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.
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.
The Digital Education Group in partnership with the Careers Service are pleased to announce the theme for our next Mini Conference.
Building on the success of last year’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, we will be revisiting the topic of employability with the theme Employability and the Inclusive Curriculum.
The mini conference will take place online on the morning of Tuesday 8 April.
The full line up will be confirmed in due course but we are pleased to announce that the Careers Service will be launching their new toolkit for embedding employability in the curriculum.
Bookings for the event are already open. You can book your place online.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit are excited to announce the date for the 13th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. The conference will be taking place between Tuesday 8 and Thursday 10 July 2025.
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.
On Wednesday 18 December, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit hosted an online mini conference taking a look at Blackboard Exemplary Practice. With over 40 attendees, and 5 sessions, it was one of our biggest mini conferences.
We were delighted to welcome Carol Chatten from Edge Hill University and Robert Farmer from Northampton University to showcase their award-winning courses.
Carol’s course is designed for medical professionals completing their placements. Robert’s course introduced undergraduates to critical thinking skills. Both courses have been awarded Blackboard’s Exemplary Course Programme Award.
We were then joined by Dom Gore and Richard Gibbons from Anthology (Blackboard). They gave an overview of the new developments that are coming in Blackboard, as well as introducing attendees to the new AI Conversations tool. We have enabled AI Conversations and have updated our Blackboard AI Design Assistant training. Take a look at our blogpost for further information.
Finally, Law and Criminology’s Lauren Harvey, and School of Education’s Panna Karlinger gave tours of their exemplary courses. Both submitted applications to last year’s Exemplary Course Award. The deadline for 2025 is Friday 31 January 2025. Further information is available on our blogpost.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce its final event of the year.
On Wednesday 18 December (10:00-14:30), we will be hosting an online Mini Conference looking at Exemplary Blackboard Presence.
We’re delighted to be joined by two external presenters.
Carol Chatten is from the University of Edge Hill and will be showcasing their Medical and Education Course. This course recently won Blackboard’s ECP.
Robert Farmer from the University Northampton will be sharing their course on Critical Thinking which also won Blackboard’s ECP.
Also joining us to share their winning courses are School of Education’s Panna Karlinger and Law and Criminology’s Lauren Harvey. Both entered our internal Exemplary Course Award last year.
We’re hoping that this event will inspire attendees and give colleagues ideas as to how they can develop their courses ahead of Semester 2.
We’re also using this event as a springboard to start thinking about an enhanced Blackboard presence.
And finally, we’ll be sharing the latest AI Design Assistant tool that we’re looking to enable in January: AI Conversations. This builds on the other AI Design Assistant tools that we already have enabled in Blackboard.
Colleagues can book for this half day event via the online booking system and a Teams invitation will be sent out.
We’re the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit. Based in Information Services, we work with staff across the university to support and develop learning and teaching. We run a wide range of activities to do this.
Each module has its own dedicated course in Blackboard. These courses contain online content, such as reading lists, and teaching staff details. This is the main point of information for your students for any given module, including access to lecture recordings and assignment submission. The University has a Blackboard Required Minimum Presence policy for all modules. Please see our staff guide for further information.
Lecture Capture: Panopto
When teaching in person, be aware that all lectures (that is, teaching where the focus is on information being transmitted from staff to students) should be recorded using Panopto, our Lecture Capture software. See details of our Lecture Capture Policy.
E-submission: Turnitin and Blackboard Assignment
At Aberystwyth University, students must submit all text-based and word-processed work electronically as outlined in the University’s E-submission policy. For this, we use our e-submission tools: Turnitin andBlackboard Assignment. Turnitin provides an automatic text matching functionality.
Polling tool: Vevox
Vevox is Aberystwyth University’s polling tool. Polling can be used in learning and teaching activities as well as meetings to make the session interactive and collaborative with many different possibilities for use.
Resources and further help
We have a number of Guides and FAQs to help you use our software.
Training Provision
To support all staff with their teaching, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit runs a series of training sessions. These include:
practical sessions to familiarise staff with the different elements of the VLE,
the Active Learning agenda,
assessment and feedback,
accessibility,
presentation skills, and more.
artificial intelligence
We also offer a range of events and training programmes. You can find details of our annual CPD programme and book your place to attend via our Book a Course page. We deliver some sessions ourselves, while others are delivered by university staff whose teaching features good practice in those areas. Look for (L&T) in the session title.
Events
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit runs a range of events, including the Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, Mini-Conferences, Mini-Fests, and Academy Forums. All of these are great opportunities to meet people from across the university and discuss Learning and Teaching issues and developments.
There are many highlights to this year’s programme and we are grateful to colleagues for sharing their innovative teaching practices with us.
The conference starts with an online keynote and workshop from Professor Lisa Taylor (University of East Anglia). Professor Taylor will introduce how employability can be embedded in the curriculum before highlighting her pioneering work around work-based online placements.
In the subsequent workshop, colleagues will be given the opportunity to apply these principles to their own disciplines. Professor Taylor’s abstract provides further information.
Building on Professor Taylor’s session, colleagues from across the University will be sharing their approaches to embedding employability in the curriculum, culminating in a workshop from Bev Herring on curriculum design for employability development.
