Communicating and Collaborating

UTSOnline offers a wide range of communication and collaboration tools.

Communication in UTSOnline

The Blackboard support pages offer detailed explanations of the main communication tools.

Here you will find descriptions and guides to using:

Collaboration in UTSOnline

For guides to the variety of collaborative tools in UTSOnline, access the Blackboard support pages.

Try the individual guides for:

The Portfolio

Portfolios are an invaluable tool in academic and professional development and enable authors to communicate their development and achievement over time. They provide a powerful medium for users to efficiently collect and organise artifacts representative of work and o curate these artifacts for a specific audience.  Portfolios offer a means to demonstrate formative and/or summative progress and achievement. Learn more about UTSOnline portfolios.

A.nnotate

A.nnotate is an online commenting software that has been integrated into UTSOnline (Blackboard) to help students with their readings. Students can collaborate in groups and add their comments directly to a reading. Read more about  A.nnotate for academics and setting it up in your subject site.

SPARKPLUS

Here at UTS you can also use SparkPLUS, a tool offering group, self and peer assessment with sophisticated reporting in addition to the capability for conducting in-class polling. SparkPLUS promotes equitable participation in group tasks. By helping students recognise their choices about how they participate in groups SparkPLUScan be very effective in promoting more equitable and thoughtful participation in group tasks.  SparkPLUS is also a highly effective way to moderate and benchmark marking in subject teams and it offers a real time polling feature that will track and store user input.

Echo360 Lecture Capture

Echo360 Active Learning Platform (ALP) is a lecture capture system installed in two lecture rooms: University Hall, and the Guthrie Theatre. If you are teaching in either of these spaces during a major session, please refer to the Echo360 Lecture Capture help page to determine if your class is scheduled to be captured by Echo360 ALP and for how to manage your captures through your UTSOnline subject site.

Echo360 Personal Capture

The Echo360 Personal Capture (PCAP) software allows you to create content on your computer by capturing a combination of the audio, video, and computer screen and then allowing you to save the capture locally for publishing.