Aberystwyth University will be running a two-day Digwyddiad Rhannu Arfer Da – Rhagoriaeth Academaidd on the 2nd (face to face) and 3rd (on-line) July 2024. The event will be held through the medium of Welsh only. This event has been made possible due to the Small Grant Project money from the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol.
The aim of the two-day event is to present papers under the theme of Teaching Excellence – for example:
Learning and Teaching
Dysgu trwy gyfrwng y Gymraeg
Student Support
Supervision
Personal Tutoring
The academic papers will be an opportunity for staff across Wales to present their research, under the theme of academic practice – through papers, posters, panels etc. Presentations at the event are welcome from anyone teaching from staff to PhD students.
The Call for Proposals, at the following link Galwad am Bapurau – Digwyddiad Rhannu Arfer Da (jisc.ac.uk) asks for submissions of no more than 500 words, through the medium of Welsh. We welcome contributions to the event in the form of:
20 minutes presentations
45 minutes presentations
An individual or a group presentation
Posters from individuals or groups
Sharing good practice Panels
The deadline for these proposals is midday on Wednesday 27 March 2024.
I would be grateful if you could share this more widely with colleagues who maybe in interested in attending this event.
If you would like to discuss anything further, please do not hesitate to contact me.
As part of the Blackboard Learn Ultra project, we are now turning our attention to Organisations ready for September 2024.
Organisations are Blackboard sites for non-academic purposes. They have the same functionality as a Blackboard Course and can be used to provide information, online training, and access to materials. Unlike Courses, Organisations are created with no template. Organisations have the same features and functionality as Courses.
There are 3 types of Organisations:
Departmental Organisations
Every department has got 3 departmental Organisations: 1 for Undergraduate students, 1 for Postgraduate students, and 1 for Departmental staff. These are automatically created.
Bespoke and Training Organisations
These are Organisations that have been requested by individuals. They can be created with automatic feeds, such as types of students, students on specific study schemes, or staff members in a particular department. Some of these Organisations hold training packages that we are asked to undertake.
Practice Organisations
These are individual for each staff member and have no students enrolled on them. As part of the move to Ultra, we created all staff their own Ultra practice Organisation.
As we move to Blackboard Learn Ultra for Organisations, we have worked on a new Organisation policy outlining the types of activities they can be used for as well as their retention period. This new policy was approved by Academic Enhancement Committee on 7 February and can be viewed on our webpages.
Departmental Organisations
New Ultra Departmental Organisations will be created shortly but will not be made available to students until September 2024.
All departments will have a separate Organisation for UG, PG, and Staff in their department.
These are in the form:
DEPT-[departmental letter]-UG (e.g. DEPT-N-UG)
New students and staff members will automatically feed onto the Organisation once they have activated their account. Once these Organisations are available, we will contact Departmental Directors of Learning and Teaching, Faculty Registrars, and Heads of Department to help facilitate the move to Ultra Organisations.
Bespoke and Training Organisations
These are Organisations that have been requested individually for a specific purpose. We have never removed or deleted Organisations before (unless this has been requested).
As part of this work, we will:
Remove access to all bespoke Organisations that have not been accessed in 3 years with a view to retire the Organisation.
Contact those who still have responsibility for an existing Organisation to see if they are required and facilitate the move to Ultra for these Organisations.
Practice Organisations
Staff members currently have access to two practice Organisations – one in Original and one in Ultra.
We will be retiring the Original Organisations in September 2024. Colleagues need to copy any materials they want to retain onto the Ultra version of the Organisation.
If you have any questions about Organisations, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
When using external resources such as PDFs or scans and videos in your teaching and learning activities, it is important to check how accessible they are and ensure that all students will be able to use them. This is crucial if you are relying on them to support a learning activity, because usually it isn’t possible for you to edit such an external resource. If the item you want to use is not very accessible, then look for an alternative, otherwise some students will be excluded.
The guidance in the AU accessibility checklist can be used to evaluate how accessible an external resource is.
Please select the most accessible material available – if the only resource that is available is not accessible, think carefully about how you provide that information to student who may find it difficult to use.
PDF documents / scans
Scans of handwritten documents, or non-OCR scans from books, magazines etc are inaccessible to people who need to use screen-readers, enlarge text etc. Wherever possible use OCR readable scans and PDFs. You can talk to the Information Services Digitisation Team about getting appropriate scans of materials. If you use scans of handwritten documents, you could provide a transcription of the content.
The University of Chicago’s guidance on OCR and PDFs is useful if you want to know more about this issue (note that it includes links to services and software not available at AU; it is also only available in English).
Videos
Check the video that you want to use has captions or subtitles. For example, if you are using YouTube, there’s a Subtitles/Closed Captions icon in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.
Check the quality of the audio and make sure you can hear and understand it at a reasonable volume.
If there are no captions, or the audio quality is poor, is it possible to lip-read the actors or presenters?
Many TV recordings in Box of Broadcasts recordings include a transcript, so this is a good place to source video. Remember that some BBC programmes are also broadcast with sign language interpreters.
If videos use text to convey meaning, make sure that it has clear fonts and good contrast.
Avoid videos with lots of flashing lights and fast-moving images – if you can’t avoid using a video that contains this, make sure that you warn students (and provide an alternative explanation or video where possible).
The W3C web page on audio and video content is also useful. Although it is designed for people creating audio and video, if gives you some pointers of things to look for when selecting resources.
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.
25/5/2024 Student Belonging Community of Practice, Student Belonging Conference 2024 (hybrid online and in person at UEA). Call for proposals open until 29/02/2024
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.
Subscribe to SEDA’s mailing list for email discussions about educational development and emerging teaching practices. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
Follow University of Birmingham’s Higher Education Futures institute HEFi on Twitter for daily posts with links to pedagogical literature and more. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
Join the #LTHEchat on Twitter Wednesday nights for one hour of lively discussion about learning and teaching in HE. I often find out about good resources for the Roundup from the chat.
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. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.
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.
11-15/3/2024 Active Learning Network, Global Festival of Active Learning: Back to the future – looking ahead for active learning (Call for proposals open until 26/1/2024)
12-13/3/2024 Jisc, Digifest 2024: Imagining the future of education and research (hybrid in-person in Birmingham and online)
May
25/5/2024 Student Belonging Community of Practice, Student Belonging Conference 2024 (hybrid online and in person at UEA). Call for proposals open until 29/02/2024
Saunders, R. (14/2/2024), S4E8 Nicola Grayson, Pedagogy on the Rocks (33-minute audio recording), L&T Chatshow podcast series, ‘This week’s L&T Chat Show Podcast is “Pedagogy on the rocks” with Dr Nicola Grayson, taking in deep learning, surface learning and The Infinite Monkey Cage.’
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.
Subscribe to SEDA’s mailing list for email discussions about educational development and emerging teaching practices. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
Follow University of Birmingham’s Higher Education Futures institute HEFi on Twitter for daily posts with links to pedagogical literature and more. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
Join the #LTHEchat on Twitter Wednesday nights for one hour of lively discussion about learning and teaching in HE. I often find out about good resources for the Roundup from the chat.
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. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is excited to share with you details of the new Forms and the new Linkert question type which were introduced in the February update.
Forms
Instructors frequently need to survey their class to gauge student interests or opinions on a range of topics from field excursions to course feedback. Now, instructors can create a Form for these use cases.
The following items are supported in a Form:
Essay question
Likert question
Multiple choice question
True/false question
Text
Local file
File from cloud storage
Page break
By default, a Form is not graded. Questions in a form don’t have correct or incorrect answers. Forms are currently not anonymous, this functionality will be included in a future update.
Image below: An example ungraded Form used for a clinical teaching placement
Some instructors may choose to grade a Form to encourage participation. When this is the case, instructors must manually enter a grade for each submission.
Instructors may view Form submissions by student or by question in the new grading view.
Image below: Ungraded Form submissions by question
Image below: Graded Form submission by student
Instructors may download the Form results from the Gradebook and Submissions page as an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file.
Image below: Download Form results from Gradable Items view
Image below: Download Form results for Submissions page
In the Gradebook grid view, student submissions for an ungraded Form appear as “Submitted.” Graded Forms display the manually entered grade or appropriate grading status.
Likert question type
Likert questions help provide a quantitative measure of opinions and attitudes. The responses often range from strongly disagree tostrongly agree. This question type is now available in the Form assessment type.
Image below: Set up a Likert question
The scale range defaults to three options, with suggested labelling for options one and three as strongly disagreeandstrongly agree. Instructors may select a range of three, five, or seven options and label the poles as desired. Instructors may also choose to include a “not applicable” option.
Image below. Example Likert question in an end of unit survey
Note: A Likert question in a survey created in the Learn Original course view converts/copies to a Form in the Learn Ultra course view. The scale range default is three.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit are excited to announce the date for the 12th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. The conference will be taking place between Tuesday 10 and Thursday 12 September 2024.
Look out for Calls for Proposals and the announcement of the conference theme. As usual, we will be updating our Learning and Teaching Conference Webpages and also our blog to keep you up-to-date with how things are progressing.
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.
11-15/3/2023 Active Learning Network, Global Festival of Active Learning: Back to the future – looking ahead for active learning (Call for proposals open until 26/1/2024)
12-13/3/2024 Jisc, Digifest 2024: Imagining the future of education and research (hybrid in-person in Birmingham and online)
Stanford University Graduate School of Education (2024), Empowering students with AI Literacy, Classroom-Ready Resources About AI For Teaching, Stanford University
University of Maine (n.d.), Learn with AI(toolkit and resources)
Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal (2/2/2024), ‘This special issue is guest edited by the RAISE Network Special Interest Groups (SIGs) Co-Convenors: Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and the Research and Evaluation (R&E) SIGs’.
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.
Subscribe to SEDA’s mailing list for email discussions about educational development and emerging teaching practices. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
Follow University of Birmingham’s Higher Education Futures institute HEFi on Twitter for daily posts with links to pedagogical literature and more. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
Join the #LTHEchat on Twitter Wednesday nights for one hour of lively discussion about learning and teaching in HE. I often find out about good resources for the Roundup from the chat.
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. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.
