SCY-Lab general overview

In this introduction chapter, you will read a lot about the SCY-Lab learning environment and its components. There is much more to know, for example how to install SCY-Lab. For technical information like that, we kindly refer you to Part B of this manual.

Getting started

There are a few things to be done before your students can start working with SCY-Lab: they will have to create a user account and you will have to enroll them in a mission. How to do so, is explained in Part B of this manual. Apart from that, you may also want to edit the level of scaffolding, formulate learning goals or perform other authoring tasks beforehand. You can do all this on the SCY portal page, see paragraph 3.3. More information can be found in Part B of this manual. After enlisting students, you and they can log into SCY-Lab using their account name and password.

The general components of SCY-Lab for students

Mission map / navigation

You enter a SCY Mission through the mission map. This mission map is the first thing you see when you login. Using the mission map, students can navigate through the mission.

In the mission map, there are a number of icons. These icons represent coherent sets of activities, the abovementioned Learning Activity Spaces. All ELOs are produced within such spaces.

Working with ELOs

In a learning activity space, a student works by opening ELOs, working in them and saving them. He or she can always produce more ELOs, search for older ELOs or throw obsolete ELOs away – these are never deleted, however, but hidden from view.

Feedback and portfolio

Not only teachers, also students have an online SCY portal page outside (but linked to) SCY-Lab. There they may work on their portfolios and give and receive feedback among each other. From any learning activity space, a student can navigate to his online portfolio and to the feedback functionalities.

SCY-Lab features for teachers

Portal page

As a teacher, you may log into the SCY portal page (http://scy-review.collide.info:8080/webapp.) Here, you may create a new mission based on one of the missions, or select an existing mission. You may also edit your personal profile and browse the profiles of other members. In Part B, paragraph 8.3, you will find more information about these and other functionalities of the teacher sections.

For an introduction to the SCY Portal for teachers, see the video below:

 

For an introduction to the SCY Portal for students, see the video below:

Mission cockpit

When you select a mission, you are taken to the mission authoring and cockpit page. From here you can

  • read the mission description
  • enroll students into the mission from the user list
  • adjust the level of scaffolding (see paragraph 1.3) between low, medium and high
  • see a list of anchor ELOs (‘More details') and toggle whether a student is required to complete these for his portfolio
  • configure the assessment by formulating learning goals to be assessed
  • browse portfolios that have been submitted for assessment by students
  • monitor current student activity during ‘runtime' in a number of ways