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).
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.
