Uniservity

[bandgeekmafia78]

I used Uniservity in my last school and found it very unflexible, slow and not particularly user-friendly. I now use Frog which is a lot nicer to work with, albeit quite expensive.

[matt40k]

If that's the case then staff wouldn't tell kids to steal information from Google or Wikipedia. They would also teach them about not just taking pictures from Google image search, and resizing pictures before just dropping them into an application and dragging the corner to make it fit.

 

I know teachers who give detentions for copying straight off Wiki. Most have left the public sector.

[booggerboy]

"i couldnt care less if the code behind a vle was a saved to web word doc as long as it worked, was viewable in a browser and both the staff and pupils could and would use it"

 

Really? I'd quite like my code to be compliant so that I could guarantee that all children logging in from home has the same experience.

 

I would also like children to be able to find examples of well written code throughout school, as it is important to encourage the next generation of web designers to get it right.

 

bb

[GrumbleDook]

I have checked up with some folk at uniservity and none of the posters are their staff ... just folk who are teachers or at LAs and use uniservity ... it is not a PR exercise and we need to remember that there can be a separation between education benefits and technical issues.

 

I also find it a tad funny that we are having a go at new members who have joined the site when EduGeek is high ranking in search engines, it has come up in *my* search alerts (and presumably the same for anyone else who has alerts for UniServity, Learning Platforms or VLEs) so it is not surprising really.

 

Also remember the number of times we have piled into another forum to give our opinions *even when we are not regulars over there* eg Computing articles, TES Forums, etc ...

 

Be as cynical as you want to be ... but we do it too!

 

Back to the topic though ... we didn't choose UniServity at LA level as we wanted something more bespoke that schools to tinker with as they wanted. Turns out that schools want a solution given to them with a prebuilt setup and strategy that they want to get used to *then* tinker with. Can't please everyone.

 

Out of interest, folk have spoken about the technical problems? Has it be a slow degrade of preformance, specific tools, etc ... and what was done to rectify it. If you can give specific examples it may help uniservity track some of the issues down ... heck, it works with Capita.

 

Lets be a bit balanced about this though folks ...

[Dos_Box]

Thanks for beating me too it Tony.

[booggerboy]

Does balanced mean no more negative comments about Uniservity?

 

Just checking.

 

bb

[sahmeepee]

I also find it a tad funny that we are having a go at new members who have joined the site when EduGeek is high ranking in search engines, it has come up in *my* search alerts (and presumably the same for anyone else who has alerts for UniServity, Learning Platforms or VLEs) so it is not surprising really.

 

Also remember the number of times we have piled into another forum to give our opinions *even when we are not regulars over there* eg Computing articles, TES Forums, etc ...

 

Be as cynical as you want to be ... but we do it too!

 

Obviously if you read my post carefully I have clearly been misunderstood .

 

It's rare to get a flood of visits on a post such as this via search engine results alone; it's not exactly the only post on here about Uniservity. It's also unusual to have such a split in opinion between new users and established users - almost completely polarised in fact. I think your second paragraph is a bit closer to reality.

 

I would be interested to know what the http-referer was for the first page hits from those new users.. unlike the TES, on edugeek we know people with log files

Edited May 8, 2009 by sahmeepee
minor typo

[GrumbleDook]

hmm ... you think that UniServity users may talk to one another and be a tad narked that when one comes on to say something good about it they get people putting more negative stuff on so they mention it to others who then *also* come in ... just like we have posted links to stuff on TES forums and then gone over there to back one another up?

 

And balanced ... I'm just saying it might be nice to give others a chance and perhaps seeing things from their point of view (eg not always from a technical or coding purist point of view). Happy to take this into another thread where we can have a meta-discussion about how online communities deal with conflict and challenge (could actually be a god starter for those doing degrees or reports looking at this, plenty of prior research available to discuss).

[TechMonkey]

(could actually be a god starter for those doing degrees or reports looking at this, plenty of prior research available to discuss).

 

Ohhhh noooo, you'd only get Richard Dawkins coming along and spoiling it for everyone

 

I think Uniservity is probably one of those things like CC3 VS vanilla, linux vs windows vs osx. You (hopefully) make your choice based on what is best for the school & make it work. Uniservity is a hosted solution so those without the man power, time or knowledge may like it. It is fairly easy for kids to see what is going on & for staff to make activities or upload resources.

 

On the other hand I think the interface is confusing in places, the hosting doesn't always come up to scratch at certain times of the day, I don't like the idea of all the resources being remote, just in case & feel a home spun option would work better (as we do have the time, man power & getting their with the knowledge )

[beeswax]

Happy to take this into another thread where we can have a meta-discussion about how online communities deal with conflict and challenge (could actually be a god starter for those doing degrees or reports looking at this, plenty of prior research available to discuss).

 

Hmm. Just come across this. Might indeed be a good idea.

z.