Quick Start Guide: Setting up your module in Talis Elevate

This is a quick start guide designed to give you a one-page overview of making use of Talis Elevate. If you are using Talis Elevate as part of an integrated offering within your Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), please click the links below for your relevant VLE 

Step 1: Login

1. Navigate to app.talis.com, our Talis Elevate home page

2. Enter your institution name

3. Log in using your institutional login portal

Step 2: Create your module

1. From the landing page, select "Create module" 

2. Fill out the details on the next screen. You can call your module whatever you like, but please ensure your course code is the same that's shown on your VLE, so you can easily use this module again when your institution integrates Talis Elevate with your VLE. This can be changed at any time. 

• The Start and End date define the parameters of the ‘teaching period’ which is reflected in the analytics windows throughout Talis Elevate and can also impact if comments are shown outside of this defined period, dependent on institutional settings. If creating a module ahead of a new academic term, we'd recommend you set the start date as 'today' so you can experiment with annotations and they will be shown in resources 
• The Student numbers are an approximation from you. This impacts how many avatars are shown in the analytics modal from within Elevate resources. If you have 80 approx students, and only 70 ‘active’ in your Elevate module, this will show as 10 ‘unknown’ students, indicating you may have ten students still missing from the cohort, or who have never engaged with the content.
  
  
• Click Save when done. 

Step 3: Add Resources

1. Click on the ‘add resource’ link in the admin area of Talis Elevate.

   

2. From the Add resource screen, you are able to drag and drop files from your computer or select files using your computer’s file browser. On the ‘From YouTube’ tab, you can add a link to YouTube resource using the URL. You can also quickly add resources to this module that you’ve previously uploaded to other modules by using the 'Reuse existing resource' tab.

   
   
3. Once you have selected and uploaded the file, you’ll see it processing on the same screen and will be able to give the resource a title and description. Please note, media files being directly uploaded may take some time based on your internet connection. Please do not close this window whilst the video is uploading. 
   
   
   
   
4. Both of these display in the player when students' are accessing the resource as well, so it's recommended you give the resource a clear title, and use the description to outline the activity you are expecting the students to undertake with this resource.
   
   

This content will now be available for re-use on the admin manager. As soon as you upload new content, this will appear on the top of your module list, but after that, it will appear further down the list based on the level of engagement. Please use the native find features in your browser (CTRL+F in Windows, CMND+F on a Mac) to find your resource to view, share, edit, and delete.

Step 4: Sharing resources to your VLE

Once you have your file in Talis Elevate, click the 3 dots (ellipsis) icon to the right of the resource title under the Actions menu. You’ll then be greeted with 2 options to copy the link to the resource or to copy the Embed code.

Adding via Link

This can be shared anywhere in your VLE, via an announcement, discussion board, or an item on the content area of your VLE (this is the most common approach). To add the link to your VLE site, simply click on the ‘Copy resource link’ button and then add this to your VLE site as usual (normally into a link/URL area, dependent on your VLE). If possible, set the link to “open in new tab” to ensure your students continue to have the VLE open in the original tab.

Adding via Embed code

Embed code - This is HTML code that will visually embed the resource in your VLE. You will need to edit your course HTML to do this. To copy the embed code, simply click the ‘Copy resource embed code’ button. To embed into your VLE, go to any page with a Rich Content Editor (sometimes just called content editor), click on the HTML button (showing you the page in HTML form), and paste the embed code where you’d like it to appear on the page. If you’re not familiar with HTML coding, try and do this as you develop your pages, so you can just add to the bottom of your page at the time. 

Once embedded and saved, the resource will look like this in the VLE. Upon clicking the link, the resource will then open in a new tab in the Elevate player. 

Step 5: Building activity into your resources

Dependent on what you're trying to achieve with your student group, you may wish to build activity directly into the content. We've produced a good practice guide here to give you some pointers on things to consider when building activity into resources.