Uniservity

[tosca925]

Ia any one using/seen UniServity cLc Learning Platform?

I have been asked to have a look into it?


Comments please?

[Jake]

Havent tried it myself yet, but Uniservity is the platform which portsmouth LEA here have decided we will be using

[Vegas]

We're using it here, check it out.
http://www.school-portal.co.uk/Group...?GroupID=21353

[pete]

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?nam...ght=uniservity

They may have improved.

[olcinm]

UniServity seem to be winning a lot of LA contracts. This could be because they have a good presentation team or because they can convince people that they do understand education. Key to use in primary school BY pupils including those that are just learning to read is the interface. This comes down to configurability and simplicity but even more so to the editing tools. A bog standard WYSIWYG (almost) HTML editor just does not cut it. What about cut and paste for graphics, painting tool so I can paint my contribution in a forum or audio input without the need for paint/record > save locally > click insert > find recording (click/click/click!) and click upload.

Something like the flash based honeycomb system from SoftEase or 2Simple Java tools are what's needed.

[beeswax]

@olcinm: I attended a short (1 hour) presentation of Uniservity a few weeks ago, as they have won the contract to supply a VLE to all our LEA primary schools. When I spoke to our LEA rep later about why he had chosen this particular VLE when it offered nothing that half a dozen others didn't, he said that he could work with this company and they really understood education. So that seems to answer your thoughts on why some LEA's choose Uniservity.
It allows pupils to personalize (to a certain extent) the pages they view, and what some Year 7's were doing with their space put the surrounding Uniservity designed "blocks" to shame (they looked so retro). It didn't seem to offer any functions over and above those available in Moodle, so why should we pay £3.5K a year for something we have no control over, when some of that money can be better spent buying in Moodle expertise?
When our EDIT team were part of the council they were all for a Sharepoint based solution throughout the borough. Since they were Tuped their views have changed.

[FN-GM]

We have it, all it can say that its the biggest pile of cr*p i have ever seen. Moodle all the way for me. Sorry to be so blunt

[mullet_man]

Were using it, but we are moving to StudyWiz very soon.

http://www.school-portal.co.uk/group...?groupid=47065

The problem is we are using it really just as a website for news, and not for the actual VLE purpose, biggest hurdle is the staff.

[antoeknee]

Hi Mullet-Man

Seems some of the agreement has yet to be sorted out for us to use StudyWiz in Oldham so I'm not sure how soon 'soon' will be.

[mullet_man]

Hi Mullet-Man

Seems some of the agreement has yet to be sorted out for us to use StudyWiz in Oldham so I'm not sure how soon 'soon' will be.

Our digital tech has been on the training, and was told early March for us to get the StudyWiz for us to use.

[antoeknee]

Yep thats whats been said though I believe the agreement ain't yet signed and the storage allowances for pupils/staff are woeful.

Seems that you'll have to pay for some add-ins!

Also its ssems the MIS integration isn't what it should be, not live!!

[mullet_man]

Yep, am guessing Oldham won't have paid for the best system.

Are you part of the schools taking part in the first wave?

[rama1712]

Our LA Wirral has just signed up to this company and we are as a school going to be one of the first 10 schools to use it.

But we have been having problems getting some tech info from LA so we thought we would ask here if anyone can help then please do as we will be able to put any other questions that arise from your answer to Uni when we meet in a few weeks.

1) How much space do pupils and staff get for there own area ie for eportfolios.
2) how much space is there per department/faculity for puting worksheets documents and resources.
3) Can users access there school work area throu Uni Ie if thay are working at home and forgot to drop work in to there uni area can this been done or will thay have to use a third party program link easylink.
4) What type of resources can you NOT use on uni system
5) What features/goodies is there that the school can use
6) Does anyone have any instructions sheets, informations sheets that we cna have that will help us explain it to our staff.

Thanks in advance for any help

Stuart P

[conehead]

Our LA Wirral has just signed up to this company and we are as a school going to be one of the first 10 schools to use it.

But we have been having problems getting some tech info from LA so we thought we would ask here if anyone can help then please do as we will be able to put any other questions that arise from your answer to Uni when we meet in a few weeks.

1) How much space do pupils and staff get for there own area ie for eportfolios.
2) how much space is there per department/faculity for puting worksheets documents and resources.
3) Can users access there school work area throu Uni Ie if thay are working at home and forgot to drop work in to there uni area can this been done or will thay have to use a third party program link easylink.
4) What type of resources can you NOT use on uni system
5) What features/goodies is there that the school can use
6) Does anyone have any instructions sheets, informations sheets that we cna have that will help us explain it to our staff.

Thanks in advance for any help

Stuart P

The best place for info about it is the cLC area of Uniservity, the Connected Learning Communities bit. Once you have an account you can get into the help area and forum, so you can post your enquiries.
The school "super user" can set quotas for the eportfolio size, I think the defaults are 20 and 50 meg. As all the School-Portal stuff is hosted externally to your school, you can access it anywhere.

I reckon you can upload as much stuff as you want within reason, the main problem I see with it, is the interface is quite complicated and your typical teacher is going to find it too much trouble to learn how to use it.

It looks like there will be a solution to the SIMS integration soon!

UniServity - Capita partnership delivers great news to schools

[Edu-IT]

1) How much space do pupils and staff get for there own area ie for eportfolios.
You can set a limit and you can view usage. Space can be allocated on a user basis so if you want to allow some users more space than others then that isn't a problem.

2) how much space is there per department/faculity for puting worksheets documents and resources.
I don't think there's a limit. I've just looked at our disk usage and it says unlimited. Your LEA may set a limit though on the amount of space you can use.

3) Can users access there school work area throu Uni Ie if thay are working at home and forgot to drop work in to there uni area can this been done or will thay have to use a third party program link easylink.
No, you cannot access the network through the VLE. You can import users from SIMS though.

4) What type of resources can you NOT use on uni system
What do you mean? Are you talking about file types etc?

5) What features/goodies is there that the school can use
There's a lot of things which you can make use of such as forums, to do lists, markbooks.

6) Does anyone have any instructions sheets, informations sheets that we cna have that will help us explain it to our staff.
I suggest reading through this to find out more about what the system has to offer. You can use information from this to create guides for your staff.

http://www.school-portal.co.uk/help/...s/default.html

If there is anything else you want to know then post here or PM me and I'll try to help answer the questions you have.