Information Services is pleased to announce a special half-day event looking at ways in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used in academic contexts.
The event will be held on Thursday 11 April between 09:00-13:00 in the International Politics Main Hall.
The aim of the event is to look across the 2 academic functions:
Research
Learning and Teaching
And to reflect on ways in which AI can be used to enhance these activities, increase productivity, and save time.
We’d also like to explore the challenges and obstacles that you face in using AI in these contexts and establish ways in which the University can best support you.
The session will be interactive, with participants encouraged to share their own experiences and examples of best practice. All colleagues are welcome to attend – from those who have been using AI for a while to those who haven’t used it before.
Attendees are welcome to join the session throughout the morning and a timetable for those who have registered will be circulated closer to the event.
Lauren Harvey and Caroline Whitby, from the Department of Law and Criminology, have been awarded the Exemplary Course Award for the module LC31520: Dispute Resolution in Contract and Tort
In addition to the winner, the following module achieved Highly Commended:
Panna Karlinger from the School of Education for the module ED20820: Making Sense of the Curriculum
The aim of the Exemplary Course Award, now in its ninth year, is to recognise the very best learning and teaching practices. It gives staff members the opportunity to share their work with colleagues, enhance their current modules in Blackboard, and receive feedback on to improve.
Modules are assessed across 4 areas: course design, interaction and collaboration, assessment, and learner support. The self-assessed nature of the award gives staff the opportunity to reflect on their course and enhance aspects of their module before a panel assesses each application against the rubric.
The panel and the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit would like to thank all of the applicants for the time and effort that they have put into their applications and modules this year.
We’re looking forward to receiving more applications next year and many congratulations to the recipients of this year’s award.
This month Blackboard brings us the ability to see Gradebook item statistics, being able to set assessments with no due date and some tweaks to message notifications.
Gradebook item statistics
Item statistics give insight to course members’ overall performance on a graded content. Now, instructors can select a column in the gradebook to access summary statistics for any graded item. The statistics page displays key metrics such as:
Minimum and maximum value
Range
Average
Median
Standard deviation
Variance
The number of submissions requiring grading and the distribution of grades also displays.
Image below: Access to item statistics from the Grid view.
Image below: Access to item statistics from the Gradeable Items view.
Image below: Item Statistics page.
No Due Date assessment option
Due dates are an important aspect of the teaching and learning process. In some scenarios, such as self-paced learning, an instructor may not want to apply a due date. To make the option for not having a due date more evident, we’ve added a “No due date” option for Tests and Assignments.
Image below: Test Settings panel showing the new “No due date” option.
We also updated the default due date and time to tomorrow’s date at 11:59 pm.
Image below: Test Settings panel displaying the new default due date and time.
There may be cases when the “No due date” selection conflicts with the Assessment Results settings. When this occurs, the instructor is prompted to review the settings.
Image below: A warning banner appears when the “No due date” selection conflicts with Assessment Results settings.
Instructors can navigate to the Assessment Results section in the Settings via the link in the banner.
Image below: Assessment results timing options when there is no due date.
Please note that for summative and high stakes assessment, we still advise having a due date and time. To discuss your requirements for test settings, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
Announcement indicators and mark announcements as read/unread
Announcements are an important communications channel within a course. It is important to help create awareness of new announcements and read/unread controls.
Now, there is a number indicator next to the announcement tab in the course. The indicator signals the number of unread announcements available.
Additionally, students can now mark announcements as read or unread. On the New Course Announcement pop-up, users have the option to mark the read state. Students can also mark announcements as read or unread from the Announcement page.
Image below: Number of unread Announcements next to the Announcement tab
Image below: Announcements pop-up with the option to mark as read/unread
Image below: Announcements page with the option to mark as read/unread.
Image below: Matching announcement and messages indicators for consistency
Reminder: Access the Course Activity Report and message students from within it.
The Course Activity report helps you understand how well your students are performing and how much they are interacting with your course. The Course Activity Report enables Instructors to:
Message students who are falling behind and encourage them to increase their course activity
Identify struggling students based on their overall grade, missed due dates, the number of hours they spend in your course, and the number of days since their last access
Congratulate students performing well in your course and ask them to be mentors
Customize your course alerts to identify struggling students when their overall grade drops below a specific value, they’ve missed due dates, or they haven’t accessed the course for a certain number of days
Download the table view to a CSV (comma-separated values) file to analyse the data with other tools
Download the scatter plot as a PDF or image to share information with other instructors or mentors of the course
To access the Course Activity Report select Course Activity in your course’s Analytics tab.
Image below: Accessing the Course Activity Report from the Analytics tab
Sending Messages
Instructors can select students and send them messages from Course Activity by selecting the Send message button. When you send a message to multiple students, each student will receive an individual message and will not know which other students were included.
Image below: A student selected to be contacted and the Send message button highlighted
It is possible to grade tests either by student or by question —making it easy to compare answers across the course and ensure fairness and consistency in grading. Marking by student is currently limited to non-anonymous submissions. Marking anonymous submissions will be included in a future update
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
Knight, C. (25/2/2024), AI 16 – Charlie does a course 3 (6-minute video), “Charlie is feeling a bit down this week as he considers what AI means for professional qualifications and professional bodies.”
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 recent Academic Enhancement Committee approved some changes to the annual course creation process:
Courses will be created blank with the University approved template
Course creation will always take place on the first Monday in June (this will be Monday 3rd June this year).
Some staff have asked for more information about why courses will be created blank. This blog post is designed to help explain the reasons for this decision.
Previous years’ course copy process was done using Building Blocks. Building Blocks are no longer supported by Blackboard and can’t be used (you may remember that this was one of the reasons for moving to Ultra). The Blackboard course copy tool hasn’t been updated, so we don’t have a technical way of copying courses.
The course copy workflow is easier in Ultra than it was in Original. And as we will be copying from Ultra to Ultra courses, you’ll be able to copy larger blocks of content.
Blank courses means that template updates and additional settings can be applied to courses. Blackboard has changed a lot since last summer, and there are new settings that will be useful for next year’s courses. To use these staff would need to add them to each courses manually.
Previous course copies included gradebook columns. After several years this started to get confusing for staff and made the gradebook difficult to navigate. Copying over the links for Turnitin, Panopto and Talis also has the potential for confusion – it isn’t easy to tell whether these links have been updated or not, and staff would need to check each one manually.
Some courses won’t have been created in Ultra (for example courses that only run every two years). These need to be created blank as Ultra courses anyway.
Blank course creation will also help to avoid out-of-date content being copied over as standard.
Information about how to copy content can be found on the Blackboard help site. Guidance and support will be available over the summer, but if you have any questions, please contact us on elearning@aber.ac.uk.
Equipping for Excellence: Pioneering Learning and Teaching Design.
The main strands of this year’s conference are:
Embedding employability skills across the curriculum and beyond
Harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence and other technologies to enhance learning
Creating dynamic learning activities to motivate and engage
Designing inclusive learning for all
Staff, postgraduate teaching assistants, and students are welcome to propose sessions on any topic relating to learning and teaching, especially those that focus on the incorporation and use of technology. Even if your suggestion doesn’t fit a particular strand, other topics are welcome.
We seek to encourage presenters to consider using alternative formats that reflect and suit the content of their sessions. As such, we are not specifying a standardised presentation format.
Please complete this form no later than 24 May 2024.
If you have any questions, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit at lteu@aber.ac.uk.
Vevox, our polling software, runs a series of webinars showcasing the best practices of integrating polling into learning and teaching activities.
These sessions take place online.
On 22 March at 3pm, Patrick Cadwell from Dublin City University will be showcasing how they use polling software for translation studies.
On 26 April at 3pm, Liam Bagley from Manchester Metropolitan University will be showcasing how they use polling software for real world scenario training within a health and healthy aging context.
For further information and to book a place, see Vevox’s webpage.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce the theme for our 12th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. The Learning and Teaching Conference will be taking place from Tuesday 10 – Thursday 12 September 2024. The theme and strands for this year’s conference are: Equipping for Excellence: Pioneering Learning and Teaching Design
Embedding employability skills across the curriculum and beyond
Harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence and other technologies to enhance learning
Creating dynamic learning activities to motivate and engage
Designing inclusive learning for all
Keep a look out for our forthcoming call for proposals and for booking onto the conference.
