We are pleased to announce our next Mini Conference taking place on Tuesday 14 April 2026.
In collaboration with the Department of Psychology, Student Accessibility and Wellbeing, and the Digital Education Team (Student Journey), we are looking for 15-minute presentations on the following topics:
Navigating university life as a neurodivergent student
Inclusive teaching and learning practices
The role of support services in fostering neurodivergent success
Please indicate in the proposal if you are comfortable taking questions for 5 minutes at the end of your presentation. Please submit your proposal before Friday 6 March.
Now that semester 1 teaching has finished and we are moving towards the assessment period, we wanted to write a blogpost to highlight the analytical reports that are available in Blackboard.
These reports can be used to monitor Blackboard usage and engagement and help you to re-enforce messages to students.
Progress Summary
By default, the student progress summary is enabled on all content items in Blackboard courses.
This allows Blackboard to record when content has been opened, and students are able to mark tasks as complete.
To access the report, click on the … to the right of the content item and select Student Progress:
There you’ll see the progress report:
From this page, you can also filter students by those who have unopened the content, those who have started it, and those who have marked it as complete.
If you apply a filter, you can message the highlighted students using the message button.
Test question analysis
Using Blackboard tests? You can run a report to analyse the questions with:
Average score
Possible questions
Completed attempts
Average time spent on the course
In addition to this, it also allows you to re-examine questions with the Discrimination report. This indicates how well questions differentiate between students across all levels.
The difficulty report indicates which questions are easy, medium and hard.
To view the report (once the test has ended), navigate to the test and select Question Analysis:
The report will run and you will receive an email once it has completed:
Discussion analysis
Making use of Discussions in your Blackboard course? Then you can run a report for the overview which will give you the total number of active students, the average number of posts per students, as well as the average wordcount for blogposts.
You can click on Student Activity for the overview:
You can use the message feature to contact students who haven’t engaged, as well as see the top participants, and the responses with the most replies.
Course Analytics
The Course Analytics page allows you to flag alert settings for students based on the amount of time spent in the course and the dates since their last access.
Choose Analytics from the top menu:
You have two views:
Student hours in the course against their overall mark
Student list view showing overall mark against missed due dates, hours in course, and days since last access
Thank you very much to our presenters from the Departments of Computer Science, Geography and Earth Sciences, and the School of Literature and Languages.
And a special thank you to our external speakers: James Fern and Richard Mason from Bath University who gave us a brilliant overview of the two-lane approach to assessment design that Bath is currently working through.
We look forward to welcoming you to one of our upcoming events.
In November, we took part in Blackboard Ally Fix your Content Day, making the content of our Virtual Learning Environment even more accessible. We placed 3rd in the UK and 60th on the international leaderboard.
We’re planning our next Mini Conference in collaboration with colleagues in Student Journey for April 2026. Further information will be made available soon.
And our 14th Education and Student Experience Conference will take place between 8-10 September 2026. Keep an eye out for updates, call for proposals, and external speaker announcements.
We are delighted to confirm our programme for our final event of the year on Thursday 18 December.
Our Mini Conference on Generative AI is taking place between 09:30 and 15:30. We are running this as a hybrid event. For those wanting to join in person, it will take place in the Visualisation Centre building, VC, 0.06.
We are delighted to confirm our external speakers:
James Fern and Richard Mason will be joining us to share the 2-lane approach to Generative AI Assessment Design that has been adopted at Bath University.
In addition to James and Richard, we have an exciting line up:
Hannah Dee, Amanda Clare and Clive King from the Department of Computer Science will be presenting.
Emma Butler-Way, Tom Holt, Rhys Dafydd Jones, Jayesh Mukherjee, and Stephen Tooth will be joining us from the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences.
Jennifer Wood and Alex Mangold from Modern Languages will also be presenting.
Joy Cadwallader and colleagues from Academic Engagement will also be joining.
Earlier this year, Professor Anwen Jones announced the Education and Student Experience Award Fund at the 13th Annual Education and Student Experience Conference.
We are delighted to confirm this year’s winners and the 4 enhancement projects that they will be leading over the coming year:
Dr Elizabeth New, History and Welsh History: The Aber Medieval Physic Garden
Dr Emma Sheppard, Geography and Earth Sciences: Developing a Sustainable Student Gear Hub
Dr Kate Woodward, Theatre, Film and Television Studies: Inclusivity and Accessibility in Assessment Design and Feedback Practices
Dr Scott Tompsett, Department of Life Sciences: Pulling together – supporting teamwork assessment more effectively
Thank you to all applicants for submitting a proposal and to the awards panel.
There will be opportunities to hear more about these projects at next year’s annual Education and Student Experience Conference.
To assist colleagues, we have a training session available on Wednesday 10 December at 10:10. Places can be booked online.
In addition to this, we are running 4 E-learning Excellence training sessions (based on the 4 assessment criteria). These sessions are available to all colleagues, whether they are considering submitting an application or not. Places can be booked online.
If you have any questions, please contact the Digital Education Group (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
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).
