Tag Archives: sharing

Organize and Share content changes upcoming in echo360

We are writing to inform you of upcoming changes to how you can organize and share content in Echo360. These changes will improve the ability to share content with others, organize shared and personal content, and find content in your Library.


 

Echo360 Community,

We are writing to inform you of upcoming changes to how you can organize and share content in Echo360. These changes will improve the ability to share content with others, organize shared and personal content, and find content in your Library.

What is changing?

The upcoming changes involve three key components, which are explained below:

  • The Groups feature will be renamed Collections
  • Collections will be added to the Library
  • The existing class collection feature on the section homepage will be renamed to “Class Group” to avoid confusion

All current Groups capabilities will be available in Collections and new capabilities will be rolled out in future releases, making Collections a more powerful way of sharing and organizing content than is currently available.

In the current user interface, Groups is a separate tab, accessed in the top navigation as shown below.

Collections_Picture1

When Groups is renamed to Collections, users will see their Collections on the Library tab as well as on a separate Collections tab, as seen below.

Pic2_customercomm

Also, the feature that allows the instructor to create collections of classes inside an Echo360 Section will be renamed Class Groups as shown in the image below. This will reduce confusion with the new Collections feature, as shown in the image below.

Picture1----2


Why is this feature changing?

By renaming Groups to Collections, it will be clearer that this feature offers a way to organize content as well as to share it with others. Collections can be used by individuals to organize content in their libraries without the need to share it. When a Collection is shared, the new structure will make it easier for users to find content that has been shared with them without the need to navigate to a separate tab.

We will be building out the capabilities and permissions for content shared in Collections going forward and this name will make more sense for the new capabilities that are planned.


How does this affect users?

This change doesn’t remove any existing capabilities and should make new capabilities easier to implement into content management workflows. Other than adapting to a new name, the primary impact of this change is that users will no longer need to navigate to a separate tab to find shared or organized content.


When will this change happen?

At this time, we anticipate this change to be implemented in our first deployment of 2022, on 11-12 January 2022.

What do you need to do?

This change will be pushed automatically and there will be on-screen orientation to explain the changes. To better prepare your users, you may want to provide them with advanced notification. Please feel free to share this email and/or the screen shots in your communications.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact your Echo360 representative.

All the best,
Echo360 Team

 

Call for Proposals

Dear Teaching Colleagues,

Greetings from The Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching.  We are currently planning our annual Teaching & Learning Colloquium to be held  from 8:30-4:30 on Friday, November 2, 2018, and you are invited to participate.
The goal of this colloquium is to provide a dedicated space & time to engage the SBU teaching community in discussion of current teaching practice while also enabling faculty to discover CELT & DoIT services available that support their instructional mission.
To make the colloquium as authentic and pragmatic as possible, we are hoping to tap into your personal teaching expertise. That’s why we’re inviting you to present a 45-minute breakout session.
The breakout sessions are organized into four tracks:
  1. Experiential Learning
  2. Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning
  3. Academic Success
  4. SBOLD/TALENT Grant, Innovative, and Distance Learning Projects
We invite you to share your effective instructional strategies and passion for teaching. Please propose your presentation by completing this form by Friday, June 1.
Thanks in advance for considering this opportunity to collaborate with CELT’s mission of nurturing the teaching community here at Stony Brook.

Sincerely,

The Center for Excellence in Learning & Teaching
Colloquium Planning Committee
celt@stonybrook.edu
631.623.2358 (CELT)

Google Drive tidbit

You may have a bunch of files that you want to share with your class.  Are they a bit on the larger side?  Perhaps it will make some servers happier if you store them in Google Drive rather than directly into your Blackboard course site.  (Think a semester’s worth of videos.)

So, then – how do you share them with your students in such a way that they can’t be downloaded?  (I’m not saying that allowing students to download the videos is a bad thing.  Downloading can make it easier for offline consumption of the material – like while on an airplane or other low access areas like southern Maryland.)

The first part of this process makes perfect sense.  We want to be organized, so we create a folder for the content.  You created the folder and that makes you the owner.

Next, you share the folder. If you double click on the folder, it will open, leaving you with a screen that shows it’s path at the top.

Clicking on the name of the folder (you did name it, right?)  Will reveal a drop down menu:

Select “Share…”

See that tiny font in the lower right corner… it says “Advanced” — click that.

Then there are owner settings at the bottom.  Please check off “Prevent editors from changing access and adding new people.”   This will help prevent some headaches later if you give someone access higher than what you really wanted.

 

Now – add your students.  I’ll show you want I do, but you might have a easier way.  Feel free to comment below.

Go to your Blackboard course site, and go to “Users and Groups”

Open Users.

Show All  in the lower right, and sort by columns by “Row” (this will lump the Instructors, Teaching Assistants and SLN Help Desk people at the top and bottom of a list of all your students.

 

Drag your cursor to highlight all of the student emails on the page and copy them to your clipboard (command C).  This unfortunately grabs other columns as well that include usernames and other information that we don’t need, but that isn’t so bad.

Next, paste this into an empty spreadsheet.  I use Numbers.  Make sure all the emails are in the same column, my very first row usually has the email in the wrong column, so I paste it into the right one.  Then I delete all the non email columns, select all and copy the one column that is left that has the emails. (Yes you can probably select all of that one column without deleting the others… but like I said, this is just what I do.)

Now with the emails on your clipboard go back to your Sharing Settings of the folder, and paste them into the “Invite people:” text box.

Even if there are hundreds of addresses, this should be fine, though you may need to let google think on it for a bit.

Make sure you aren’t giving them the keys to the kingdom…   and select “Can view only”

Next, add the files.

You may think you are done.  After all, you said they can “view only.” Viewing is viewing and downloading is something else right, so it shouldn’t be able to be done if you can only view.  Not true in Google Drive.

For each file that you have loaded into the folder, we need to back into that sharing settings.  We get to it in a slightly different way.  Highlight the file by clicking it once.  After it is highlighted, some more tool icons show up in the upper right.  Pick the one that looks like a person with a plus sign.

Click Advanced again.

 

There is a new option!  Make sure “Disable options to download, print, and copy for commenters and viewers” is checked.

Now, do that for every file in your folder.  You are done!

 

** (Note that your students can still screen capture your videos and share them with whomever they want if they are really determined. That is just what people do. If you lock a door, it just makes people more determined to get inside.)