University Writing Program

Introduction to LATTE for New Instructors


Captions available. Transcript below.

List of Topics with Timestamps 

See also: Appointments (YouTube)  — use Google Calendar to schedule conferences

 
Transcript

DOUG KIRSHEN
Hey, everybody! It's Doug, your friendly neighborhood admin, and the LATTE guru for UWP. I should say at the outset that a upgrade to LATTE has been announced. It's moodle 5. Moodle is the underlying software of LATTE, and they say that Moodle 5 is gonna be installed and up and ready to go in the fall of 2024. So that means that there'll be new and exciting features that may make some of what I'm about to tell you obsolete. But this is a good place, I'm sure to start, and I'm sure these instructions will still pretty much work for the new system. So to get started, I'm going to share my screen. Okay? And here's a look at what your LATTE course will look like when you first see it in order to get there. You first go to latte brandeis.edu. You'll be asked to log in right there if you hadn't already. and then you'll see a screen look something like this, and you'll have something like fall semester 2024, and you should see your your your course in here. you'll notice that in my course I actually have 3 versions of sex and advertising from a couple of semesters ago, and that is because, instead of having 2 separate latte sites for my 2 sections, I had the the its support. People combine them into one meta course. so that will be the first thing that you'll want to do. If you have 2 sections of the same course. You just write to help at Brandeis study, do you, and ask them to combine them into the one meta course.

  • Installing the UWS Shell from BOX — 00:45 – 07:36

So when you go into your course, it's gonna look like this. And this is the basic shell or template. That they offer you. But we have a a particular one that we've designed for uws. So the first thing we're gonna do is install that in place of this one. So I'm gonna go down here to the Administration panel, and I'm going to go Restore is we're going to be Restoring from a backup that we've created earlier. I'll go choose a file, and then I'm gonna pick BOX.com and click there to log into my account. So I will use the sso login, which is going to look a lot like the regular Brandeis login. and then I'll get a screen that says Grant Access to Box. and there you go. So your login might look a little bit different. I was already logged into in Brandeis...

Okay. So down in here. I'm gonna look for a folder that says UWS Shell Latest that. And if you don't find that, get in touch with me because it just means that I need to add you to the sharing access on Box to get this. So within UWS Shell Latest, I'm going to look for something that says UWS Shell Latest and in this case the latest date on it is 14 February [2024]. So I'm gonna use that one in this case, or whatever is the most recent date. And I'm going to go. Select that file. and I'm going to hit, Restore. So at this point there are a whole lot of screens here, most of which you just click through and ignore. I'm gonna actually make my screen little smaller so that I can maybe get through these a little sooner. The one thing that you do want to pay attention to is where it says, "Restore into this course." So what we want to do is want to delete the contents of that course and then restore. Okay, so next screen next screen and perform the Restore.

Now. the one issue we have here is that there is a bug in the system. And very often this Restore does not work on the first try. So if I were you, I would go away for 5 min or so, and then come back and see where you are. Okay, I'm back. I actually waited only 2 min, so we'll see what happens here. But, as you can see, or at least take my word for it, this time thingy showing how far we've gotten hasn't moved at all. And that's because there's a bug here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go and abort this by going back to the course. And you see what actually happened is that it did erase everything that was in there, but it did not restore or install the UWS shell.

So I'm gonna do that step again. I'm going to go down to ... Sorry. Oh, here we go, Administration block. I'm gonna click, Restore. I'm going to choose a file from Box once again. I will go to the UWS Shell Latest. Once again I'll find the file that says Uws shell latest, this is 14 February. In this case. Click on that, select that file and click restore. Now there's one difference on the second screen. whereas before I said to delete the contents of the course and then restore this case, I'm going to say, merge the backup course into the course because that shell was erased and the bug is in [the "Erase"] option. So I will say, continue. and I will keep clicking next next and perform, Restore. And let's see what happens this time. And now it's much more hopeful. It says that we're going to be there in 4 min and 50 s. and I bet you it might not even take that long. But I'll do a pause here. Oh, wait a minute. maybe I won't pause. This looks a lot more hopeful, doesn't it? Yay, okay. Course was restored successfully. Click the continue button. and lo and behold, there it is! This is the UWS shell that we wanted to install. It's gonna make this a little smaller or so so that we can, so that we can play with it together.

And so you'll notice just to do a little tour here. This first section at the top is laid out, and each section that we go through here in in LATTE parlance or Moodle parlance, is called the Topic so. And the first topic is actually this special top section here. There's a little thing here that will go expand all which would expand everything underneath that. But other than that, you can always do this, you know. by clicking this to expand or contract. Okay? And we have. I'm not sure we'll have these 2 topics there for you or not for the fall. Usually. The first thing you'll see is this Getting Started and then Free Resources And then we'll get into the first unit. The lens, overview and assignment sequence. And there's a few different sections here that you can use maybe for submissions, handout resources, videos, so forth. And then we just get into a week by week, for each topic is one week. So you would fill in what the dates actually are, and put the stuff in for each week there and then, when you get to the the CGA unit, you have similar stuff going on there and and find the Research unit down here. Okay. there's also some additional stuff down here that may or may not be of use to you. So these are sections that can be hidden, or not, and if you want to find out what's hidden, what's not hidden, you just go up here and switch your role to Student. And you can see what the student would actually see more or less.

Okay. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change this picture to be my actual headshot ... in order to do that. First of all, I'm gonna go turn editing on. and then I'm gonna shoot way down here. Oh, and toward the bottom, under instructor resources. And this is hidden from the students, as you can see. So I'm gonna go ahead and open this up. and I'm going to go. "Add an activity or resource." And what I'm looking for is a file. So this just means as a file. And in this case I'm going to upload it from my from my computer. So let's find that we're gonna call this Doug headshot and see, and I'm going to go in here, and I'm going to use this file picker. I'm not going to drag and drop, because that doesn't actually work too. well. choose a file. And it's gonna be something from my desktop. And I think it's this. okay? And then I'm gonna say, save and return to this. Okay? So there is what I uploaded this thing. This is Doug headshot. So if I click on this we will see it there. It is. Okay. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click on the picture itself. And if you have if you have a Mac, you can right-click if you have that or you can control-click and I'll do the same thing. And I'm going to go Copy image address. Okay? And then I'm gonna go back to the main course. I mean, of course, that's kind of funny. Here I am. And I'm gonna go into this section so that I can work on replacing that. So I'm going to go to Edit and Edit settings can make some room here by pulling this down. And then I'm gonna click on this symbol here, which is the symbol for HTML, which is the underlying sort of code-ish kind of thing that that is making that that stuff appear. and what I'm gonna look for, and I'll see where it is. Now it's right about here, and it's online 18, you see? See something here called the instructor headshot. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to highlight where it says SRC. Equals. And then I'm going to highlight everything that is inside the quotation marks paste and that is the file that I uploaded, and the way I know that worked is by clicking this again, and there I am. So you can always, when you're doing that sort of thing, you can always hit cancel and try again. If at first you don't succeed. ... The main thing is just to make sure that when you're pasting, the new address of their new head shot ... in between the quotation marks in the SRC attribute. Okay? Good. Then I can go through, and I can change the title of my course here I can put in the days when it meets the classroom link and so forth. I'm gonna save and return it for us. and I'll just show you what that might look like. So here's one of mine, and as you can see this was a metacourse, where I combined my 2 sections, as I mentioned, and I just put in the days that met the classroom office hours, and I even did some customizing to to these icons here, which is the next thing that we'll look at. Okay. Okay. So the top section here.

Obviously, the first thing here is your Syllabus, then the Welcome letter for your new students, [an icon] for your group appointments. And you can set up, what we usually do, most of us do. is we set up Google Calendar appointments, and you put the link in there and then Announcements which is like, for you to post announcements to your class. Okay, anyway. So the first of these standard icons here is the syllabus. And over here in LATTE Course Tools is actually where you upload your course syllabus so you can do it. Like that and and as soon as you're ready, you can obviously upload. Choose your file like you do. It's always it's always the same format for the file picker and so forth, so I can go ahead and upload that now it's done. So. Now, if I go into LATTE course tools and I say Get course syllabus you'll see that I just uploaded one. and it's gonna download for me, and I'll see what it was. and that but that was the one that I uploaded just now and and then if I want to, and I should actually because, it's does not automatically, make this icon work here. So I need to get the the the address of this. So I'm gonna right-click on this or control-click on Mac. I'm going to copy the link address. And then, in order to change this, I need to go in here. It says, edit and go edit settings which opens this up. and then I will do that, and you can either go control K or command K on a on a Mac. That usually is the hyperlink command that goes across a lot of different software. So try it, or you can just click on link Tool, which is here and put it in. And then you have the option of whether or not to open it in a new window. And of course you can, it can be a PDF. And so forth, so I'll just have create link. and there it is, and we'll see what we do with it. I would go and yeah. save and return to the course. Now, if we go back to this and see what happens. And again brought up and was wants to download that however. [when] I click on the icon itself. That doesn't work. So I only got the the word down there to link, which is just seems to be the way it is. What can I tell you so

what else? The welcome letter? This is something that you know you can compose, and and if you if you do, if you click on the icon. Let's do it click on the icon. and then you can go edit settings. and then you can type in whatever you want there. So this is very welcoming, very, very, very welcoming. So I'm just there's mine. I think. I think. Yeah. Hmm. okay, I'm not really sure. Why, not to know. Oh. I think I am sure. Why, I know why this is actually a good thing. because I want to show you that edit settings. So I put this up here, but actually that the welcome letter is actually down here under content, not up here under description. So this is the actual content. This this right here is is not even going to show up. So the letter goes here in the content. and we'll say, save and return to the course. Now when I click welcome letter. There it is. So let's see. See, I edited, edited that very cleverly doing that. Okay, the actual file is right here. That goes into that welcome letter.

Okay, So if you don't know how to set up appointments on Google Calendar, you can find that out. There's how to videos on the web, or we can show you really easily. But in general, that goes to your appointments, page for students to to sign up for you know, for conferences or for office hours, or however you want to use it.

Now this Announcements is the [created with] tool called a Forum, a discussion forum. and this is a special one that's been pre loaded here for you. The thing itself is right here. But instead of showing this, we just show this icon up there. So so what the student is, gonna see? Right? So the student is just gonna see the icon. And so if I click on announcements. so what's gonna happen there is that's gonna be a place for you to post whatever announcements you want to make to the class. This is a discussion forum, but it's set up so that only you can post to it. And so the posts automatically get emailed out to your students. So if I go to my old course here, you can see that it actually has a place. We're gonna put in the last few announcements, or I can click on this and it has. You know it. It keeps this record, or rather ... this archive of all of your messages, so people can go back and find something you said a month ago. If ... you want so to post a new one. You would just go add a new topic. and then subject line here, type into their post to the Forum. And as I said, this. This one is set up to automatically email to everyone in the class. And that's usually not the default option at all. Usually the default option is not to email it to everybody.

And so while I'm at it, let me go back to the new course that we're talking about, and I'll just go into any of these topics. And and as I said, Let's these these first 2 here on AI. I'm not sure we're gonna have these in the in the the semester that you're doing that. But just for the heck of it, let me go ahead. And first of all get out of student mode. And I'm going to expand this and excuse me, I'm just gonna show you how to create or or use, put in one of these tools. So first of all, I need to up in the upper right "Turn editing on" by clicking that. Then at the end of each topic, you're going to find a link that says, "Add an activity or resource." So if I click on that here is the various tools that we have here. So first of all, let's talk about the Forum tool. So now I'm creating a new forum. So let's say, I'm gonna say, class discussion forum and And I can put a little description of that in here if I want to. I'm just gonna go. save and return to the course. And here's the thing I just created. So this is by default available to your available to your students. You can always hide or unhide these tools if that's convenient for you. So student or anybody can click in there. post a discussion topic and that by default everybody will be able to see it. But it doesn't automatically email to everybody. That would be an option that you would need to select.

Okay, other things that you can do. These these icons here are made with the URL tool. So that's that's very simple for us. So I can go add an activity or resource. And I'll find the yeah, URL tool. And then I, this is gonna be sample. I'll put in the yeah, URL, and we can that. And then here's the one I just created. So this will just go wherever made, that link out which was no place interesting in this case. obviously, I can change just by clicking on that I can rename this. no place interesting. This one here, and you can see the Microsoft word icon. There. That's the file tool. So I would click. add an activity resource again. And this time I'm going to use the file tool and you can use that to upload on to upload whatever format of file that you want. I wouldn't use the drag and drop here. I would use the file picker and go choose file. So I'm gonna get somethin from my computer right now and get just use that same word file I've been using. Or maybe we'll pick something else so that you can see a different icon. So here's a PDF file that I'm gonna upload. So there's a there's a PDF that I just uploaded so it'll be whenever form you want to, then I'll click to go there. One thing to keep in mind about about LATTE is that links are pretty much absolute. They're not session dependent. So if you click on a link or ... right click on something generally that's going to work in other places if you want them to. So if I wanna have a different place on my LATTE page in order to link to this. I could go ahead and copy the link address and then use it over there.

  • Labels —Adding links to text within a Label, for example files stored in your own Google Drive instead of uploading them to LATTE — 25:20 – 30:50

So this area right here is actually called a Label. So in other words, it's got nothing but description in it but text. But this is linkable text. So if I wanted to, I could hit edit settings. and I could highlight what I want here and link. And in that case I'm linking to something that I just uploaded. So here's the thing right there that I linked to, and it's gonna be the same as that. So in that case. this Pdf. so. And you know, the fact is is that you actually never have to use the the URL tool, or even the File tool, because you can do that. Just by going into one of these creating one of these labels and just linking stuff from there. And if you. I'll show you on one of my courses that I I've done that. me see somewhere. So for example. yeah, so here I have. This is just a list. And this is just a label in which I've just created a list in the, in, the, in the editor show you what that looks like editing on. And then so this is just in this topic and open this up. And and I have a label. This area here is all just a label. and down here is another label. and if I want to edit this, I have to go edit edit settings, and then you'll see within that I just created a bullet list using this tool here. and instead of using the File tool, ... I just went ahead and and put in links to this. So you know, rather than uploading all of your files to LATTE,, you can just have them sitting on your Google drive and link to them like that. I think that's much easier than than trying to upload all of them one by one, so you can do what you want. But you know, even here if you want. You can say I wanted to add a file there so I could go command K. Control K. Or I can hit this link button here and it says, Enter a yeah, URL. But I'm gonna go into browse repository. So and what that does is it allows me to pick a let's see, allows me to pick a different file here. So let's do. We can find something slightly more interesting, maybe not. And upload this file. So and now I actually uploaded what this is going to. and you'll see when I I save this. It was just yeah. something random, but I stuck there. So in other words. You can really do a lot just with the label tool. But I will say this, that you probably don't want to make your labels bigger than this. This is about the max, ... one screen. When they get really huge, you can actually run into a little trouble. So I might have been pushing the envelope a little bit here. and and the LATTE people might tell you that they prefer you to use the the the tool that was meant for this stuff. But at the bottom of So at the bottom of any topic where you click, add an activity or resource. And here is the label. and I've been talking about. So here's a blank label that's right there. And what I got see here. find some random text from the Boston Globe, or something. ... ... ... I don't know. Give me some text here. Okay. so in my label I can just paste stuff in there. there we go the stuff I randomly copied from somewhere. and save and return to the course. please.

And here's this label that I just created. And I pasted this stuff in, you notice that it actually kept some of the formatting, and it put in even this image, and it kept some of these links too, and that works from other places, too. So if you have something, say, you have a table, you wanna make you [could try to do it in LATTE but] It's impossible. Well, it's possible, I suppose, but it's not really possible to create tables in a LATTE. But you can create one in, say, Google. and say Google Docs or something, and copy and paste it into a label, and it will look will look sort of decent. Show you an example of that. and don't pay attention to my idiosyncratic titles for stuff, because it's not really the best way to do it. That somewhere in here. Yeah. So here, this like class email list. This is just a label. And inside the label, this is a table that I created in in Google Docs, and then just pasted in here. and that was really the only way that I could have done this and make it look that pretty. Not that making things look pretty is all that worth it to be honest with you.

Okay, so so let's talk about another tool. That's very useful. The Assignment submission tool, as you can see, you can see the the icon there. What these things look like. So I'm gonna create a new one. Let's go down to say Here. okay. And then I'm going to use the assignment tool. And let's say this is lens paper draft. and I can put in your here by February. First, let's say I can have it. Display the description on the course page, you know or not. And then what I can do is I can set up these dates to allow me to say when I'm going to start allowing submission if I want to. I don't have to enable that I can just put in the due date, which I said was January. February first. In this case. so next year and then I don't have a cut off date. So that means that it'll keep accepting submissions even after that date. But I could put in a cut off date where I no longer accept submissions. and I put in a reminder grade by usually wouldn't do that. So usually you just have the due date. And then if you look at down here like for submission types in here. Actually, you can even specify what types of files that you will allow, like .doc, .docx .pdf, and say so that nobody would be able to upload in theory. and this I can just also make it file submissions only. and so forth. I do not use the Turn it in plagiarism on settings that's not activated properly right now. And you see here. it again gave me accepted file types to use. So I'm gonna save that. And so here's the sorry I put in obscure place. But here's the Here's the one I just created. And you see, I have a little description on in here. and you know you want to look and see what this looks like from the student's point of view. Let's see, I don't know how realistic this is going to be. but anyway, so a student would click on here. and you would get something to add a submission, and then they would upload their word, their word document, or whatever it was.

Okay. So is there anything else that we want to tell you about here. you know there's other stuff going on over here. Let me go over to this. There's a place, for example. I mean, a good trick is, you know whether you have editing on or not. You can use this thing to expand all which means that you can use the find on page control. F command F to search for something, you know. quickly, on the entire site.

Oh, one other thing I do want to look at actually, is the Getting Started section. So let's look alright. So everybody has this Getting Started section. And in this is you know, somebody says, read the syllabus. Let's just click the syllabus icon. And there's something here. It says, Download Microsoft office. Stuff here about planning your semester. And it's a nice video here from the BUGS tutors. and stuff like that. And I just want to look together with you at the survey. and we had an old way of doing it with Woofoo. And this is a sort of new way. It says student survey LATTE version. and and it's telling me I'm not eligible to take the questionaire But I think I can maybe preview it. Okay, so here's the student questionnaire just looks like this. and you can customize it. You can edit the questions. If you want to. can make them required or not. you can add or subtract questions. You can control. ... Some of what the the feedback is that ... students will get and and then also there's a way in here to retrieve the responses as well. and that part of it I'm not going to show you, because there aren't any responses in this particular shell. So need to do that separately. Okay? And then again, this is just go back to where we started here. So in this section, this getting started section, if I go to the top and turn editing on. So this is just another tool. the questionnaire tool right there, that's already installed for you in there.

Okay, so let me show you where to get more information about all of this. Just gonna go to bit.ly/UWP-IR nstructor resources. And then here, under Setting Up LATTE. you will see instructions for all of this, including the how to load the shell from box, how to do the backup and restore how to install your headshot, and saw this. Some other stuff. Also some more information on how to use the questionnaire tool and how to request videos for your course. And then down here. There's more. There's a Learn LATTE course that its offers and you can go in here and learn some more details about latte and how to do stuff and sorry. Let me get back here, setting up a lot there. And [make] the courses available to students. I should mention that as well, and also we have down here some places where you can get help. On campus from you can check with the help desk on the usually very helpful with stuff like this. The the support for for LATTE is actually in the library these days. But that doesn't matter. You can always just write to help@brandeis.edu to ask for, to ask for help.

And but let me go back, and then just put the last point is to about making your course available, and I'm going to show you one more thing, too, about the the roster and the photos. So here in Administration, see where it would be. So somewhere in here, I guess I need to. Oh, I think there's some place here, it says Show course or Hide course Yeah, right here. So before you you know the semester, you need to go show course to make this actually appear and be visible to your students. or I can also pipe course to get rid of it that way. Okay, so you gotta do the "Show course" thing as well as upload your syllabus before you begin.

and let me just also show you one more thing. That you have standard here. and I'll just show it [in an old] course, because I have data in there, but, for example. there is a roster here, so you can see all of your students in your class. There's also a photo version. so you can learn everybody's name and impress all of your students before the first class. It's nice. You can print this out and make flashcards to test yourself. ... You can also even do like a copy and paste from here into a like an excel spreadsheet or sheet spreadsheet to create a roster for your course. you know, for grading and so forth. That's very handy. Another handy little thing that's here in the I'll take course tools is. You can sort and filter forum posts. So with that you can, if you have a bunch of forums, say for different papers. Maybe you have a forum for the Lens paper. Maybe you have a forum for the research paper. All those discussion forums you can go through, and you can pick out one of your students, and you can display all of the posts that she made throughout the semester on any of the on any of the ... discussion forms. And, as you can see, students from Sex and Advertising students can include pictures and stuff in their posts if they want to like. So even weird ones like this. okay, so I think, that will pretty much do everything that we want to get gone through here. Alright, so just find me at dkirshen@brandeis.edu or uwp@brandeis.edu if you need any help with anything, and I will help you, or refer you to where you can get that help.