This year’s Learning and Teaching conference has the theme Innovative Pathways to Empowering Learners: Adapting, Engaging, and Thriving and will be taking place between Tuesday 8 and Thursday 10 July 2025.
You can register for the conference online.
Following the announcement of our conference keynote, we’re pleased to confirm our next external speakers.
On Tuesday 8 July, Professor Lee Elliot Major OBE FAcSS and Beth Brooks from the University of Exeter will be joining us to showcase their pioneering work with social mobility in the South West.
Professor Lee Elliot Major OBE FAcSS is the country’s first Professor of Social Mobility, based at the University of Exeter. As one of the world’s leading social mobility experts, his work is dedicated to improving the prospects of young people from under-resourced backgrounds. Lee was formerly Chief Executive of the Sutton Trust and a trustee of the Education Endowment Foundation. He is focused on the impact of research, working closely with Governments, policy makers as well as schools, universities, and employers across the world, and advocates an ‘equity approach’ in schools based on principles set out in his book Equity in Education.
Beth Brooks is an Executive at the South-West Social Mobility Commission, where she leads on various social mobility projects. Before joining the Commission, Beth worked in Widening Participation at the University of Exeter, and as a secondary school teacher in the South West. She holds a PGCE with distinction from the University of Exeter.
Their University-led Tutoring Service is scalable, sustainable, low-cost tutoring model is a high-quality approach to tutoring with the potential to transform thousands of young lives across the country. Using programmes, undergraduate tutors boost key skills of school pupils, gaining work experience and credits towards their degree, forming invaluable relationships with pupils falling behind in class while considering a career in teaching. Unlike other programmes, it is free for schools. We call it the ‘win win win’ scheme.
For further information, see their website.
On Tuesday 8 April, we co-hosted our latest Mini Conference with colleagues from Careers and Employability Services. We hosted 50 attendees from across the University and had 5 sessions.
Materials from the conference are now available on our webpages.
The conference started with a welcome from Professor Anwen Jones, Pro Vice Chancellor for Education and Student Experience. Following Anwen’s address, Dr Aranee Manhoaran from Kings College London gave a fantastic keynote. In her keynote, Aranee identified an Employability framework that can be applied to the curriculum. As well as this, strategies were given regarding how to map this framework onto the curriculum to review assessment.
Dr Saffron Passam from Psychology gave a presentation which focused on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion as an integral employability skill.
Dr Louise Ritchie from Theatre, Film and Television Studies gave an overview of how the Drama and Theatre Curriculum partnered with the Careers and Employability Service to improve visibility and graduate outcomes.
The School of Education’s Annabel Latham outlined innovative assessment design with the Careers and Employability Service. The assessment included workshops, poster creation, and a post assignment discussion.
Finally, Careers and Employability Services’ Bev Herring and Jo Hiatt recapped the morning’s event and ran an interactive presentation for colleagues to reflect on how comfortable they felt integrating employability skills into their curriculum.
A big thank you to our presenters for such engaging sessions and to those who attended.
We’re looking forward to our next Mini Conference. In the meantime, colleagues can book onto the Annual Learning and Teaching Conference which is taking place between 8 and 10 July.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. Social media: X.com, BSky.
We will be creating the new blank Blackboard courses for 2025-26 on Monday 2nd June 2025.
Once courses have been created, we will run a weekly feed between the Module Management System and Blackboard to reflect any updates or changes. Students won’t come onto courses until registration has been completed in September.
If you want to know more about why we create blank courses at the start of each academic year, do take a look at our blog post on Course Creation from 2024.
In the April update, we are particularly excited about a new feature called the Learning Object Repository. There is now the ability to print Blackboard Documents, and updates to the grading and feedback workflow for staff and students.
The new Learning Object Repository is an institutional repository designed to centralise resources across courses and organisations.
We can upload items to the Learning Object Repository for instructors to copy into their courses. Note that items copied into courses cannot be edited.
This feature is available for Blackboard Documents at this stage but there are plans to develop options to include files in the future. We have also requested a folder level structure be developed so that we can organise content items for instructors to find.
Over the next couple of months, we will be working on developing the process for colleagues to request for items to be added to the Learning Object Repository. We aim to have this in place ready for your 2025-26 courses.
Some initial ideas from us include links to generic skills resources, generative AI policies, and optional health and safety statements.
If you have any ideas about how we might use the Learning Object Repository, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.
We have seen some significant changes to the Documents feature in Blackboard over the past 6 months. Now colleagues and students can print these Documents or save to PDF so that they can review content offline.
The print function retains the Document layout. Note that for instructors, knowledge check blocks print with all the question and answer options. All other blocks print as displayed outside of editing mode.
Image 1. The new Print button for Documents is now available for students.
There are some minor enhancements to Grading and Feedback this month.
In the Gradebook, instructors now have enhanced ability to monitor student engagement with assessment feedback. An indicator on the individual student’s Overview page now displays whether a student has reviewed the feedback for a given assessment.
When a grade is posted, the indicator includes a label of Not reviewed with the existing Completed label in the Status column. When the student reviews the feedback, the status updates to Reviewed with a review timestamp.
If the new grade indicator is reset for the assessment, such as when a grade is updated or if the assessment has multiple attempts, the timestamp updates when the student reviews the feedback again. If all attempts are deleted, the Not reviewed or Reviewed label is removed.
Image 1: Instructor Gradebook view has Reviewed and Not Reviewed labels in the Status column.
To see whether a student has viewed their feedback:
Blackboard Assignment can manage group submissions where a student in a group submits a file, and marks and feedback can be allocated for all students.
In this month’s update the grading interface for group submissions has been updated to match that of individual submissions.
The students’ Gradebook has changed to include:
When a grade is posted and the new grade indicator (purple circle) is turned on, the View button displays for the assessment.
When students select the View button, the new grade indicator turns off, and students are redirected to their submission. If no submission is made, the side panels with feedback opens. The View button remains unless the instructor deletes the graded submission and all attempts.
Image 1: Previous view of the student Gradebook included Feedback column with feedback icon and new grade indicator when feedback is available for review.
Image 2: New view of the student Gradebook includes an actionable Results column, with the new grade indicator turning off after the student views the feedback.
This section aims to keep you updated on progress of enhancements requested on the Blackboard Ideas Exchange.
We are pleased to see the Feedback Indicator included in this month’s release. This is a feature that we requested and was important in our recent SafeAssign Pilot survey.
Greek has also been added as an output language for the AI Design Assistant. This was requested by a colleague in Lifelong Learning.
If you have any enhancements to request from Blackboard, please get in touch with us via elearning@aber.ac.uk.
Over the next few months, we are making the following changes to the course roles in Blackboard.
(from June 2025).
Teaching staff should be added using the most appropriate role via Module Management (which will feed directly to Blackboard within an hour). Anyone with Additional Lecturer or Additional Tutor in previous years’ courses will keep their access but the roles won’t be available for new enrolments.
(from June 2025).
This will give the same access as before but will help us to make sure that students don’t see these colleagues as teaching members of staff. This should cut down on the possibility of students incorrectly contacting administrators and External Examiners. Note that both External Examiners and Department Administrators will be listed as Facilitators in the Course Register. You will be able to tell which is which because External Examiners don’t have an AU email address (@aber.ac.uk).
(from March 2025).
These were mainly roles created for system test purposes. However, if anyone was added with one of the deleted roles, they have been changed to Student. Any queries about enrolments should be sent to elearning@aber.ac.uk.
Any staff added manually will be removed from the course on the following Monday night. Student enrolments must be managed via the Student Record. New course enrolments are added within an hour of the change, and students are removed from old course enrolments on the following Monday night.
You shouldn’t notice too many differences, but it will improve some technical aspects of staff and student access to Blackboard courses.
These changes to course roles are designed to remove all course roles that have been created in-house at AU. This is because they don’t update as part of the Blackboard monthly updates. This means that course roles may not have the permission to use new tools or an up-to-date Welsh interface. Changing to using just the in-built Blackboard roles should improve access and bilingualism, as well as be more efficient. The only exception to this is the AU-created Course Viewer role which will remain. We have voted for the Blackboard Ideas Exchange entry for a built-in Course Viewer role, and we will make use of it if it is introduced.
Following our retention schedule, the removed roles will be finally deleted in 2030 when the last of the courses using them are removed from Blackboard.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. Social media: X.com, BSky.
We have experienced an issue with the Panopto Recorder that has affected some people from having folders to record into.
We believe that we now have a solution to this issue, which we have tested in a number of rooms.
We are now rolling out this fix to all teaching room machines.
User profiles will now be refreshed every 5 days (rather than 10 days). The refresh will mean any local copies of materials copied to the desktop will be removed after 5 days.
Apologies for the inconvenience to those who have experienced this issue.
We are delighted to confirm our keynote for this year’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. Bookings for the conference are already open.
Dr Neil Currant will be joining us for an in-person keynote presentation and masterclass workshop on the second day of the conference, Wednesday 9 July.
Neil will be discussing the important role of compassionate assessment, belonging, and inclusive assessment practices.
In the workshop, colleagues will be given the opportunity to reflect on their own assessment practices and ways in which they could incorporate and adapt them based on Neil’s keynote. This work builds on the vital work being undertaken in Student Support Services.
Please see below for a speaker biography and links to selected works and projects:
Dr Neil Currant is a Senior Educational Developer at the University of Bedfordshire. He was previously Head of Educational Development at Oxford Brookes University and the Royal Veterinary College. Neil has been supporting teaching, learning and assessment practices in higher education for twenty years with expertise in inclusion and assessment.
Neil has been involved in JISC funded research projects on the use of learning technology, an Advance HE funded project on global citizenship, institutional research on awarding gaps and QAA funded projects on belonging and compassion.
Neil is a reviewer and accreditor for Advance HE. Neil co-founded the Compassionate Assessment Network in HE and is currently researching assessment practice related to compassion, the affective impact of feedback and ungrading.
Belonging research – Teaching Insights journal.
Rethinking assessment? Research into the affective impact of higher education grading
Belonging project – https://www.qaa.ac.uk/membership/collaborative-enhancement-projects/assessment/belonging-through-assessment-pipelines-of-compassion
Compassionate Assessment Project – https://www.qaa.ac.uk/membership/collaborative-enhancement-projects/assessment/compassionate-assessment-in-higher-education
We will be announcing further external speakers in due course.
Our Call for Proposals is still open, and closes on April 8. We welcome proposals that speak to the conference themes, but also those which showcase the excellent teaching practices taking place at Aberystwyth University.
Bookings for the conference are already open. Please complete our online survey to book your place.
If you have any questions about the conference, please contact the conference organisers via elearning@aber.ac.uk.
There are some new features available in the latest Vevox (Polling Tool) update that we wanted to draw your attention to.
For those unfamiliar with Vevox, the polling software can be used to ask students questions and for them to respond live using their mobile devices. For information on how to use Vevox, see our webpage.
The update includes:
If you are using Team polls and quizzes, you can now set up a Leaderboard. This enhancement is great for end of term or revision style activities.
If you create questions on a spreadsheet, you can upload them from an excel template.
This feature was introduced in the last release but there are some improvements to the workflow. You can conduct a demographic poll to gather key information or characteristics for your responders, before asking further questions to disaggregate the results.
The AI quiz generator now can create 10 questions at a time.
The updated PowerPoint add-in includes improvements to LaTeX and KaTeX rendering, rich text options for question formatting, and improved Pie Chart and numeric poll updates.
Take a look at Vevox’s latest product update: March 2025 for the full update.
If you have any questions on using Vevox please contact us (elearning@aber.ac.uk).