Registration for the twelfth annual Learning and Teaching conference is now open.
This year’s Learning and Teaching conference has the theme Equipping for Excellence: Pioneering Learning and Teaching Design and will be taking place between Tuesday 10 and Thursday 12 September 2024.
Staff, postgraduate teaching assistants, and students are invited to submit proposals for the 12th Annual Aberystwyth University Learning and Teaching Conference held 10-12 September 2024.
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.
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.
As part of the Blackboard Learn Ultra project, we are now turning our attention to Organisations ready for September 2024.
Organisations are Blackboard sites for non-academic purposes. They have the same functionality as a Blackboard Course and can be used to provide information, online training, and access to materials. Unlike Courses, Organisations are created with no template. Organisations have the same features and functionality as Courses.
There are 3 types of Organisations:
Departmental Organisations
Every department has got 3 departmental Organisations: 1 for Undergraduate students, 1 for Postgraduate students, and 1 for Departmental staff. These are automatically created.
Bespoke and Training Organisations
These are Organisations that have been requested by individuals. They can be created with automatic feeds, such as types of students, students on specific study schemes, or staff members in a particular department. Some of these Organisations hold training packages that we are asked to undertake.
Practice Organisations
These are individual for each staff member and have no students enrolled on them. As part of the move to Ultra, we created all staff their own Ultra practice Organisation.
As we move to Blackboard Learn Ultra for Organisations, we have worked on a new Organisation policy outlining the types of activities they can be used for as well as their retention period. This new policy was approved by Academic Enhancement Committee on 7 February and can be viewed on our webpages.
Departmental Organisations
New Ultra Departmental Organisations will be created shortly but will not be made available to students until September 2024.
All departments will have a separate Organisation for UG, PG, and Staff in their department.
These are in the form:
DEPT-[departmental letter]-UG (e.g. DEPT-N-UG)
New students and staff members will automatically feed onto the Organisation once they have activated their account. Once these Organisations are available, we will contact Departmental Directors of Learning and Teaching, Faculty Registrars, and Heads of Department to help facilitate the move to Ultra Organisations.
Bespoke and Training Organisations
These are Organisations that have been requested individually for a specific purpose. We have never removed or deleted Organisations before (unless this has been requested).
As part of this work, we will:
Remove access to all bespoke Organisations that have not been accessed in 3 years with a view to retire the Organisation.
Contact those who still have responsibility for an existing Organisation to see if they are required and facilitate the move to Ultra for these Organisations.
Practice Organisations
Staff members currently have access to two practice Organisations – one in Original and one in Ultra.
We will be retiring the Original Organisations in September 2024. Colleagues need to copy any materials they want to retain onto the Ultra version of the Organisation.
If you have any questions about Organisations, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit are excited to announce the date for the 12th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. The conference will be taking place between Tuesday 10 and Thursday 12 September 2024.
Look out for Calls for Proposals and the announcement of the conference theme. As usual, we will be updating our Learning and Teaching Conference Webpages and also our blog to keep you up-to-date with how things are progressing.
The University has a Vevox licence for all staff and students to use.
Vevox is Polling Software that allows participants to use their mobile devices to respond to questions.
In Semester 1, over 300 Vevox sessions ran, with over 10,000 participants and 1,500 polls.
In learning and teaching contexts, you can use Vevox to make your teaching more interactive, giving students the opportunity to reflect on their learning, respond to questions, provide ideas, and consolidate their understanding.
Vevox is not limited to learning and teaching activities. You can also use Vevox in meetings and outreach activities to canvas opinion, help with decision making, and give colleagues the opportunity to feedback.
There are variety of question types available:
Multiple choice
Word cloud
Text Ranking
Numeric
Rating
XY Plot
Pin on image
You can also run surveys.
The Q and A feature gives colleagues the opportunity for their attendees to ask questions and for you to respond to them live in the session.
This feature is useful for classroom assessment techniques, such as muddiest point and revising key concepts.
With the Q and A function, participants can also upvote comments so you can address questions. This useful feature can also be used for external presenters and conference activities.
You can run analyses on your polls to see participant response.
As an institution, we have several case studies. See our previous blogpost on Vevox case studies.
If Vevox is new to you, then we have a training session on 26 January at 11:00 online via Teams. You can book your place via our CPD booking page.
