Best Practice for Managing Course Size

Advice for how to reduce the file size of a larger course within Learn. A large course is anything over 1 GB in size.

Looking for Help with Learn?

From the beginning of the 23/24 academic year, all new courses will be delivered using an updated Learn interface. In order to ensure that users can access support materials for current and previous year courses we have kept old support materials on Edweb pages and created a new Sharepoint Learn site full of useful resources for the new interface.

For Learn resources for current courses, please visit the Learn Sharepoint (University of Edinburgh users only).

Here you can access the most up-to-date information such as:

  • Good practice guidance
  • Training and support resources 
  • How to guides

To access support material for older courses please use the pages below as usual.

 

Media Hopper Create - Video, Audio and PowerPoint Content:

Instead of uploading videos (mp4) and audio (mp3) within Learn, you should upload them into Media Hopper Create (University Media Asset management system).

For example, when creating PowerPoint slides and embedding a video, instead of embedding the video within the PowerPoint, upload the video to Media Hopper Create and insert the link within the PowerPoint.  This will greatly reduce the size of the PowerPoint file when it is uploaded to Learn and will ensure your video/audio files are streamed effectively to the people using them.

Mashups:

Mashups can be used to link to external content in YouTube, Flickr etc.

Further Guidance for Media Hopper Create and Mashups

Course Copy, Export and Archiving:

Every June new courses are created within Learn in preparation for the next academic year.  There is an option to copy your previous course over into the new course.  To help manage the size of the Learn course it is important to be selective of what needs to be copied over and not to automatically copy over everything from the previous course as this can lead to courses becoming overly larger in terms of file size.

For more detailed advice on Course Copy please see this webpage: Copying and Backup

Use the Content Collection

The Content Collection is the file manager area of Learn which allows users to store files and folders for each course.  You can store content for multiple courses you teach on and can share content across courses with other users.

It helps to avoid duplication of the content and allows for materials to be reused within a course without the need for uploading the item again and again.

Content collection should only contain information relevant to the current year and should not contain nested copies of previous courses – in general the content collection should be checked for large files, duplicated files and unused files/folder which can be deleted.

For more information on the Content Collection please see: Content Collections

Reduce File Sizes:

Before uploading, reduce file sizes for certain files such as:

Microsoft Office Files which consists of PowerPoint and Word files. The Reduce File Size option is located in the File menu.  Another option is to save these files as a PDF, which often makes smaller, read-only versions of the files.

Images - Use a graphics program to resize images for screen viewing before uploading.

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