Drozda and Brenna Clarke Gray
Please email jdrozda@tru.ca or bgray@tru.ca to share your work or with further questions.
Create a persona for your chatbot and give your bot a name. Choose your own question or consider one of the following questions to use to design the conversation:
What date are convocation ceremonies this/next year?
How do I get my transcript?
What citation style do I use for my assignment?
Mock-up you conversational flow chart using you chart paper, markers and Post-it notes.
Take a look at ‘Chatbots and Digital Assistants Report’ This report is based on a survey of universities and colleges across the UK and on engagement with some of the major vendors of chatbot platforms – Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft – to identify opportunities for Jisc to help institutions with introducing these new technologies.
The Tech Advocate outlines two ways to think about the role of chatbots in personalizing education and gives examples of how chatbots can provide instantaneous information about many topics.
The eLearning Industry outlines ten common scenarios where using a chatbot for learning support can make a real difference.
If you missed this session, share your contact information with us and we’ll be in touch for the next offering of this workshop.
Every now and then a WordPress plugin comes along that I instantly know will be a useful game-changer for many TruBox and OpenETC users. I recently installed this plugin on both servers and will take a few paragraphs to show you what it does. The Academic Blogger’s Toolkit (ABT) helps you manage citations and bibliographies in WordPress-based writing. Oh, this is a Gutenberg (Block editor) plugin so you are out of luck if you are a Classic editor person.
Once you activate it on your site you have a setting to take care of before you use it, that’s right, selecting your citation style. That is taken care on the Dashboard => Settings => Academic Blogger’s Toolkit screen as demonstrated below. Start typing the name of your style guide (acronyms seem to work), select it from the list and click save in the panel. There are lots of citation styles available.
Okay, that’s all we have to do there for now. Let’s see how it works. The scenario is as follows: I have all my citations in my regular citation manager, Zotero (recently moved from Endnote to Zotero, let’s please not have the ‘favourite’ citation manager argument.) I’m going to export citations, in this case just a couple I think I will need (see notes below) for this article from Zotero to an .ris file. RIS is a common format for importing and exporting to and from citation managers.
Now to get my sources into the ABT. I need to first switch my right sidebar to the ABT panel (see image below). Then I will use the import button, find the file on my computer in the file selection dialog box and import it.
We now have our references in the ABT panel. We have not cited anything, so they all appear in the “Uncited Items” area. Let’s put in a citation and see how that works. I’ll put the citation for the Academic Blogger’s Toolkit plugin webpage on wordpress.org right here. (D. P. Sifford 2019) What I did was position my cursor in my text where I wanted the citation, open the “Uncited Items” panel, selected my citation (I could have selected more than 1 using the shift or control key as I was selecting them), and then clicked the “Insert citation” button as seen in the image below.
You will notice a couple of happy byproducts of inserting a citation: ABT begins to build the bibliography and puts it in a block at the bottom of the page. Also, it moves the reference from the uncited group to the cited group so that you can keep track of usage and additional citations against the given reference.
That’s probably enough to get you going. See below for some additional notes and a handy link or two.
Notes, links and documentation
Unless your needs are simple I don’t think that the Academic Blogger’s Toolkit will replace your primary citation manager. There are features such as citation notes, attached full text and files, and others that are not provided for in ABT.
I am taking a “bring in just the references I might need for this article” approach to ABT usage for now rather than a “bring every citation I’ve every gathered” approach. I’ll be keeping my main citation manager anyway, and this seems more prudent.
On the subject of footnotes. You may have noticed the footnotes group. To be honest I haven’t figured out how that one works yet. If you use certain styles, such as AMA, it will create footnote-like citations, but they still appear in Cited group rather than Footnotes group. (This I imagine lets you change your citation style at any time.)
If you follow the link to the plugin listing on the WordPress site (D. P. Sifford 2019) you will find that the plugin author’s primary working location is his github.com repository(D. Sifford 2019). (Github is a nerdy place where programmers store their code for distribution, version control, collecting and responding to issues and so forth.) This plugin author also stores documentation for ABT there. You can go the the link directly https://github.com/dsifford/academic-bloggers-toolkit/wiki(D. Sifford 2019), or you can access the ‘three vertical dots’ menu in the ABT manual to access the “Usage instructions” link to get to the same place. (There are two ‘three vertical dots’ menus, make sure you access the one directly across from the insert citation button.)
The Intercultural Intersections Website is what we consider a “bespoke” project for the Learning Technology and Innovations group. It required plenty of lead time and a great deal of initial custom WordPress development and ongoing iteration.
Our internal client for this site was Kyra Garson, Interculturalization Coordinator in TRU’s Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Also involved in the project was her work-study student, Santi Swain.
The goal of the project was to provide a place to continue discussions that had their origins or inspiration in the biennial Intercultural Intersections conference conference hosted at TRU.
A profile of this project was presented at the 2016 Festival of Learning in Burnaby, B.C. A website supporting this profile presentation can be found here.
Kaltura is a one-stop shop for all things video. It’s like Youtube on steroids. It integrates with Moodle and WordPress and is accessible to all TRU Faculty and Students.
Use Kaltura for video creation, editing, storage and cataloguing. Use it in Moodle for display video, video-based assignments, captions/transcripts and more.
Moodle is the Learning Management System at TRU and allows for the delivery of course materials, assessments like assignments and quizzes, and student engagement through tools like forums and Big Blue Button for videoconferencing. Student data is protected when instructors use Moodle to communicate confidential information about course progress and grades.
Our installation of Moodle includes a rich suite of plug-ins that allow for a range of pedagogical tools to be used in classes, including interactive exercises built in H5P and robust integration with Kaltura.
Big Blue Button is a tool for synchronous audio/video discussions. It integrates with Moodle, Mattermost and even has stand-alone access via the Greenlight front end. It includes video-based chat, whiteboard, session-recording and screen sharing functionality.
Use it when you want to interact with others in real-time and save recordings for later. It is great for computer-based instruction at a distance, but is not a classroom-based lecture broadcast/capture system.
