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Exemplary Course Award Winner 2024-25

WordPress User [jbw] Blackboard, Exemplary Course Award Leave a comment
Exemplary Course Award

We are delighted to announce the winner of this year’s annual Exemplary Course Award.

Congratulations to Mari Dunning from Lifelong Learning for the award-winning course: XM18210: Writing Women: Feminism in Poetry and Prose.

The panel noted exemplary practice in the courses’ clear introduction and design, strong support and guidance, active and engaging participatory activities, and creative tasks. This was all achieved through an accessible and enthusiastic online learning environment.

Many congratulations to our highly commended and commended recipients:

  • Law & Criminology’s Dr Kathy Hampson for the course LC37120: Critical and Radical Criminology
  • Lifelong Learning’s Henrietta Tremlett for the course XM15710: Autobiographical Writing
  • Computer Science’s Dr Yasir Saleem Shaikh for the course CSM0120: Programming for Scientists

These 3 courses demonstrated some excellent practices, including: clear and accessible structures, effective use of weekly quizzes, engaging and varied activities, clear marking and feedback processes, creative assessment design, and well-designed learning objectives communicated with clarity.

The award is assessed based on a rubric across four areas:

  • Course Design
  • Interaction and Collaboration
  • Assessment
  • Learner Support

The courses were of such a high standard, and we look forward to sharing their practices with you in due course.

Many congratulations to this year’s well-deserved recipients.

Panopto: Automatic Speech Recognition Captioning

WordPress User [jbw] Accessibility, Panopto, Technical Updates Leave a comment

We are pleased to announce that Panopto Automatic Speech Recognition Captioning was approved at the recent Quality and Standards Committee.

This means that for the academic year 2025-26 and beyond, automatic captions will be applied to your Panopto recordings.

Viewers see the captions appearing at the bottom of the screen or can download a transcript:

Screenshot showing a Panopto recording with captions

Whilst captions will appear automatically next academic year, colleagues can already apply automatic captions to all the recordings in a Panopto folder. Consult Panopto’s guidance on how to do this.

We have been working to enable automatic captions for several years, so we welcome this development. As part of this work, we have taken mitigating steps to address some of the challenges and concerns, including:

  • Inaccuracies of automatic captions
  • Clear expectations for staff and students
  • Managing multi-language courses

Automatic Captions are applied to all recordings on the site once we enable this feature. The default language that will be applied to module folders is English. Modules delivered 100% through the medium of Welsh will have their folder settings manually updated to generate Automatic Captions in Welsh.

We have also undertaken an Equality Impact Assessment to address some of the challenges posed by Automatic Captioning which is available by request (elearning@aber.ac.uk).

To facilitate the enabling of automatic captioning, the Lecture Capture policy has been updated. We review all of our policies (Lecture Capture, Blackboard Required Minimum Presence, and E-submission) annually. We will release further communications regarding these updates in due course.

We will now start work on updating Panopto to enable Automatic Speech Recognition captioning for 2025-26.

Blackboard Achievements

WordPress User [jbw] Blackboard, Technical Updates, Uncategorised Leave a comment
Screenshot of the Achievements tab and associated badges in a Blackboard course

We have enabled a new feature on Blackboard called Achievements.

Achievements allow instructors to link student achievement to badges to help recognise their accomplishment or proficiency.

See Blackboard Help for an overview of achievements. The help site will give you advice on the types of activities they can be used for as well as how to set them up.

To create a badge, you need to associate it with a Gradebook column – such as a test, assignment, or Turnitin. You can specify a certain level that needs to be attained to generate the badge. 

Students can then view their achievements on the course or organisation from the Achievements tab. We’d welcome working with colleagues to explore how achievements could be used at a scheme or department level.

Annual Learning and Teaching Conference: Registration now open

WordPress User [jbw] Annual Learning and Teaching Conference 2025, Conference, Uncategorised Leave a comment

Registration for the thirteenth annual Learning and Teaching conference is now open.

This year’s Learning and Teaching conference has the theme Innovative Pathways to Empowering Learners: Adapting, Engaging, and Thriving and will be taking place between Tuesday 8 and Thursday 10 July 2025.

You can register for the conference online.

Mini Conference Keynote announcement: Dr Aranee Manoharan

WordPress User [jbw] Conference, Mini Conference 2025 Employability Leave a comment

Inclusive Curriculum 2.0: Bridging Inclusion and Employability Aims through the Curriculum

Dr Manoharan

We are delighted to confirm our keynote for our mini conference on Tuesday 8 April.

Dr Aranee Manoharan from Kings College London will be joining us.

Please see below for an overview of Aranee’s keynote and a biography. You can book your place for the mini conference online and we will be announcing the full programme in due course.

If you have got any questions regarding this event, please contact the conference organisers on elearning@aber.ac.uk.

In this keynote, Aranee will introduce an approach to inclusive curriculum design that supports all students to develop the knowledge, skills, and experiences required to successfully navigate the rigours of a VUCA 21st century. The presentation will explore the key principles of inclusive curriculum development that supports student and graduate outcomes, before sharing how employability can be integrated effectively through subject teaching & learning – including using a programmatic approach to curriculum design and high impact pedagogies and assessments. The session will share a range of tools that Aranee has developed through her work with academic and professional services teams in this area; all of which can also be found in the QAA-funded toolkit for Inclusive Employability Development through the Curriculum that she led with colleagues at City University and University of London.

Dr Aranee Manoharan, PhD, SFHEA, FRSA

Aranee is Senior Associate Director for Careers & Employability at King’s College London. With experience across the areas of teaching, student experience, and educational development, as well as EDI and governance, she specialises in taking a whole student lifecycle approach to improving student outcomes. An Advance HE Senior Fellow, she specialises in inclusive approaches to curriculum design to support student and graduate outcomes and has significant experience working with academic teams to facilitate real-world learning, using high-impact pedagogies and assessments, delivered in collaboration with community and industry partners.

A committed advocate for equity and inclusion, Aranee serves on a number of advisory groups, including the Institute for Student Employers (ISE) EDI Working Group; Royal Society of Biology HUBS Awarding Gap Network; Advance HE’s Race Equality Charter Governance Committee; and as a Board Director for AGCAS, where she leads the social mobility, widening participation, and regional inequality portfolio. Aranee is also the Director of AM Coaching & Consulting, a consultancy that supports organisations to establish inclusive working, learning, and research cultures.

Creating an inclusive approach to learning and teaching during Ramadan

WordPress User [jbw] Uncategorised Leave a comment

As Ramadan starts, we wanted to highlight a guide for educators that has been led by Oxford Brookes’ Professor Louise Taylor (along with several other collaborators).

During this time, those observing Ramadan, will abstain from food and drink during daylight hours.

The full guide can be accessed and downloaded from this webpage.

The guide outlines the potential impact of Ramadan on students’ learning and offers some adaptions that may want to be considered. Oxford Brookes have produced a 7-minute video of students sharing their experience of Ramadan. The guide draws on surveys from HE professionals to provide an evidence-based approach and offers 6 ways in which we could adopt more inclusive learning:

  1. Acknowledge Ramadan
  2. Avoid assumptions and ask
  3. Adjust assessment timings
  4. Offer asynchronous learning
  5. Raise awareness and celebrate
  6. Be inclusive and make sustainable change

The guide concludes that its key message places importance on initiating discussions with Muslim students.

As a community, we hope to build on this work for next year, using this guidance as a starting point.

We are passionate about inclusive education practices and would love to showcase them at the forthcoming Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. If you adopt inclusive practices in your teaching, then do consider submitting a proposal for the conference.

Call for Proposals: Learning and Teaching Conference 2025

WordPress User [jbw] Annual Learning and Teaching Conference 2025, Conference Leave a comment

We are now inviting proposals for the 13th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, Tuesday 8-Thursday 10 July 2025.

Submit and view the call for proposals online. 

The theme for this year’s conference is:

Innovative Pathways to Empowering Learners: Adapting, Engaging, and Thriving

The main strands of this year’s conference are:

  • Adaptable assessment design
  • Student engagement and autonomous learning
  • Community building
  • Technologies to enhance learning
  • Online learning

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 8 April 2025.

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

13th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference: Theme Announcement

WordPress User [jbw] Annual Learning and Teaching Conference 2025, Conference, Events and Networks Leave a comment

We are pleased to announce the theme of the 13th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, taking place between 8 and 10 July 2025.

The theme is: “Innovative Pathways to Empowering Learners: Adapting, Engaging, and Thriving”.

The conference will have the following strands:

  • Adaptable assessment design
  • Student engagement and autonomous learning
  • Community building
  • Technologies to enhance learning
  • Online learning

Each year, we speak to our stakeholder group and other members of the University to establish topics that colleagues will find useful.

The first strand of adaptable assessment design brings together a piece of work being undertaken by colleagues in Student Services, which foregrounds flexible approaches to assessment design, assessments with multiple formats, and authentic assessment design.

Student engagement and instilling autonomous learning remains to be a key challenge for colleagues. Under this strand, we’re interested in strategies for instilling autonomy in learning, ways in which learning can be scaffolded, and the embedding of skills for learning and the graduate workplace.

Our third strand of community building seeks to highlight the work of wellbeing in the curriculum and to consider more trauma-informed ways of working, how online learning communities are created, and the use of learning analytics. Central to all these themes is inclusive pedagogies.

Under the strand technologies to enhance learning we will be interested to hear about positive case studies and uses of incorporating AI into the classroom, advanced and exemplary uses of Blackboard Ultra, and good teaching practice in the digital age.

Our final strand speaks to online learning speaks to the work of the Aber Online Learning Project in partnership with HEP, transitioning on campus to online teaching, and engagement strategies for online learning.

We will be opening the Call for Proposals and conference booking shortly.

If you have got any questions, please contact the conference organisers on elearning@aber.ac.uk.

Vevox Updates

WordPress User [jbw] Polling Software, Technical Updates, Vevox Leave a comment
Screenshot of Numeric question with Word Cloud output

Vevox, the University’s preferred polling solution, has some great new features from its September 2024 and December 2024 release.  

For colleagues unfamiliar with Vevox, it can be used to make your teaching more interactive, and to help decision making in meetings. Participants use mobile devices to engage in real-time polling, but there are also options for asynchronous Surveys and Q & A boards.

All these updates are available on this YouTube recording and via these release notes:

1. Q and A labels

Session hosts can define labels that are now visible and usable by participants. This means that participants can optionally tag their Q&A messages with a  pre-defined label. For example, you may wish to have a label for Assessment to allow students to link their questions to a tag.

2. Compare poll results in your session

This is a useful activity to measure the impact of a teaching session. Ask students one question at the start of the session to gauge their level of understanding and then ask them the same question at the end of the session to see if their understanding has changed. See the Vevox update for instructions on how to achieve this.

3. Downvoting options

By default, the Q and A board allows participants to upvote questions. This means that you can order questions by those which the majority of participants want to ask. Vevox has introduced a Downvote setting which you can toggle on to allow your participants to downvote questions. You can change these settings in the Q and A setting interface.

4. Alternate result display

Responses to MCQ poll questions can now be displayed in different ways. You can use the traditional bar graph but you can now choose to display your output as a pie chart. You can change the view in real time by having the Vevox admin panel open on one screen in the lecture and having the presenter window projected.

5. Number cloud question release

The number type poll now gives instructors the option to display how the output is shown with a new Word Cloud style interface. You can choose to have this as an output from the poll question interface.

6. Text walls formatting

Results for the answer style question now show in a more streamlined fashion when publishing the results. Rather than showing the output in full, the first couple of sentences display. The instructor can click on the comments they want to highlight and it will show the full response.

7. PowerPoint real time results

The PowerPoint integration has been updated to be able to show WordCloud, Pie Chart, and Number Cloud results live. Further information on using the Vevox PowerPoint integration is available on their webpage.

8. Rich text options for question formatting

Bold, italics and underline are now options in the question formatting.

9. Attendance tracking

For identified polling, you can run attendance information from the data reports. You can then see when participants joined the session and let the session.

10. Custom profanity filters

As account administrators, we can add words to the custom profanity filter. This will be applied to polls, surveys, and q and a features. If you have a word that you would like included in the profanity filter, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.

Further information and support is available on our webpages: Polling Tool  : Information Services , Aberystwyth University.

Previous updates and case studies are available on our blog.