Queen’s Online for Learning and Teaching
Dr Subhajit Basu
Lecturer in Information and Technology Law
School of Law
Queen's University Belfast
Queen’s Online for Learning and Teaching is an integrated environment for staff and
students at Queen's. The system enables the lecturer to create a resource to complement a
classroom-based course or an entire course online.
Queen’s Online for Learning and Teaching enables lecturers to:
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Provide course materials that include text, images, video
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Communicate with students via discussion forums, email and broadcast messages
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Set up tutorial groups
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Allow students to self-assess with immediate feedback
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Evaluate student and course performances using data provided by the system
Lecturers can make changes to a module, from any web accessible location and these
changes will be available to students immediately. Students are automatically registered
for all their modules with Queen’s Online. However, only modules that have been
registered by the tutors will be visible to students. To log into Queen’s Online, students
require their student number and their University password. Staff must register their
modules with Queen’s Online for Learning and Teaching.
We use Queen’s online quite extensively in our Law in Information Society Module. All
the learning resources available to the students through the QOL The core module course
material which includes syllabus, lecture presentations, reading lists, and assessment
questions are all upload on QOL. The resources are uploaded in Word files, PowerPoint
files, links to web sites, HTML files. QOL also provides a link to a QCat Reading List.
The QCat Reading List allows providing an online reading list for the module that is
directly linked to the Library catalogue. Queen’s Online also offers a facility to track the
use of the resources and also to track the student’s activity. It is possible to see how
many times a specific resource was viewed by each student and track the overall use of
resources by each student and the activity within the discussion forum ( although we do
not use discussion forum for the IS module).
The communication tool in QOL tool presents the list of students registered on the IS
module together with their Queen's email address. It is possible to choose to email an
individual student, a group of students or all of the students on the module.
Students in IS module are assessed by written essays, which they require to upload within
the deadline on QOL. Assignment is a relatively new application developed in Queen’s
Online which allows which we have started using for the IS module since last year. The
QOL provides with the facilty to
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Create a new assignment and modify existing assignments (providing assignment
details, associated files etc)
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Access completed assignments submitted by students
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Track if and when a student has submitted their assignment i.e. not at all or
before/after the deadline
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Provide marks and feedback to individual students – (there is also a facility to
email individual students)
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Extract all of the submission information e.g. name, student number, submission
date, mark and feedback to a spreadsheet