Month: October 2025

Weekly Resource Roundup – 27/10/2025

WordPress User [mhj] Weekly Resource Roundup Leave a comment

October

November

December

Resources and publications

Other

  • Call for proposals (open dates) Unfiltered by EmpowerED: A Podcast Series where educators share unedited stories of inspiration and challenge
  • Call for proposals (open dates) Future Teacher Webinars
  • Webinar series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinars free open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.

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: BSky, X.com.

Turnitin App Retirement

WordPress User [jbw] E-submission, Technical Updates, Turnitin Leave a comment

Turnitin has announced the retirement of their Turnitin app at the end of the year, December 2025.

The Feedback Studio iPad app will be retired and no longer available. Instructors can continue to access Feedback Studio as usual through Blackboard. This includes mobile devices and tablets.

Turnitin are working on developing a New Standard Assignment, so instructors can review and provide feedback on student work from tablets without needing a separate app. We will release comms regarding this new service in due course.

If you have any questions or concerns about this, please don’t hesitate to contact us (elearning@aber.ac.uk).

Merged Courses – our most frequently asked topic in September

WordPress User [kaw] Blackboard Leave a comment
Policies and Information

We’ve had a look at all the queries that came into the elearning@aber.ac.uk inbox over September to see what the most common query was. And the answer is … Merged Courses.

So, here’s some useful information about merging courses which can help to answer some of your queries:

  1. A merge links two or more courses together in Blackboard. It is an effective way of dealing with separate courses that have the same content, so you don’t have to upload materials to more than one course. More information is available on the blog. Some cases where this might be useful are
    • Modules are taught the same content but there’s a module available for 2nd and 3rd years.
    • Modules that bring together different degree schemes and have different module IDs, e.g. dissertation modules.
  2. Courses aren’t merged automatically so you will either need to merge them via our new Module Partners tool or by emailing elearning@aber.ac.uk . If your courses were merged last year, you need to merge them again for 2025-26. If you want to check whether your courses have already been merged, you can use Module Partners (or email elearning@aber.ac.uk)  
  3. Students will see the module code and title of whichever course they are registered on. If you find that students can’t see content in courses that you think are merged, please check in Module Partners or email elearning@aber.ac.uk to check.

We’ve also had questions about enrolments – information about how enrolments work is available in our Access to Blackboard Courses FAQ.

Note: we produced the summary of our most common support queries using Microsoft Copilot.

Uploading Offline Panopto recordings 

WordPress User [kaw] Panopto Leave a comment
Policies and Information

Some staff will have made offline Panopto recordings because of the impact of an Amazon Web Services service disruption on Panopto on Monday 20th October.

All offline recordings will need to be uploaded to the Panopto servers before they can be made available to students. Instructions are available in our FAQ How do I manually upload Panopto recordings via the Panopto Recorder program? You can check teaching room availability from myadmin.aber.ac.uk > AAA/ATO (Aberystwyth Timetable Online)

We recommend that you upload any offline recordings with the next 7 days. If you have any questions, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk  

Join us for Fix Your Content Day 2025

WordPress User [kaw] Accessibility, Blackboard Leave a comment
Inclusivity and Accessibility banner

On November 18, Aberystwyth University will join institutions worldwide for Fix Your Content Day 2025, hosted by Anthology. This 24-hour competition is part of our ongoing commitment to inclusive education.

We’ll be hosting a drop-in on 18th November between 2pm and 4pm in B23 Llandinam. E-learning Staff will be available to answer questions and help you use Ally (tea and biscuits also provided).

Together, we’ll aim to fix as many accessibility issues and course files as possible using Anthology® Ally. Every fix—big or small—contributes to a more inclusive learning environment for all students.

How you can help:

  • Review your courses for red and orange indicators
  • Focus on quick wins like adding image descriptions or improving Microsoft Word documents
  • Start fixing on November 18 and keep things going throughout the day
  • Aim for 100%, but improvement is what counts!

For more information on how to fix files using Anthology Ally, have a look at our FAQ on Ally.

Weekly Resource Roundup – 13/10/2025

WordPress User [mhj] Weekly Resource Roundup Leave a comment

October

November

December

Resources and publications

Other

  • Call for proposals (open dates) Unfiltered by EmpowerED: A Podcast Series where educators share unedited stories of inspiration and challenge
  • Call for proposals (open dates) Future Teacher Webinars
  • Webinar series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinars free open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.

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: BSky, X.com.

Save the Date: 14th Annual Education and Student Experience Conference

WordPress User [jbw] Annual Education and Student Experience Conference 2026, Conference Leave a comment

We’re pleased to announce the dates for Aberystwyth University’s 14th annual Education and Student Experience Conference.

We will be hosting the conference between Tuesday 8 – Thursday 10 September 2026.

We will start work on planning and establishing themes and guest speakers for the conference.

Conference themes, calls for proposals, and external speakers will be announced in the new year. Keep an eye on our webpages and our blog for further information.

If there is a particular topic that you would like the conference to address, do get in touch via elearning@aber.ac.uk.

Call for Proposals: Mini Conference: Generative AI

WordPress User [jbw] Case Studies, Conference, Generative AI, Mini Conference 2025 Generative AI Leave a comment

On Thursday 18 December, the Digital Education Team will be hosting their final event of the year, a mini conference on Generative AI.

We are looking for calls for proposals from staff and students for this event.

If you are interested in contributing, please complete this form by Friday 7 November.

We are interested in sessions around the following themes:

  • Embedding generative AI skills in the curriculum 
  • Generative AI as an employability skill
  • Generative AI use in assessment
  • Generative AI and maintaining academic integrity
  • Generative AI for learning activities

Booking for the event is already open. Please book your place online.

If you have any questions, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.

Collaborative Documents in Blackboard

WordPress User [jbw] Blackboard, Technical Updates, Ultra Leave a comment
Policies and Information

There is currently an intermittent issue with collaborative documents in Blackboard which is preventing the documents being linked to a class.

If you receive the error warning:

image of Course initialization failed message

Follow this workaround:

  • Create a document in your OneDrive
  • Click on the Share button in the top right hand corner:
Screenshot of a collaborative document with the Share button highlighted
  • Click on the settings cog and choose People in Aberystwyth University
  • Change More Settings to Can Edit
  • Click Apply
  • Choose Copy Link
  • Paste the link into Blackboard

We apologise for the inconvenience caused. We’re working with Blackboard and Microsoft to resolve this issue.

What’s new in Blackboard October 2025

WordPress User [ksg2] Blackboard, Monthly Update, Ultra Leave a comment
Blog Banner

In the October update, we want to draw your attention to a new feature with the Learning Object Repository. There is also an important and highly requested update to Fill in the Blank style question, and tagging questions in question banks to help colleagues with question organisation.

Updates to the Learning Object Repository

We were very excited about the launch of the Learning Object Repository. We have already made use of it for the Blackboard standardised template and for Generative AI statements.

This month’s update sees the ability for us to upload files to the Learning Object Repository which colleagues can then copy into their courses.

We can stipulate the availability of the content, so that it can be available or unavailable to students.

See our webpage on the Learning Object Repository for further information.

Updates to the Fill in the Blank Question for Students

The way that Fill in the Blank Questions displays has been updated. This is an enhancement that colleagues have requested so we are pleased to this available.

 Fill in the blank questions now display the blanks inline with the surrounding text, whether the question is presented as a sentence, paragraph, or table. We also added hidden ARIA labels to blanks to improve screen reader accessibility.

Image 1: Before this update, the blanks appeared below the question.

Image 2: After this update, the blanks appear in-line with the question.

Tag questions with metadata in tests and question banks

Instructors can now tag questions with metadata when creating or editing questions in tests, forms, and banks. 

Instructors

Questions can have multiple tags of the same type. Metadata is visible during question creation/editing and can be used to filter questions when reusing or adding to pools. Metadata is not visible to students during test-taking or review.

Supported metadata types include:

  • Category
  • Topics
  • Levels of Difficulty
  • Keywords

Image 1: Instructors can create and apply a tag to questions.

Image 2: Tags appear as filters in the question bank.

If you have any enhancements to request from Blackboard, please get in touch with us via elearning@aber.ac.uk.