To complement the keynote sessions from Blackboard, we’re delighted to welcome colleagues from Bangor University: Bethan Wyn Jones and Alan Thomas.
View our full programme and book your place online.
One thing that we were keen on having as part of the conference is to hear about colleagues’ experience of moving over to Blackboard Ultra. Bangor have been using Ultra since 2020.
Please see below for their biographies:
We’re delighted to welcome a number of external speakers at this year’s Learning and Teaching Conference.
View our full programme and book your place online.
On Tuesday 4 July, we’ll be joined in person by colleagues from Blackboard.
Colleagues will have the opportunity to hear about future developments, work on and enhance their blackboard ultra modules, and provide feedback to the company on enhancements.
Please see below for our speakers’ biographies.
The Annual Learning and Teaching Conference is fast approaching (4-6 July). We’re delighted to have a couple of stands during the second day of the conference, 5 July.
Located in the Think Tank, colleagues can speak to the Tell us Now team about upcoming changes to the MEQ process and Student Services about the plans for teaching and learning through a trauma-informed lens.
Our full programme is available on our webpages and you can book your place online.
One of the great new enhancements that we’ve got in Blackboard Ultra is the ability to embed collaborative documents.
For those of us who did much of their teaching online during the Covid pandemic, you will recall us espousing the benefits of loading a collaborative document in the chat. We’ve now been working to enable this on our Blackboard Courses and we are pleased to say that they are available for you to use on your 2023-24 courses.
This means that your students will be able to collaborate together outside the classroom, on Blackboard in their own time. There are 3 types of document available for students to collaborate on:
We’re going to be using the collab docs for blog and wiki alternatives. But, if you want to maybe get your students to mind map, generate ideas, or build on each other’s notes, take a look at the collab docs. You could also use it to get students to sign up to groups. You can use the group feature in Ultra courses to limit the item to a specific student or group of students.
Want to know how to do it? Take a look at Blackboard’s guidance on Microsoft OneDrive and collaborative documents.
In preparation for our move to Ultra, the University’s Blackboard Required Minimum Presence has been updated and approved by Academic Enhancement Committee.
We revisit all our policies annually, but the move to Blackboard Ultra has meant that we have spent longer preparing the RMP.
The full RMP 2023-24 is now available on our webpages.
Some of the changes to the RMP are listed below:
We have now started our Departmental Ultra training programme and hope to see you over the coming weeks. If you can’t attend your session then we are running a series of centrally organised sessions for all staff to join.
If you’ve got any questions about Ultra, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
We are looking forward to welcoming you to the 11th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, which is just over a month away, 4-6 July.
This year’s conference theme, Transformative Teaching: Creating Opportunities for Learning, aims to reflect the commitment that AU staff have to enhance the student learning experience.
We’re pleased to confirm our full programme. We will have 2 days in person (Tuesday 4 July and Wednesday 5 July) and 1 day online (Thursday 6 July).
We look forward to seeing you at the conference, and please remember to register for the conference by completing this online form.
If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce our keynotes for this year’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference (4-6 July 2023).
Booking for the conference is already open. Book your place today.
We will be joined by colleagues from Blackboard and Bangor University to ensure that we are well prepared for our move to Ultra.
There will be opportunities to:
We’ll be announcing the rest of our programme shortly, but you can expect sessions on Artificial Intelligence, Creative Assessment Design, and developing resilience in students.
We’re excited to see you in person on 4 and 5 July and online on 6 July.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce our first external speaker as part of this year’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference.
Taking place between 4 and 6 July, bookings for the conference are already open.
Michael Webb from Jisc will discuss Artificial Intelligence in the session Navigating the Opportunities and Challenges of AI in Education.
Since the introduction of Chat GPT, colleagues have been finding ways in which the power of artificial intelligence might be used in Higher Education alongside the challenges that it poses.
Jisc’s national centre for artificial intelligence in tertiary education aims to help institutions adopt AI in a responsible and ethical way. We are working across the sector to help institutions navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by generative AI. In this session we’ll review the strengths and weakness of generative AI, the practices and approaches we see emerging, and take a look at how technologies and practices are developing as ever more generative AI applications are released.
Michael Webb is the director of technology and analytics at Jisc – the UK digital, data and technology agency focused on tertiary education, research, and innovation. He is co-lead of Jisc’s national centre for AI in tertiary education, supporting the responsible and effective adoption of artificial intelligence across the tertiary education sector. As well as artificial intelligence, he has worked on projects around the internet of things, virtual reality, and learning analytics. Before joining Jisc, Michael worked in the higher education sector, leading IT and learning technology.
This session will be of interest for colleagues who would like to add AI into their teaching and learning activities, as well as explore ways in which it can be used productively.
Our full programme will be announced on our webpages in due course. Aberystwyth University has been working on its own guidance for Artificial Intelligence. Take a look at ourConsiderations for Generative AI Detection blogpost for further information.
On Wednesday 10 May, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit welcomed Dr James Wood from Bangor University to give some ideas around student feedback design and engagement.
The recording from the session is on Panopto and the PowerPoint slides can be downloaded below:
In the session, Dr Wood outlined
The next big event for LTEU is our annual Learning and Teaching Conference which is taking place between 4 and 6 July. Bookings for this are already open.
If you have any external speakers that you would like LTEU to invite to next year’s series then please email lteu@aber.ac.uk with your suggestion.
The Blackboard Ultra Courses for the Academic Year 2023-24 have now been created blank using the pre-agreed University template.
The early creation of Ultra Courses is the next phase in our move to Blackboard Ultra and prepares us for training over the coming months.
To access your courses for next academic year, click on Upcoming Courses:
You will see any courses that you are listed as an instructor on as well as courses that you might support as departmental administrators.
If you don’t see a course that you are meant to be teaching on then check with your departmental administrator – it might be that you haven’t been added to the module record in the Module Management System. We are updating this feed every Tuesday morning so you can expect to see your modules on a Tuesday afternoon once the update has gone through.
The courses are currently private and will be made available on 1 September 2023. Students won’t appear on your courses until they have completed their registration.
Departmental Directors of Learning and Teaching have been contacted to arrange a training session for your department.
If you want to get started on setting up your courses, you might want to:
The next phase of the move to Ultra is focusing on training and making sure that our support materials are up-to-date. See our overview of training for further information.
If you have any questions about Blackboard Ultra, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).