A smorgasbord of new features and general improvements: CLAS can be embedded in connect (blackboard learn). Instructors and TA's can temporarily view a course as a student would see it. Each course has a moderated instructions and welcome area, with a tutorial videos that show features relevant to each type of user (student, instructors, TAs). Each video can be previewed and pre-annotated by instructors and TA's before being assigned to students. A lot of speed-ups and user experience polishing.

1. Project Owner
fred.cutler@ubc.ca
Lead Developer
thomas .dang@ubc.ca
Art s I n s t ructional
Suppor t and
Information
Technology
Univer s i ty of Br i t i s h
Columbia
Collaborative Learning Annotation System
USING CLAS IN CONNECT
COURSE INSTRUCTIONS AND
WELCOME AREA
“STUDENT VIEW” FOR
INSTRUCTORS AND TA’S
PREVIEW AND PRE-ANNOTATE

2. CLAS IN CONNECT (BLACKBOARD LEARN)
Whether you are using CLAS in your course already, or you are thinking about
adopting CLAS as a media sharing & annotation platform for your course, you
can now embed CLAS within the “Connect” Learning Management System.
Students no longer need to remember an extra website and log in twice.

3. CLAS IN CONNECT (BLACKBOARD LEARN) - OPTIONS
You can use CLAS for timeline annotations, as a discussion board (comments
only), or simply to share video (video only). You can request to switch
between these modes at any time.
Full featured
Comments only
Video only

4. CLAS IN CONNECT (BLACKBOARD LEARN) – VIDEO LIBRARY
MANAGEMENT
The page for uploading, managing, and assigning videos can be reached from
a link on top of the video view page like normal. By default, students cannot
upload videos, but this can be turned on per course upon request.
Video upload &
management
page

5. PREVIEW AND PRE-ANNOTATE VIDEOS BEFORE ASSIGNING TO
STUDENTS
Click on the icon on the thumbnail of each video in the
video management page to show a full
CLAS “preview and pre-annotation” page
with all the usual features.

6. COURSE INSTRUCTIONS AND WELCOME AREA
Each course in CLAS now has a default “welcome area” with a tutorial video
and a special comment panel where instructors and TA’s can put course-wide
instructions and messages. The welcome area has anti-spam features to
make sure that only relevant messages are shown to the whole class. The
tutorial video changes dynamically to fit the viewer’s role, showing only the
relevant features for each user.

7. STUDENT VIEW FOR INSTRUCTORS AND TA’S
Instructors and TA’s can temporarily view the course as a student. Access to
the video “upload and management” and the “group management” pages will
be blocked, and the private groups of individual users in the course will no
longer be viewable (except for your own group(s), of course). Download, re-sharing,
annotating, and commenting rights may be restricted as well
depending on the course.

8. OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
¡ The video management page can scale nearly indefinitely
§ Collections of thousands of videos are displayed in seconds
(dedicated to our early adopters and supporters in the School of
Music at UBC)
§ Each of these videos can be instantly assigned to a user or group
within and between courses by a smart dropdown box widget with
integrated search and recommendation-as-you-type. This widget is
comfortably scalable to thousands of students too
¡ Annotating and commenting on mobile is more user friendly,
especially for videos with a lot of posts already. Try it!