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.
Season’s greetings from all of us at the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit.
A big congratulations to those of you who completed the Teaching for Postgraduate at AU qualification. Congratulations to PGCTHE participants who attended Graduation back in July as well as those who submitted their final coursework this month. Also, congratulations to those who achieved the Associate, Fellow or Senior Fellowship status through the ARCHE scheme, as well as our Exemplary Course Award Winners.
This year, we’ve really enjoyed working with you on topics such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Supervisory Framework, active learning and other aspects of learning design, and of course, Blackboard Learn Ultra.
Thank you to our external speakers who have joined us over the year, and all of the speakers at this year’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference in July, which was our biggest one yet. Thanks as well to colleagues from other departments who have run sessions for us and to all of you who have attended.
We hope you have a restful break, and we look forward to seeing you in 2024 – a Happy New Year to you all!
For colleagues who might be new to the University, colleagues who are returning from research leave and other periods of absence, and those who want a refresher, we are running our E-learning Essentials: Introduction to Blackboard Learn Ultra in January.
We’ve got our Blackboard Learn Ultra guide for staff on our webpages as well as a playlist to talk you through setting up your Blackboard Learn Ultra Module.
On 31 December 2023, Blackboard is retiring Building Blocks as an integration solution for third party tools and they will no longer function in Blackboard. This will not affect Blackboard Learn Ultra Courses.
Whilst we made use of Building Blocks in Blackboard Learn Original (courses which ran before 2023-24), your Blackboard Learn Ultra Courses do not use them.
Building Blocks are installed software packages used to integrate tools such as Panopto and Turnitin (among many others) into Blackboard. Over the past two years we have upgraded these tools to LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) integrations. The retiring of Building Blocks was one of the drivers for moving to Blackboard Learn Ultra.
LTIs offer us access to regular updates, bugs fixes, and ongoing developments and enhancements designed for Blackboard Ultra. Building Blocks required manual upgrades and received infrequent updates as this form of integration approached retirement.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit has done extensive testing to ensure that this change will have as minimal an impact as possible on current Blackboard Learn Ultra courses.
We will undertake the work of disabling Building Blocks on Tuesday 12 December during the regular IS Tuesday Morning Maintenance window in preparation for their final retirement.
