Nuku the learning environment
What is Nuku?
Nuku is the learning platform at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
A learning platform is an integrated set of interactive online services that provide teachers, learners, and others involved in education with information, tools and resources to support and enhance educational delivery and management.
The term learning platform also includes the personal learning environment and physical learning environment.
It is framework of tools that work seamlessly together to deliver a student centric learning experience by unifying educational theory & practice, technology and content. The core of this is the Learning Management system—Canvas.
When you go to nuku.wgtn.ac.nz, the interface that you see is Canvas. It's the most visible component of Nuku, and the glue that binds Nuku together. But there are lots of tools that have been connected to with it, and we've also configured it for our requirements here at Te Herenga Waka, which will be slightly different from other universities. So together, this collection of tools—including our instance of Canvas, Panopto, Talis, Turnitin, Qualtrics, and others—is all Nuku.
What does Nuku mean?
We chose the name Nuku to reflect the breadth and shift our new learning platform represents, and how it will enable the ways we want to undertake learning and teaching in the future. The name also grounds the learning platform to our whenua, our place, as it starts to permeate the entire university learning environment.
This meaning is reflected in the design of the visual identity for Nuku. The dynamic puhoro motif represents the concept of movement, while the triangular shapes are an abstraction of the whenua and the connection to Papatūānuku.
Nuku
(verb) to move, shift, extend.
(verb) to move, shift, extend, indent (computer)
(noun) wide extent, throughout, length and breadth, all over, all through.
(noun) the Earth.
Log into Nuku as staff or student.
Contact Digital Solutions—the University's IT systems and support team—if you need help with accessing Nuku.