If you are a student at the University of Copenhagen, chances are that you’ve had a run-in with a service called Absalon. For the uninitiated, Absalon is based on a system called it’s learning, which is a “virtual learning environment“. As a student at KU might also know ISIS, which serves pretty much the exact same purpose.

Now, one of the things that annoyed me quite a bit is that way you are supposed to log in to this system is by first going to punkt.ku, logging in there, clicking Absalon, which then pops up in a new window. The reason that this annoyed me can mainly be summed up in these following troubles:

• For one, if I bookmark anything at Absalon — let’s say a course page — and I click that bookmark, I get a session time out. I must then proceed to go to a completely other site in order to log in. In short, my bookmarks are useless.
• Secondly, it opens in a new window (or tab) when you try to open Absalon from punkt.ku.



• And finally, there is a bloody log-in box on the page, why shouldn’t I be allowed to use that?

Well, as it turns out, you actually can use that log-in box, but in order to do that, you need to find the username and password for your account. If you look at the picture above, a way of doing that should pop out — the “Forgotten password?” link. Before we can use that, however, we need to find out which email address is associated with the account.

The email field

In order to do that, you have to log in to Absalon the old fashioned way; through punkt.ku. Once you have done that, there should be a “My Settings” link in the top right hand side of the page. From there, you click on to “Change settings”, which contains the email address associated with your account.

With that in hand we can proceed to get our log-in information. Copy down the address and log out. Absalon doesn’t like you, so it doesn’t return to the main page when you log out, so you will have to go there yourself. Now, open the “Forgotten password?” page, make sure that “KU” is selected in the membership drop-down, and enter the email address, exactly as it was on the “My Settings” page.

After sending that request, you should be sent an email containing both the username and the password of your Absalon account, and after that you will never have to go to punkt.ku to log in to Absalon ever again.