Lecturers' Guide

LiLa Portal - Lecturers' Guide

 

It is expected that lecturers will manage the learning of their students and select which experiments out of the large collection available in LiLa will be used for teaching and training in their courses. If these experiments depend on hardware resources, these resources must be made available to the students; that is they must be Reserved.

Reservation requires contact with the content provider, in most cases the creator of the experiment, to obtain a booking code from her or him. This booking code is valid for an infinite number of student bookings within a given time period. At their discretion, the LiLa booking system allows the teacher to divide this time slot up into several slots which students can book individually. In the simplest possible use case, the entire time slot reserved by the content provider is handed over to a single, large group of students, though more complicated setups are possible. For example, you as the teacher may give two lectures, both requiring the same experiment. In this case, you would probably want to break up the time slot granted by the content provider into two slots, one for the first and another for the second student group. This ensures that the two groups cannot conflict with each other.

Last but not least it is usually best to provide access to the experiment in your Institution’s own Learning Management System, together with all the teaching material you provide, i.e. lecture notes, assignments, etc. This step requires that you download the experiment from the portal and upload it to the LMS of your university. If your university does not use a learning management system, you may, of course, direct students to the LiLa portal as well.

 

 Logging into the Portal

 Before you can do any of the above, you need to log into the LiLa portal:

sign-in

wayf

login

Searching for Experiments

explore

search-mask

exp-more-info

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

detailed-view

Reservation of Experiments, and Creation of Booking Slots for Students

While virtual experiments are available any time to anyone and ready to use directly, remote experiments require booking as the corresponding hardware resources have to be shared between several, possibly even hundreds of users. This step is called reservation or booking and requires two actions from you, the lecturer.

Downloading Experiments

The last step is actually the easiest, namely downloading experiments. While you may in principle send your students directly to the LiLa portal, doing so may not be a good idea because this separates the learning material you provide with your lecture from the actual experiment. Unless your institution doesn't host a Learning Management System, it is considerably simpler for your students to access experiments along with your lecture in the LMS of the home institution. Typical examples of such systems are Blackboard, Ilias or moodle as well as any other SCORM compliant LMS; all of which are supported by LiLa. Booking and access control to the experiment is automatically handled by LiLa, simplifying the deployment of experiments considerably.

The following steps are required to download and deploy an experiment in a LMS:

download

book-experiment

This is the same page that your students will see, and this is inserted automatically by LiLa to restrict access to the experiment whenever it is not booked. If you already created booking codes for students you may now enter one of these codes to reserve time on the experiment. Note, however, that you will not be able to use the experiment before the reserved time.