The current position

As it stands right now, we don’t have a quality mechanism for managing rollover of content using Talis Elevate. Currently, amending your module’s start/end date will hide legacy comments, but this doesn’t resolve the full and desirable ‘rollover’ experience.

Whilst many of our academic community are quite happy re-creating modules each academic year, we know this is not possible for all modules, especially with seminar based teaching, and where complexity has arisen especially through use of the VLE. 

We have been working hard this past year to really understand the challenges you face with rollover in and out of the VLE, to develop a solution that will make your lives really easy when it comes to Talis Elevate. Whilst we have a solution, we have not been able to implement this work ahead of the current academic year. However, we do have an interim measure. 

What we are doing for this current academic year 

We’re introducing a new feature and making a change to the way modules are managed we're calling 'reset module'. 

What does ‘reset module’ do? 

If you rollover your VLE sites/learning spaces with Talis Elevate resources, and reset your module via the Module Manager (where you can access module level analytics, and add resources):  

• Access to resources will continue to work. Any resources that are restricted in group spaces will also continue to be accessible 
• All historic annotations and analytics will be removed, including academics annotations. 
• Analytics emails will only include the ‘latest’ cohorts information
• Students personal notes will be maintained for the old cohort who access resources again 
• Students from the previous cohort will not get notifications based on the current student cohorts activity 

Those accessing content on the historic VLE site will be able to see ‘new’ annotations. We have found that access to legacy content (through conversations with institutions) is typically very low, for this interim period, our discussions with institutions highlighted this to be a viable option. 

Read our support article for how to reset a module 

It should be noted that analytics and annotations are not being deleted, just removed from view. Talis will still maintain the ability to access, download, and share this information with you. This includes

• Student engagement (time on module/resources/day by day) 
• Annotations made by students 
• Resource downloads, student by student, by time 

Please contact support@talis.com if you require this information   

What are the options for re-using content and modules? 

Reset the module

You will be able to reset modules as outlined above. This will only have implications for legacy data and resource access, and will allow a ‘blank canvas’ for re-use of content, structure, and use in teaching.  

Please note, Content that has been run via the digitisation workflow for copyright clearance will not be available for re-use due to copyright restrictions. 

See our support guide on resetting a module here 

Create a new module, and re-use content 

You can currently create modules manually in Talis Elevate. This is not bound to our traditional understanding of a module, but could be setup for a study group, journal club, etc. When you create a module, you can easily add content you’ve previously uploaded to Talis Elevate via the ‘add resource’ feature, and search for any previously uploaded content. This exists within the product now

Please note, Content that has been run via the digitisation workflow for copyright clearance will not be available for re-use due to copyright restrictions 

See our support article here on re-using resources 

Adjust the start/end dates 

If you amend the start date on a module, you will not see the analytical data for any activity that took place before that date. However, your previous cohort of students will get notifications about new annotation activity taking place.

Do nothing 

In some cases, you may wish to maintain elements of discussion activity across terms/academic years. If you do nothing, you’ll see annotations from the old students and current students. All students will merge into effectively a single ‘cohort’. All students in this cohort will get annotation emails, etc.  

How are we communicating this to grassroots academics? 

• We will be contacting all ‘active’ Talis Elevate users with guidance via email 
• We will be ‘alerting’ academics in the Product ahead of teaching to this new feature, what this enables, and what the implications are. 
• We will signpost in this communication to a support article with all the necessary information and advice

What is the longer term plan? 

We will make use of the improvements from LTI 1.3 to facilitate rollover and copied content to the new module automatically for you with the below benefits

• Create a new Talis Elevate module using the full module code that’s passed from the VLE. This often contains the module code, the academic year, the semester of delivery, and where/how it’s being delivered, making up a unique identifier 
• That content will be ‘copied’ to the new module 
• Links will persist, meaning no re-linking will be required in the new VLE site 
• Legacy analytics and annotations will be ‘siloed’ in the original module. There will be no need to reset a module, all old data will be accessible via the previous VLE site for staff and students. 

Once an academic has launched the first resource to create the new module, students will be able to prompt this as well, allowing content to be copied to the new module as well. This ensures that resources are accessible to the cohort. Academics can proactively delete this content from the new instance of the VLE if it isn’t to be re-used, stopping this content being copied over. 

For those institutions that utilise a ‘persistent site’ approach, we will seek to utilise a custom parameter to determine the academic year. This is data you will need to send as part of the LTI payload. When we detect this parameter has changed, we will follow the same pattern as above. 

We plan to implement this work in the coming academic year, alongside work to upgrade to LTI standard 1.3.

Any questions? 

Please raise a support ticket with us.