 It's best to use the Google Chrome browser when accessing Loop. To access Loop, visit loop.dcu.ie and click the DCU login button. Enter your username and password. Upon logging in, you are brought to your dashboard. This is the main landing page. From here, you can access all the learning material that your lecturers have provided to you. Depending on your course or program, you will take a certain number of modules each semester. These modules have their own distinct module page on Loop, and you can view them all from this dashboard. You can rearrange how your modules appear. You can also star a module, which is particularly useful if you find yourself visiting a module page more frequently than others, and you want to make it quicker and easier to get in. Over time, you would also get access to some non-module pages from your dashboard, such as the library let's tutorials, the student support and development hub, the students union, and more. There is a quick links block on the right hand side of your dashboard as well. This allows you to access other tools like Loop Reflect and the library quickly and easily. Let's take a look at a module. Click one to be brought to the module page. On a module page, you will see a contacts block, which contains the lecturers' details and how to contact them. You may also see other items like an accessibility block or upcoming events. Different lecturers teach different modules, and they will all use Loop in a slightly different way. Some may have their Loop module laid out vertically with expandable and collapsible sections that contain different resources and activities. Other lecturers might use a different layout, such as organizing material into separate sections represented as tiles. Other lecturers might lay out their Loop courses as long vertical lists. Some lecturers might have all their resources and activities available to you from the start. Others might hide them and then make them visible bit by bit throughout the semester. The kinds of things you might see on a module page include the announcements forum, the module handbook, a Zoom classroom for your live online sessions, an online book that contains text, imagery, video, PDFs or other types of documents, perhaps even some folders where several documents are grouped together, links to other websites, a discussion forum and an assignment. Some of these resources will download to your computer and others will appear on screen for you to work through. Clicking on these resources and activities will give you access. To get back to the module page, use the breadcrumb trail at the top of the screen. Let's explore two of these activities in more detail. Your lecturers might use discussion forums as learning activities. These are great ways for you to share your opinions, learn from your classmates and consolidate your knowledge. In this discussion forum, the lecturer has started a discussion topic. The lecturer has asked each student to post a response to the question that is posed. It's very easy to reply. As the discussion forum evolves with more contributions, you can reply to your classmates and they can reply to you, and in this way the discussion starts flowing. Lecturers also use loop for continuous assessment purposes, setting you tasks and assignments that you need to submit by a certain deadline. You'll use what's called a loop assignment for this. You might be submitting a text document, a loop reflect portfolio or some other piece of work, and it's quite easy to do. Click Add Submission. You must accept the plagiarism declaration when submitting your work, drag and drop your piece of work, and click Save Changes. If the lecturer has activated the Urkund text matching tool, after some time you will see a percentage score of how much text in your document is similar to text from the web, and then clicking this score will bring you to an Urkund report that you can consult. You can edit your submission any time up to the deadline. Click Edit Submission. You might want to edit your submission if, for example, you've made some changes to your document since consulting the Urkund report. Take to accept the plagiarism declaration again, choose the file you first uploaded, delete it, and then drag and drop your updated file, and click Save Changes. Many lecturers will also use this assignment to grade your work and give feedback, so sometime after the deadline you'll be able to revisit this loop assignment to retrieve the grades and feedback. The navigation drawer on the left-hand side of loop lets you access different areas. You can expand and collapse the drawer using the hamburger icon. The drawer can give you access to your module grades, for example, or let you view your loop calendar. It will also bring you back to your dashboard where you can select another module to explore. If you need help with Loop at any stage, visit the Loop Student Support page, or log a ticket with the help desk by emailing iss at dcu.ie.