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:
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
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.
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.
We have not specified a Learning Materials folder owing to the two-level of folder restrictions in Ultra
Colleagues have the option to create a structure that meets their needs.
The Assessment and Feedback folder remains the same as before and is pre-populated with:
Guidance for students on submitting their work and finding their feedback.
Regulation on Unacceptable Academic Practice
Link to the Referencing and Plagiarism LibGuide
Link to Past Exam Papers
The Aspire Reading List link should be on the content page of the module and no more than 6 folder levels down. If you have questions about your reading lists, please contact your Subject Librarians.
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 ourfull 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).
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:
Learn all about the benefits of moving to Ultra
Hear about some exciting new developments that will help enhance your teachingListen to colleagues from Bangor about the lessons that they’ve learned from their move
Take a look at what excellent means with Ultra courses
Attend a workshop to help enhance your modules to ensure that they are the very best that they can be for September
Give your feedback on Ultra to product developers to help it meet our needs
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.
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.
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:
The changes to the feedback NSS questions for 2023
The purpose of feedback
The move away from feedback transmission to one of action
Barriers to student feedback engagement
Screencasting your feedback
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:
In summer 2022 we moved to a new version of Turnitin. As support for our previous version of Turnitin has now ceased, the historical version (known as Turnitin Building Block) will be retired on 31 August 2023.
This means that any marked assignments will no longer be accessible to staff and students.
Staff should contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk) if they still need to access Turnitin assignments in the Building Block for marking purposes.
Even though access will be removed, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit will still be able to request marked assignments via Turnitin support. If you require this after 31 August 2023, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
It’s been a little while since we gave you a progress report on our move to Blackboard Ultra. We’ve been working hard to prepare for the start of our training programme and making sure that our integrations are working.
Technical Update
We have been focusing on our Course Creation process. To help colleagues with the move to Ultra, we are creating courses for next academic year much earlier this year.
This will also help with our training as colleagues will be preparing their live Ultra course.
Our integrations have also taken a lot of work to set up and get working:
Panopto: Panopto has been moved to an API connector ready for Ultra Courses.
Talis Aspire: Talis Aspire LTI is now enabled. We have been working with colleagues in Academic Engagement to ensure that this is as smooth as possible.
Turnitin: Work on moving Turnitin to a LTI connector was completed in summer 2022, and no additional changes to Turnitin are required for the move to Ultra Courses.
Microsoft Teams meetings: We will move to the Teams LTI in summer 2023. This tool will be for scheduling Teams meetings.
These are existing tools but one of the benefits of moving to Ultra is the introduction of Office 365 LTI integration. This allows you to upload documents from your OneDrive straight into Blackboard as well as offering students the opportunity to collaborate on a document together. For those of you who have been following our progress on our blog, you will see that this collaborative tool forms the basis of our Wiki solution.
Training Update
Our E-learning Essentials: Introduction to Blackboard Ultra training session has now been designed and is ready for staff departmental training sessions.
We have communicated with all Departmental Directors of Learning and Teaching to start arranging your departmental training session. If you are unable to make your scheduled session then we will be running them centrally.
As Blackboard Ultra Courses have a completely different approach to organising and arranging content, our Required Minimum Presence has been re-written. Keep a look out for our updated RMP.
Guidance Materials
We have been working on rationalising and preparing our guidance materials, including our FAQs. One change you’ll notice once we’re in Ultra Courses is that our FAQs will link directly to Blackboard help materials. These materials are available bilingually in Welsh and English.
Annual Learning and Teaching Conference
Our Annual Learning and Teaching Conference is taking place between 4 and 6 July. A key strand of the conference will be the Blackboard Ultra. Keep an eye on our blogposts as we announce our keynote speakers. A reminder that our Call for Proposals closes on 5 May – you can submit a proposal using our online Call for Proposals form.
On 28 March, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit hosted their first mini conference of the year in person.
The mini conference’s theme was Virtual Reality. The conference materials are now available on our webpages.
The conference started with a keynote by Chris Rees who is the Executive Head of Digital Creativity and Learning Unit at University of Wales Trinity St David’s. Chris gave an overview of how UWTSD have been using two newly created immersive rooms (Swansea and Cardiff), with activities ranging from virtual reality gym training through to architectural walk throughs and health and safety training.
The conference then shifted to hearing how colleagues at AU are currently using VR in their learning and teaching. Amanda Jones and Bleddyn Lewis gave an insight into how the Healthcare Education Centre is using Wales’ Virtual Hospital. Education’s Steve Atherton makes use of VR in several modules, including placing students in different education contexts – from refugee camps through to Montessori education settings. After lunch, Helen Miles and Andra Jones (Computer Science) and Rebecca Zerk (Dewis Choice Project / Law and Criminology) ran a workshop outlining the challenges and benefits to VR. Participants also got the opportunity to sample the Dewis choice project using VR headsets.
What emerged from the event is that lots of colleagues are using VR in their learning and teaching. We’re looking at creating a space for colleagues to come together to discuss their approaches to VR. We’ve set up a Teams site. If you’re interested in Virtual Reality and would like to be added to the Teams site, email the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (lteu@aber.ac.uk)
