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What resources can I upload to Talis Elevate?

Tim Hodson
  • Updated

This support article is divided into key sections:

What file types does Talis Elevate support?

Talis Elevate currently supports the following file types, allowing for collaborative annotation activity.

MS Office Files

  • Word (doc/docx)
  • Excel (xls/xlsx)
  • Powerpoint (ppt/pptx/pps/pptm)*

*Please note, file types like animated PPT files, or those with media overlays are not supported.

Media file types

  • .mp4
  • .avi
  • .mov
  • .mpg
  • .mpeg
  • .gif
  • .wmv
  • .flv
  • .3gp
  • .m4v
  • .webm
  • .3g2
  • .f4v
  • .jpp

Audio file types

  • .mp3
  • .aif
  • .aiff
  • .wav
  • .m4a
  • .wma
  • .ogg
  • .mpga
  • .flacc

Image

  • .JPG
  • .jpeg
  • .PNG
  • .svg
  • .bmp
  • .ico

Please note images will need to be a minimum of 1000px wide.

Text documents

  • .pdf
  • .rtf
  • .odt
  • .ods
  • .odp

Please note a document can not be any higher or wider than 32767px.

What does Talis Elevate do with content?

For any document-based content uploaded to Talis Elevate, we apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract text from all content. This is to ensure you can highlight content throughout resources and that regardless of the original, the content can be read by screen readers. 

For video/audio based resources, we will automatically transcode these resources for playback at different connection speeds for the end-user. This is to ensure playback is possible, uninterrupted, where possible.

For YouTube content, we simply stream this content via the Tails Elevate Player. If this content is taken down, we cannot do anything about this.

Talis Elevate and Copyright

Uploading content directly to Talis Elevate comes with the same advice and guidance as uploading content to your VLE directly. You should consider the copyright of any content when uploading resources. Please consult your institutions' guidance around copyright to ensure you are meeting specific requirements. The guidance below is generic, there may be some institutional variance here which you should consider.

You may be infringing on the rights of the copyright owner of content unless:

  • you have the owner's permission
  • you use one of the UK copyright exceptions
  • you use one of the copyright licences held by the University

There are no copyright issues if the resource:

  • Is 'out of copyright' eg the copyright has expired, or the owner has waived the copyright
  • You or your institution are the copyright owners
  • The resource is covered by an open licence or a copyright exception.

Your institution will subscribe to the Copyright licensing authority (CLA) License. This stipulates the parameters for use around specific use cases on content. There are limits in place around making digital copies by authorised parties within institutions, a simple user guide is available here.

The content you've produced yourself

If you or your colleagues have produced content for your teaching, this will be the intellectual property of the institution or the author of the content. This can therefore be uploaded without issue. Examples of this include lecture notes, workbooks, Module handbooks, etc.

Scanned chapters of books or journal articles

If your university uses Talis Aspire Copyright Clearance, you have a mechanism for using scanned chapters of books and journals that have gone via the copyright compliance process. You can find out more here about how to 'use Digitisations in Talis Elevate'. This approach will ensure your institution is adhering to the requirements in place around copyright and reporting. 

Using YouTube content

YouTube content can be taken down at any time by YouTube directly, or the account holder. Talis has no control over this content, nor do we download the content, this is streamed from YouTube and we wrap Talis Elevate around the stream.

With YouTube content, a level of common sense is advised. If, for example, you find a video of someone filming content that's being broadcast on a TV, this will be in breach of copyright. You can, however, use any TED Talk content that's being streamed from the TED account.

Using Imagery in Talis Elevate

As with other copyright, you should ensure you are either using copyright-cleared/free content, own the content yourself, or have permission from the rights holder. A large number of image-based resources can be found online, and can be filtered using things like Google Advanced Search.

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