MINERVA QUICK GUIDE FOR STUDENTS

MINERVA QUICK GUIDE
FOR STUDENTS
MINERVA QUICK GUIDE FOR STUDENTS..................................................................................................................................0
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................1
General functionality .....................................................................................................................................................3
My course list.............................................................................................................................................................3
My profile ..................................................................................................................................................................4
My agenda .................................................................................................................................................................4
Study offer … .............................................................................................................................................................5
Coursesite modules .......................................................................................................................................................6
Documents.................................................................................................................................................................6
Dropbox .....................................................................................................................................................................7
Student publications ..................................................................................................................................................8
Tests ...........................................................................................................................................................................8
Poll .............................................................................................................................................................................9
Announcements.........................................................................................................................................................9
Agenda .....................................................................................................................................................................10
Links .........................................................................................................................................................................10
Users ........................................................................................................................................................................10
Groups .....................................................................................................................................................................11
Forum ......................................................................................................................................................................11
Some tips .....................................................................................................................................................................12
Useful links and addresses .......................................................................................................................................12
Introduction
Minerva is an electronic learning platform. It enables teachers to create and maintain course-websites for their
students and greatly enhances communication between them.
To use Minerva, you simply need a pc with an internet-connection, and a browser (Chrome, Firefox, Opera,
Internet Explorer, ..).
The platform is accessible through internet, at the address http://minerva.ugent.be.
As a student, you can use your CAS-login to enter Minerva.
The following functions are available for student on the course startpage:
Agenda: The course agenda, containing lessons, tasks and deadlines.
Announcements: The course’s bulletin board.
Chat: Allows for a simple chat functionality between users of Minerva.
Course description: A categorized description of the course.
Documents: A space where course material, tasks, presentations... are shared.
Dropbox: A place to exchange tasks, documents between teacher and students.
Forums: Discussion forums en document space.
Learning path: A series of learning steps, divided into chapters, in which you can define required
knowledge before going to a next chapter
Links: Useful links, categorized.
Tests: Create Tests that are automatically evaluated.
Users: Lists and allows control of all users subscribed to the course.
Minerva quick guide for students – February 2012
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Course startpage
The startpage displays the available modules for a chosen course. Items in grey have been deactivated by your
teacher for this course.
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General functionality
My course list
After logging in, you see the page My course list. From here you can access and manage your courses, and have
direct access to the other functions of Minerva:
On this page:
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A list of the courses to which you are subscribed.
Click a course in this list to enter it, giving you the course startpage, as mentioned in the previous page.
Above this list you may see possible platform announcements.
At the top of the page, you find the general functions : Profile, Agenda, Messages
These tabs are available on every page of the platform.
The side-menus provide control of your courses, the layout of this page, and more..
Courses may be organized using categories.
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My profile
The information in the Minerva user profiles is imported from the data the university keeps of all students and
employees. Do check if the information in your profile is indeed correct. If not, you should contact the ICT&O
team.
Optionally, you can complete your profile with a picture.
My agenda
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In „My agenda‟ all items are displayed from the courses on the My course list page, the academic agenda and
your personal agenda-items (private agenda), in different colours. The agenda provides five different views, one of
which displays only your personal items.
You can add personal items to your agenda, these can be recurring items.
Within your personal agenda you can drag your own items to change date/time, in week- and dayviews,
you can also change the duration by dragging.
The button recurrency allows you to enter recurring items. If you want to delete/edit them however, you
will have to change the items one by one..
Study offer …
Here you find:
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Your possible Subscriptions as a student.
Coursesites: subscriptions to (possibly not yet created!) coursesites; subscriptions as student, and free
subscriptions are displayed here.
Infosites: subscriptions to (possibly not yet created!) infosites.
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Coursesite modules
Documents
Here you find files that were uploaded for the students, organized into folders and subfolders.
To download a document to your pc or to consult it online, you can click the icon next to the name.
The displayed files-list can be exported to csv or Excel-format.
If the option is enabled, you can provide feedback to documents, that will be visible to everyone. It is also possible
to create personal notes for a document.
The document module provides a search box, and for folders containing pictures, you can choose the media
gallery.
The send multiple files at once you can wrap these in a zip-file, that will be automatically extracted.
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Dropbox
The dropbox is a means of communication, used for exchanging files between students and teachers.
As a student, you can send files to specific students, groups, or the teacher depending on the settings for this
course.
(In comparison, the files in Documents are visible to all students of the course).
Received files can be organized into folders. Files can be commented upon (feedback).
The dropbox is the most logical tool for handing in tasks.
Dropbox-files are personal, make sure to send them to whomever needs to use them
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Student publications
Provides a way to exchange documents between students.
When you upload a document into student publications, it will be visible for all users (of the course).
You can upload your document directly into a category, if the teacher has created categories.
Tests
The tests module can be used to have tests containing different types of questions:
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Multiple choice a question with one possible answer, to be chosen from a list.
Multiple response a question with one or more possible answers, to be chosen from a list.
Fill in the blanks to enter text or numbers.
Matching questions where corresponding items have to be matched.
Open questions, to be answered with free text.
A test contains one or more questions, that can be of a different type.
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Poll
The poll module is used to easily obtain an average opinion, by asking a simple multiple choice question. Each user
can only provide a single answer.
After providing your opinion, the average results are displayed.
Announcements
Using Announcements, a teacher can place messages, announcements, notifications,.. into the course site.
Announcement are collapsed, clicking the title will open them.
The most recent announcements will appear at the top of the page.
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Agenda
In the agenda, all date-related information about the course is kept, e.g. colleges, practical lessons, deadlines, fieldtrips,etc...
The agenda within the course functions almost identically as My Agenda. The only difference is that there is no
option to add a personal item, and as a result no tab to view personal items.
Links
This tool lists hyperlinks provided by your teacher, optionally organized into thematic folders. Pages will be opened
in a new window.
Using Expand categories, you can have the links from every category displayed in a single page.
Users
The user module displays all the users in your course in a list.
Subscription are personal. User roles are defined per course: one can be a course manager in one course, and a
student or assistant in another course.
A student has to subscribe, using the tab Study offer 201x-201y.
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Groups
Groups make it possible to create virtual groups of students that have common interests (e.g. for a task), within a
course. There is a separate document space per group, and a separate forum and wiki.
Within the group document space, users can freely add documents, and are factual administrators.
Forum
The forum allows a means of communication between users of the course, in which the user is free to choose
when and where to read the messages, or to take part in a discussion.
Discussions can be displayed flat, structured or nested.
Your discussions will be visible to all members of the forum, and the course administrator.
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Some tips
Log out after using Minerva!
Don’t paste text from Word directly into an editor, but first remove the layout: Word adds a lot of
superfluous html-code. As a possible method, you can paste text into notepad, and copy from there.
Give your documents clear names, or supply a description in the Comment field.
Reduce the size of your pictures, images in presentations,… by resizing them to an adequate format to
be displayed on-screen. Pdf’s can also be substantially reduced without visible loss of quality.
To avoid problems, it is better to use safe filenames: don’t use spaces, diacritical characters (é, ç,...), or
other special symbols (%, &, $,...).
Contact the helpdesk for technical questions only, provide as many details as possible (what happens
where, when). If possible, add a screenshot.
Useful links and addresses
At icto.ugent.be, more tips, tutorials,.. can be found.
In case of technical problems, contact the Minerva helpdesk:
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by telephone: (09264) 8570
by e-mail: [email protected]
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