Preparing for the new year in Talis Elevate
If you’ve been using Talis Elevate previously, and you plan to ‘reuse’ your modules and resources, there’s a couple of things you may wish to do… This blog post is designed to help you get set for the start of term with your new students.
Amending your start/end dates
If you rollover your VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) sites, you will likely want all your previously added resources to just ‘work’ again in the VLE. To ensure this can happen, we hide the comments made outside of the start/end date of your modules. This means, if you update those dates on your module via app.talis.com, your resources will appear ‘blank’ to your students, so you can start commenting from scratch again. There’s a support guide to show you how to do this.
Double-check your digitisations
If you’ve been using Talis Elevate with digitised content (for example, scanned chapters of books, or journal articles, run via the library), these will be ‘available’ to specific groups of students for specific times. This is a limitation that is set by the Copyright Licensing Authority (CLA). This means some of your previously added resources may unfortunately be unavailable. Don’t worry though, it’s likely your library will have re-requested this content is cleared.
To add this content back, you simply need to go through the process again of adding these digitisations to your module. Just make sure you keep an eye out for the up to date start/end date on those resources.
There’s a support guide here to remind you of the digitisation process within Talis Elevate
Teaching with others on a Talis Elevate module?
Not a problem, your colleagues can ‘join’ your module as a teacher too! Depending on how you’re using Talis Elevate within your VLE defines how you do this.
- If you add content into Talis Elevate from within the VLE using our plugin, all your colleagues will need to do is add some resources themselves. They will automatically become a ‘co teacher’ on your module (yes, they get the mortar board icon on their avatar as well)
- If you typically go to app.talis.com to add resources within the Module Manager, your colleagues will first need an account in Talis Elevate as a teacher, otherwise they won’t be able to access this area. If they don’t have one, raise a support ticket with us.
- Once they have an account, they can ‘join your module’. There’s a guide here for that.
Looking to use Talis Elevate for group work?
Seminar based group work is commonplace in teaching, be it for discussion activity or lab based work. With everything going on right now, there’s even more of a focus on group based activity within subdivisions of cohorts. We know we need to make this better in Talis Elevate for you now, and we’re actively investigating how we can make this really easy for you right now, but in the meantime, we’ve put together a bunch of examples on how you can facilitate group work in Talis Elevate right now.
In summary, create a module for each group, and share that with your students. Top tip to save you time: Share a playlist for that module, it’ll then update in the VLE wherever you share the link, once you upload additional resources. There’s a guide here on how to do that
Need some further help?
Don’t worry, we’re here to help as well! If you need any support, guidance or assistance, we’ve got a bunch of support guides available to you from within Talis Elevate itself. Just click the HELP button on the bottom right. From here you can
- Access a bunch of support articles, guiding you through specific parts of Talis Elevate as well as good practice guides.
- Contact us directly and open a support ticket with our support team. Just click on the ‘raise a support request’ in the HELP menu.
- If you’d prefer to see this on a webpage, you can access all our support guides here
- By the way, students have support guides written for them too. They are also accessible via the HELP button for them.
Forgotten how to do everything?
Whilst Talis Elevate is super easy to use, you may have totally forgotten how to use it! Don’t worry, we’re here to help. We’ve got some step by step guides to guide you through the process.
Using Talis Elevate via app.talis.com (natively)
Using Talis Elevate directly in Blackboard
Using Talis Elevate directly in Canvas
Using Talis Elevate directly in Moodle
