![\"SHOAL_FishImage\"](\"http:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/adamweblearn\/files\/2016\/10\/SHOAL_FishImage-300x204.png\")
Testing Testing!<\/p>\nTesting Testing!<\/p>\n
We are excited to announce that in February the SHOAL portal moves into a beta-testing phase!\u00a0 We invite staff and students to join our group of trial users, to give us feedback on the portal design.\u00a0 Trial participants will get a sneak preview of the diverse digital learning activities that will feature in the showcase.\u00a0 Email shoal@maillist.ox.ac.uk<\/a> to join the trial or find out more.<\/p>\n Our original idea for SHOAL aimed to make it easy for staff to re-use and re-purpose example learning activities by importing them into their own WebLearn site.\u00a0 Once the project began, conversations with experts such as Marion Manton (Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning) and Kate Lindsay, and our own experience, encouraged us to focus on maximising discoverability of resources instead.\u00a0 This is because we believe that staff are likely to adopt and adapt ideas that have inspired them, beyond using an activity as-is.\u00a0 By revealing interesting resources and making their creators and usage permissions known, we hope that SHOAL will encourage cross-departmental and divisional sharing of existing resources as well as promoting the creation of new learning activities.<\/p>\n On the technical side, Matthew Buckett at IT Services has developed two new WebLearn tools:<\/p>\n Each example learning activity will be hosted on its own separate WebLearn site, which will be a special \u2018Repository\u2019 site type.\u00a0 The Metadata tool can be added to repository sites to enable learning activity to be described.\u00a0 The Browser tool can feature in multiple WebLearn sites, allowing learning activities to be discovered from a variety of places within WebLearn.\u00a0 Both tools are currently integrated within WebLearn but there is the potential to run them independently if a different VLE is adopted by Oxford in the future.<\/p>\n The SHOAL project now features on the \u2018Support\u2019 page of the Digital Education website, https:\/\/digitaleducation.web.ox.ac.uk\/support<\/a>. \u00a0When the portal goes live this will be one route to exploring the learning activities.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Testing Testing! We are excited to announce that in February the SHOAL portal moves into a beta-testing phase!\u00a0 We invite staff and students to join our group of trial users, to give us feedback on the portal design.\u00a0 Trial participants … Continue reading \n