The QMplus Phase 2 Project to complete the migration to QMplus for the five schools in Science and Engineering and the MBBS undergraduate medicine programme in the School of Medicine & Dentistry from Blackboard or their own bespoke systems is taking place throughout the spring and summer of 2013. Further support for academics migrating to QMplus is available throughout August and September, including an online version of the training for those who want to recap on something they learnt during the session or who have not been able to attend a session in person.

There will also be drop-in sessions most working days during August and September at either the Mile End or the Whitechapel campus as well as E-learning Assistants being based in each of the science and engineering schools for one morning and one afternoon during the first week of teaching to help with any queries.

The E-learning Assistants are also available to help members of staff who have ideas for small projects that will result in a more interactive experience for students using their module area and which can be written up as a case study to provide ideas for other colleagues.

Updates 1.4 & 1.5 took place, enabling the following functionality on QMplus:

Update 1.4

• New functionality is available: so that visitors can be automatically logged in as guests when accessing a course with guest access, i.e. without needing to click the “login as guest button”
• Adjustment to text editor on QMplus course pages but not Groups & Portfolios: the emoticon palette will no longer be available in the text editor for users to select a graphical emoticon and graphics will no longer appear when emoticons are typed. Existing graphical emoticons will remain wherever they have been used.
• A bug affecting the rollover block will be fixed, so the course leader or administrator will be able to edit a course rollover that has been scheduled past the block’s cut-off date.
• New functionality is available for site administrators: to enrol all students from a chosen file to the joint programme student role.

Update 1.5

• OU Blog is new activity type being added to QMplus. It does not replace the standard QMplus blog, but operates alongside it. It can be used to allow everyone in the course to post to the same blog, groups of people to share a blog or individuals to keep a solo blog. These can be set up so they allow only those who write them and those grading them to have access or to allow all on the module to have access to read and comment on the blogs. If wider viewing would be useful, e.g. friends, family, employers,  allowing public viewing and even moderated comments  from people who are not logged in is an option.

• OU Wiki is new activity type being added to QMplus. Like the OU Blog, It does not replace the standard QMplus wiki, but operates alongside it. It can be used to allow everyone in the course to a series of linked pages around a central theme.

• Automated generation of certificates is an additional feature, which enables teachers and course leaders to set up  a customised certificate which is released to their students on completion of specified activities. It might be used to reward high grades on formative activities, for example, or for areas which are set up for non academic study, such as the Careers Centre’s course on Transitioning into the Workplace.

• Turnitin Assignment is another new activity type being added to QMplus this month. Whilst all assignments allow use of many Turnitin features to identify similarity between a student’s submission and other student assignments, websites and journal articles, this one allows full access to the Turnitin settings, such as setting a post date to release grades, and deciding whether students’ submissions should be submitted to Turnitin’s repository. Grades entered on Turnitin will also be fed through to the QMplus gradebook, which does not happen with other assignment types and the Turnitin assignment allows for blind marking and for emailing a submission receipt to students. Before choosing a new assignment type, you may wish to wait for the new version of the Submission Manager assignment type next month, to see which best suits your module.

• A new Logged in as block is being added. This is a customised block that incorporates QMUL’s  SMART timetable link and may be used on the new School and Faculty landing pages

• The Rollover block is being updated to improve the order of the codes in the dropdown box for selecting a module’s new code.
• The ability to redirect users to a school’s landing page is being enabled so that when they log in they will go to their school’s landing page if their school has set this up and that if they search for a school or faculty’s category page on QMplus, they will view its landing page rather than a list of its modules if that school has a landing page.

• QMplus is being configured to prevent course leaders from selecting non-QM themes for modules on QMplus as this is confusing to users viewing the module and the QMplus theme is being updated to align with a recent update to the appearance of Queen Mary websites