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.
At the 13th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, Professor Anwen Jones announced a fund of £10,000 for colleagues to bid against to a maximum of £2,000 for projects related to the conference theme:
Compassionate engagement and assessment
Health and wellbeing in a learning and teaching context
Accessibility and inclusion (inclusive learning and teaching design)
The University is providing half of the total funding, with the remainder coming from Medr, the Welsh universities regulator.
We are looking for a wide range of projects across all areas of our community which would make a difference to our education and student experience.
Over 180 colleagues across the University made use of Vevox, our polling tool, last year.
Close to 4000 polls were created across nearly 1000 sessions, with over 27,000 participants.
Vevox allows your participants to use their mobile devices to respond to a series of questions.
You can use this for many activities in the classroom:
Q and A
Knowledge checks
Quizzes
Opinion gathering
Decision making
Team games
Revision activities
Mind mapping
Resource creating
And so much more…
With our institutional licence, all members of the community can make use of Vevox. Students can use it in their presentations; colleagues can use it in their meetings. Last year, we were really pleased that Vevox was used in the University welcome talks which will continue again this year.
We’ll also be running our enhanced training session on designing learning activities using polling software in November. See this and our other enhanced sessions and book online.
A warm welcome to new students joining us and those who are returning to study at Aberystwyth University.
In this blogpost, we will outline the changes that have been made to your digital learning environment, Blackboard, ready for the start of the academic year 2025-26
If you need help using Blackboard, see our Student Guide which contains all kinds of useful information.
We’ve also got FAQs available for the other tools that we support, including Turnitin for e-submission and Panopto for lecture capture.
Updated Template
All courses have been created this year using a slightly different template.
Module Information
Item about Lecture Capture (Panopto) under Module Information
AberSkills
Assessment and Feedback
Submission Guidance has been updated to include information on academic integrity and unacceptable practice and using Generative AI in your assessments.
Availability of Content
The Blackboard Required Minimum Presence, which is the policy that outlines to staff and students the minimum amount of content on a course, has been updated to request that teaching materials are uploaded at least one day before the session.
Automatic Captions in Panopto
Captions will now be added to all lecture recordings automatically in 2025-26 making them even more accessible. The quality and reliability of automatic captioning varies due to the language and subject matter of the recording.
Students should be aware that the captioning is not 100% accurate. For clarification on captions, students should speak to their lecturer.
Name pronunciation and pronouns available in Blackboard
You can now add your name pronunciation and pronouns to your Blackboard profile. For further information, see our FAQ.
Accessible content
We are working to improve the accessibility of content in your Blackboard courses. This year the Required Minimum Presence has stipulated a requirement for a minimum accessibility score. This means that content is as compatible with Blackboard Ally as possible.
Blackboard Organisations
Organisations are like Courses in Blackboard but they are not modules that students take. Things like training and departmental information can be found in Organisations. For the first time, we have a Required Minimum Presence for Organisations which outlines to staff and students what they can expect to find as a minimum.
If you have any questions about using Blackboard, please contact us on elearning@aber.ac.uk.
A warm welcome to new staff joining Aberystwyth University.
In this blogpost we aim to provide you with information related to technology in learning and teaching, our training provision, support channels, and events that we run.
All the information that you need is on our webpages.
We write a blog full of the latest updates, details on events and training sessions, and resources.
Each module has its own dedicated course in Blackboard. Students can expect to find information about the module, learning materials, and e-submission guidance, as well as links to reading lists and lecture capture.
Please see our staff guide for further information.
Lecture Capture: Panopto
When teaching in person, be aware that all lectures (that is, teaching where the focus is on information being transmitted from staff to students) should be recorded using Panopto, our Lecture Capture software.
At Aberystwyth University, students must submit all text-based and word-processed work electronically as outlined in the University’s E-submission policy.
For this, we use our e-submission tools: Turnitin andBlackboard Assignment. Turnitin provides an automatic text matching functionality. We use Blackboard Tests to run online exams.
Polling can be used in learning and teaching activities as well as meetings to make the session interactive and collaborative with many different possibilities for use.
Resources and further help
We have a number of Guides and FAQs to help you use our software.
Training Provision
To support all staff with their teaching, we run a series of training sessions across the following strands:
E-learning Essentials: designed for colleagues new to the university, teaching, or who would like to get a refresher. The aim of these sessions is to ensure that colleagues can meet the university’s digital learning and teaching policies.
E-learning Enhanced: designed to build on the skills gained in our e-learning essentials series, colleagues will create an activity or assessment unique to their learning and teaching contexts.
E-learning Excellence: designed to offer colleagues the opportunity to create exemplary learning and teaching opportunities – often unique and sector leading.
You can find details of our annual CPD programme and book your place to attend via Book a Course page.
All of these are great opportunities to meet people from across the university and discuss Learning and Teaching issues and developments.
We look forward to seeing you at a forthcoming event. In the meantime, feel free to get in touch with us via elearning@aber.ac.uk if you have any questions.
We are working on a series of case studies to share practices of using Generative AI in Learning and Teaching Activities.
In this series of blogposts, colleagues who are using Generative AI in their teaching, will share how they went about designing these activities.
We’re delighted to welcome Dr Gareth Hoskins (tgh@aber.ac.uk) from DGES in this blogpost.
Case Study # 3: Classroom evaluation of Generative AI in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences
What is the activity?
This was a classroom evaluation of an AI-generated summary of the scientific concept ‘flashbulb memory’ as part of a lecture on ‘individual memory’ in the 3rd year human geography/sociology module GS37920 Memory Cultures: heritage, identity and power.
I prompted ChatGPT with the instruction: “Create a 200-word summary of the concept of flashbulb memory”, created a screengrab of the resulting text and embedded this within my lecture slides giving the class 3 minutes to read it and discuss it on their tables asking specifically for responses to the questions:
What biases does the content create?
Whose interests are served?
Where are the sources coming from?
What were the outcomes of the activity?
Discussion didn’t touch too much on the questions I posed but focused more on the ChatGPT content where students were much more critical of the content than I had anticipated. They noted the dull tone, the repetition, uncertainty surrounding facts presented the vague approach and general lack of specificity. Those students showed a surprising degree of GenAI literacy which was conveyed to the class as a whole. During the discussion, the students became more aware of the utility of GenAI tools, more comfortable speaking about how they use it and might go on to use it, and how its limitations and weaknesses might affect the content it generates.
I developed the exercise using UCL guidance webpage ‘Designing Assessments for an AI-enabled world’ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/generative-ai-hub/designing-assessments-ai-enabled-world and re-designed my exam questions on the module to remove generic appraisals of famous academics’ contributions to various disciplinary debates and substitute with hypothetical scenario-based questions that were much more applied.
How was the activity introduced to the students?
My intension was to acknowledge that we exist in an AI-enabled world which creates opportunities but also problems for learning. I also used the exercise to introduce the risks relating to assessment and outline my own strategy for assessing on this module using real-life problem-based seen-exam questions requiring use of higher-level skills of evaluation and critical thinking applied to “module-only” content and recent academic publications which GenAI essay-writing tools struggle to access.
How did it help with their learning?
The activity helped students become more familiar with the use GenAI as a “research assistant” (for creating outlines and locating sources) and created an environment for open discussion about the limitations of AI-generated content in terms of vagueness, hallucination, lack of understanding, and lack of access to in-house module content on Blackboard or up-to-date research (articles published in the last two years).
How will you develop this activity in the future?
I would flag other systems including DeepSeek, Gemini, Microsoft Co-Pilot and Claude AI as well as discuss their origins, pros and cons, and crucially caution about environmental and intellectual property consequences.
Keep a lookout for our next blogpost on Generative AI in Learning and Teaching case studies.
