Tutorial - The Learning Environment

The Learning Environment of our course consists of three major components

• the electronic text book and related reading matter (in WWW)
• an electronic "learning platform"- for asynchronous communication and document exchange (in ILIAS)
• a chat tool for synchronous communication - our virtual classroom (TULKA)

Synchronous Communication in TULKA

• TULKA is a so-called "Shared Whiteboard" including a chat-tool. You have to log-in with your username and password. At present, you are not able to change your TULKA password.
• You are now in a room called "Classroom" with a whiteboard, an input line below, and a chat frame at the bottom of the window. Please do not alter the size of this browser window. You may lose specific functions or may not be able to see them correctly.
• The whiteboard is visible for all participants and can be manipulated in many ways by using the options on the left. A click on the area activates the respective drawing/writing mode. Below, there is also a paint box where you can select single colours. The functions for drawing are executed while holding the left mouse button. The writing function is selected by clicking on the "Abcdef" button. You will get an editor window with options for type font and size. You should activate the box "don't clear" before using the editor if you do not want to delete the content of the whiteboard but add sth. to it. Close the editor window with "Close" and click into the whiteboard with your left mouse key in order to make your note visible.
• You can upload different file formats into the whiteboard. If the images, websites or slides contain several pages, you are able to control these by using the functions "First Page", "Page Up", "Page Down", "Last Page" on the right. The function "Slides" contains all Postscript (.ps) and .dvi files. "Images" contains .jpg, .jpeg, .gif and many other image formats. The files have to be marked in the selection window (left mouse button), confirmed with "OK". A left mouseclick into the whiteboard gets the file(s) into the board. Please note, that only the tutors are able to save the files to the respective directory. Send all files that you want to present in our chat sessions to the tutors!
• The function "Room" comprises several chat rooms for the work in your groups. During the phases for group work, please make sure that you are in the room of YOUR group.
• The function "Chat" opens up an additional chat window, which you should use as a standard for our online sessions. In this window different type colours for "tutor", "expert", "student" can be represented. Note that you cannot copy text from this window in order to paste it elsewhere. If you want to do that. e.g. for saving an interesting URL someone else has mentioned, you have to use the small chat window below the whiteboard. The function "Hide" closes this window.
• The button "Clear" deletes the content of the whiteboard.
• The button "Exit" finishes the application, i.e. you leave the TULKA environment.

The ILIAS database for asynchronous communication and cooperation

You will find a concise description of the database on the ILIAS project pages of the University of Cologne.
There is a German Version as well as an English User Help.