MINERVA QUICK GUIDE Introduction... 1 General functionality... 3 My course list... 3 My profile... 4 My agenda... 4 Study offer... 4 Coursesite modules... 5 Documents... 5 Dropbox... 5 Student publications... 6 Tests... 6 Poll... 7 Announcements... 7 Agenda... 8 Links... 8 Users... 9 Groups... 9 Forum... 10 Administration... 11 Some tips... 12 Useful links and addresses... 12
Introduction Minerva is an electronic learning platform. It enables teachers to create and maintain course-websites for their students. To use Minerva, you simply need a pc with an internet-connection, and a browser (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer,..). The platform is accessible through internet, at the address http://minerva.ugent.be. As a student/employee, you can use your CAS-login to enter Minerva. The following functions are available for student on the course startpage: Agenda: The course agenda, containing lessons, tasks and deadlines. Announcements: The course s bulletin board. Chat: Allows for a simple chat functionality between users of Minerva. Course description: A categorized description of the course. Documents: A space where course material, tasks, presentations... are shared. Dropbox: A place to exchange tasks, documents between teacher and students. Forums: Discussion forums en document space. Learning path: A series of learning steps, divided into chapters, in which you can define required knowledge before going to a next chapter Links: Useful links, categorized. Tests: Create Tests that are automatically evaluated. Users: Lists and allows control of all users subscribed to the course. Minerva quick guide 1
As a teacher, you can activate any of the above modules. You also have the following extra functionality: Statistics: This module offers various statistics about the course usage (e.g. logs of access to documents: who has downloaded what), changed/added content,... Copy course content: Allows the copying of content between course, this can save you a lot of time. Course settings: Allows changing the course settings and properties. Course quotum: Displays the disk space that your course, document space, and groups have been assigned, and the amount they are currently using. Course startpage Minerva quick guide 2
General functionality My course list After logging in, you see the page My course list. From here you can access and manage your courses, and have direct access to the other functions of Minerva: On this page: A list of the courses to which you are subscribed. Click a course in this list to enter it, giving you the course startpage, as mentioned in the previous page. Above this list you may see possible platform announcements. At the top of the page, you find the general functions : Profile, Agenda, Messages en Platform administration (for platform managers only). These tabs are available on every page of the platform. The menu at the right gives you control of your courses, the layout of this page, and more.. Courses may be organized using categories. The icon s colour indicates if you have administrator rights for a course: =administrator =user Minerva quick guide 3
My profile The information in the Minerva user profiles is imported from the data the university keeps of all students and employees. Do check if the information in your profile is indeed correct. If not, you should contact the ICT&O team. Optionally, you can complete your profile with a picture. My agenda In My agenda all items are displayed from the courses on the My course list page, the academic agenda and your personal agenda-items (private agenda), in different colours. The agenda provides five different views, one of which displays only your personal items. You can add personal items to your agenda, these can be recurring items. Study offer Here you find: An overview of your teaching assignment. Your possible Subscriptions as a student. Coursesites: subscriptions to (possibly not yet created!) coursesites; course sites belonging to a teaching assignment, subscriptions as student, and free subscriptions are displayed here. Infosites: subscriptions to (possibly not yet created!) infosites. Minerva quick guide 4
Coursesite modules Documents Here you can upload files to make them available to students. You can organize them into folders and subfolders. To download a document to your pc or to view it online, students can click the icon next to the name. The displayed files-list can be exported to csv or Excel-format. Above the documents list, you can add an introductory text, e.g. containing links to the most often handled documents. The send multiple files at once you can wrap these in a zip-file, that will be automatically extracted. Dropbox The dropbox is a means of communication to exchange files between students and teachers. As a teacher you can send files to specific (groups of) students (files in Documents are visible to all students of the course). Received files can be organized into folders. Files can be commented (feedback). All this makes the dropbox the ideal way to send in tasks. Dropbox-files are personal, let these be sent to everyone who needs to use them (colleagues, assistants,..) Minerva quick guide 5
Student publications Provides a way to exchange documents between students. Tests With the Tests module, you can create tests containing different types of questions: Multiple choice a question with one possible answer, to be chosen from a list. Multiple response a question with one or more possible answers, to be chosen from a list. Fill in the blanks to enter text or numbers. Matching questions where corresponding items have to be matched. An test contains one or more questions, that can be of a different type. Creating a test, you can determine: If/how the correct answers are displayed If/when results for a test are shown If/how feedback to the answers are displayed You can limit the visibility of a test in time, e.g. only during the lesson in which the test is planned. Minerva quick guide 6
Poll Using the poll, you can easily obtain the average opinion of your students, by asking them a simple multiple choice question. Each user can only provide a single answer. After providing your opinion, the average results are displayed. Announcements Using Announcements, a teacher can place messages, announcements, notifications,.. into the course site. The teacher has the option to automatically e-mail a message to the students. It is possible to define a time limit with announcements. In the left column all announcements are listed.. Do not always send announcements by e-mail, but only when really needed Minerva quick guide 7
Agenda In the agenda, all date-related information about the course is kept, e.g. colleges, practical lessons, deadlines, field-trips,... The agenda within the course functions almost identically as My Agenda. The only difference is that there is no option to add a personal item, and as a result no tab to view personal items. You can add items from the academic agenda, by enabling this functionality from the Course settings. This will add the official day off s and anniversaries from Ghent University to the agenda. Within the agenda you can drag items to change date/time, in week- and dayviews, you can also change the duration by dragging. The button recurrency allows you to enter recurring items. If you want to delete/edit them however, you will have to change the items one by one.. Links Allows sharing hyperlinks, which can be organized into thematic folders. Using Expand categories, you can have the links from every category displayed in a single page. Minerva quick guide 8
Users The user module displays the users of your course in a list providing administration actions (change role, delete users). Here you can add an assistant teacher. Subscription are personal. Course managers cannot simply add users to their course. When subscribed to a course, one is a normal user, and is listed in the course s user list. User roles are defined per course: one can be a course manager in one course, and a student or assistant in another course. A user has to subscribe, using the tab Study offer 200x-200y. As a course manager, you can choose when users are displayed in the course list. This can be automatically, or after approval by a course manager. Groups Groups make it possible to create virtual groups of students that have common interests (e.g. a task), within a course. There is a separate document space per group, and a separate forum and wiki. Within the group document space, users can freely add documents, and are factual administrators. In the Group space settings, documents can be set as private, in which case they can only be seen by the users of the specific group. Minerva quick guide 9
Forum The forum allows a means of communication between users of the course, in which the user is free to choose when and where to read the messages, or to take part in a discussion. Discussions can be displayed flat, structured or nested. As a course manager you can administer every aspect of the forum (message, discussion, forum). If you want to moderate the message, you can set the forum-option approval/direct post to the former. Setting the option allow students to create new threads, you have some control over the contents. You can easily create a forum for memebers of a specific group. Minerva quick guide 10
Administration The administration of the electronic learning system is possible on three levels: Platform level At the highest level, the platform manager maintains courses and users, determines the site-wide settings, activates plug-ins, etc..., using the tab Platform administration (invisible to others). Course level Some of these settings can be overridden by course managers within their courses, using course settings, where you find the following two tabs: General course settings : the course-specific settings that have to be entered for every course. Platformsettings for courses: the platformsettings that may be overridden for an individual course. These are already set to a default value by the platform manager. Group level Within the course, you can have groups that can be managed separately by your students. Course managers can manage every group in their courses. As a course manager you should pay extra attention to the settings under Course access, where -among other- you determine: who may view the course, varying from nobody to the entire internet if/how one can subscribe to a course if users are allowed to unsubscribe from a course The language setting lets you display the course in a different language... Minerva quick guide 11
Some tips Log out after using Minerva! Don t paste text from Word directly into an editor, but first remove the layout: Word adds a lot of superfluous html-code. As a possible method, you can paste text into notepad, and copy from there. Give your documents clear names, or supply a description in the Comment field. Reduce the size of your pictures, images in presentations, by resizing them to an adequate format to be displayed on-screen. Pdf s can also be substantially reduced without visible loss of quality. Deactivate the modules you won t use. Using the button student view, you can inspect if your students see the correct courses, documents, To avoid problems, it is better to use safe filenames: don t use spaces, diacritical characters (é, ç,...), or other special symbols (%, &, $,...). Invest some time to give a short introduction to Minerva to your students. Contact the helpdesk for technical questions only, provide as many details as possible (what happens where, when). If possible, add a screenshot. Useful links and addresses At icto.ugent.be, more tips, tutorials,.. can be found. In case of technical problems, contact the helpdesk: by telephone: (09264) 8570 by e-mail: minerva@ugent.be Minerva quick guide 12