Staff and students can now use the Pronunciation section of the Blackboard Profile page to record their name. They can also select the pronouns they use. For further information, see our FAQ.
Name pronunciation and pronouns available in Blackboard
Category: Virtual Learning Environment(VLE)
Welcome new staff joining Aberystwyth University, 2025-26
A warm welcome to new staff joining Aberystwyth University.
In this blogpost we aim to provide you with information related to technology in learning and teaching, our training provision, support channels, and events that we run.
All the information that you need is on our webpages.
We write a blog full of the latest updates, details on events and training sessions, and resources.
If you need to get in touch with us, you can do so using elearning@aber.ac.uk.
Introduction to E-learning Tools
Virtual Learning Environment: Blackboard
Each module has its own dedicated course in Blackboard. Students can expect to find information about the module, learning materials, and e-submission guidance, as well as links to reading lists and lecture capture.
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 and Blackboard Assignment. Turnitin provides an automatic text matching functionality. We use Blackboard Tests to run online exams.
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, we run a series of training sessions across the following strands:
- E-learning Essentials: designed for colleagues new to the university, teaching, or who would like to get a refresher. The aim of these sessions is to ensure that colleagues can meet the university’s digital learning and teaching policies.
- E-learning Enhanced: designed to build on the skills gained in our e-learning essentials series, colleagues will create an activity or assessment unique to their learning and teaching contexts.
- E-learning Excellence: designed to offer colleagues the opportunity to create exemplary learning and teaching opportunities – often unique and sector leading.
You can find details of our annual CPD programme and book your place to attend via Book a Course page.
Events
We run a range of events, including the Annual Learning and Teaching Conference and Mini-Conferences
All of these are great opportunities to meet people from across the university and discuss Learning and Teaching issues and developments.
We look forward to seeing you at a forthcoming event. In the meantime, feel free to get in touch with us via elearning@aber.ac.uk if you have any questions.
Blackboard Ally
Blackboard Ally continues to be a popular part of Blackboard with more staff and students making use of it during academic year 2024-25.
The number of downloads into alternative format more than doubled last year –over 62,000 documents were downloaded into alternative formats. And over 4000 users used this option.
Staff also made more use of the tools to fix accessibility issues in their courses – over 800 files were fixed last year (compared to 295 in 2024-25).
For the first time this year, the Blackboard Required Minimum Presence states that all Blackboard courses should have an Ally score of 70%. If you want to check your Ally score have a look at our blog post. You can also a book a place on one of the E-learning Essentials: Introduction to Blackboard Ally training courses in September.
Course Creation 2025-26
All courses for 2025-26 have been created and are available to staff in Blackboard.
This year’s course template will include some new items which we hope will help both staff and students:
- An item about Panopto recording and captions (see our caption blog post for more information)
- A link to the AberSkills web pages
- Information about AI and Unacceptable Academic Practice
Putting this information into the course template means that all students see the same information. It also means that staff don’t have to include the information when setting up their courses for the new academic year.
All AU Blackboard course sites use an agreed template with areas for core information along with agreed content for university-level policies. The course template is agreed by the Quality and Standards Committee annually. Module Coordinators have responsibility for the organisation of materials in their courses. Staff should not delete template content.
Consult the Required Minimum Presence for what should be included in the course.
If you need any assistance with Blackboard courses, see Staff Blackboard Guide.
Once courses have been created, we will run a weekly feed between the Module Management System and Blackboard to reflect any updates or changes. We have made some changes to course roles this year, and more details are available on our blog post.
Students won’t come onto courses until registration has been completed in September.
E-learning Policies Review (2025-26)
We revisit and revise all the policies relating to e-learning tools annually. All the changes are approved by the Quality and Standards Committee. The new policies are now available, and here are the details of the main changes. If you have any questions about the new policies, please get in touch with us using elearning@aber.ac.uk
Blackboard Required Minimum Presence (RMP)
The RMP outlines to staff and students the minimum standards for a Blackboard Course.
Two of the changes in the RMP are designed to improve the accessibility of course materials:
- All courses should have an Ally score of 70% or above (see the Ally Score information)
- Requirement for materials to be uploaded 1 working day in advance of the session (see the Uploading Material in Advance information)
To help staff managing courses:
- The Blackboard template will include more centrally provided information (see our Course Creation information)
E-submission Policy
The E-submission Policy outlines that all text-based word-processed work is submitted, marked, and has feedback released electronically.
To improve student access to marks and feedback:
- All marks and feedback to be returned through Blackboard (see our FAQ on how to create a column to return marks and feedback)
To improve the consistency of e-submission across the university:
- Requirement for research postgraduate work being submitted electronically include Graduate School Research Training assignments.
For staff who want to use SafeAssign as part of their Blackboard Assignments:
- Addition of information about SafeAssign
Lecture Capture Policy
The Lecture Capture Policy outlines that all transmission style presentations are recorded electronically for students to access.
The most significant change in the Lecture Capture policy is designed to improve the accessibility of recordings:
- Automatic captioning will be turned on for all recordings made after 1st September 2025 (see our blog post)
- Recommendation that summaries are made for sessions that are not recorded
To help staff managing courses:
- The Blackboard template will include centrally provided information about Panopto, including a statement that recording will take place, information about what is and isn’t recording, and information about the quality of captions (see our Course Creation information).
Organisation Policy
All departments make use of their Organisations to provide access to key administrative information. To make sure that materials are accessible and up to date, we have developed an Organisation RMP, based on the Blackboard RMP. This does not apply to staff Practice Courses.
All other Organisations should include:
- Contact Information.
- Information about the purpose of the Organisation and how participants are expected to use it.
- Content is organised clearly, and all materials are named clearly and consistently.
- Content is up to date.
- Clear instructions for participants on what to do with materials
- All materials must be as accessible as possible.
Ally Score
For the first time, our Blackboard Required Minimum Presence includes an Ally score. This recognises and builds on the work that staff have already done to make sure that teaching materials are as accessible as possible.
The RMP sets an Ally score of 70% – the good news for both staff and students is that 87% of all 2024-25 courses have a score of 70%. And overall, the Ally score for 2024-25 is 72.5% which is 3% higher than last year.
Making Blackboard content as accessible as possible benefits all our students. Having materials in a format that students can use easily means that they can focus on their learning rather than struggling with inaccessible formats. The choices that staff make to design accessible materials, as well as the Ally Alternative Formative tools, help us to make sure that all students can engage with their studies.
It’s particularly important here at AU, as the latest HERA data show that over 28% of our students have a declared disability (compared to 16.7% nationally).
To check your course Ally score, have a look at the guidance on the Blackboard help pages. And you can find out more about designing accessible materials with our online training materials.
Ally will give you help and guidance to address common issues. One of the most common issues at AU is handwritten documents that have been scanned. We’ve written some guidance to help staff who do use this type of material. And if you wanted to use scanned articles in your course, contact the Digitisation Service.
Uploading Materials in Advance
Giving access to teaching materials in advance of a session makes them more accessible for students. It gives students a chance to prepare before attending so that they can concentrate on the content of the lecture when they attend. For sessions that include discussion or group work it can allow students to consider how they may engage with these activities. A research paper from Oxford Brookes provides information about the value of making materials available in advance,
Feedback from students over the last few years has asked for this change, and the issue was discussed at Academic Board in summer 2024. And it’s standard in a number of other universities, for example at Edinburgh University and Oxford Brookes.
AU has decided that teaching materials should be released at least one working day before the event takes place:
- For a session taking place on Thursday, materials should be available by Wednesday morning
- For a session taking place on Monday, materials should be available by the previous Friday morning
You can use the Blackboard release conditions to make sure that materials are available at the right time. If you already make all your materials available at the start of term, you are welcome to continue with this.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day
Providing accessible learning materials helps everyone to learn. Using some basic tools and making some small changes to your documents can make a big difference to students with disabilities.
Today (15th May) is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, so it’s a good day to see what you can do to improve the accessibility of materials in Blackboard.
You can access tools in both Blackboard and Microsoft Office to help you create accessible documents:
If you have 5 minutes today, look at the Ally Course Accessibility Report in one of your Blackboard courses. The section on content with the easiest issues to fix is a good place to start. This will guide you through some quick changes you can make straightaway.
Or you may find some things that you want to improve over the summer, as part of the annual course creation process. One of the biggest issues we see in Blackboard courses is non-OCR scanned documents. A good way to make sure that scanned documents are accessible is to speak to our Digitisation Team who can advise on scanning book chapters and journal articles.
Here at AU nearly 30% of our student population has a declared disability, so any improvements you make to the accessibility of your content will make a big impact on how students engage with them.
Find out more about Global Accessibility Awareness Day (this is an external site and not available in Welsh).
Handwriting guidance
We know that some staff use handwritten documents in lectures – these may be for working through calculations, or to demonstrate a process, or to draw a graph. When you upload these to Blackboard, they tend to have a low Ally score as they aren’t accessible for some users. Here are some ways that you can make these types of documents more accessible.
When you are writing in lectures make sure to use clear and consistent handwriting – try not to use cursive (joined up) text, and make sure you write at a good size. Using a felt tip pen such as a Sharpie will also help with contrast. If you can provide a typed version, add this to Blackboard along with the handwritten version. If this isn’t possible you may want to signpost students to another source for the equivalent material (for example a textbook, Panopto recording with captions, YouTube video etc).
When you do scan materials, you can use the university printers, as they all have an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) setting. This means that the text and images on your scan can be selected by a student. This helps with screen readers, as well as Blackboard Ally – Ally won’t create an MP3 file from a non-OCR document (although it will try and create an OCR version, but this doesn’t always work well). Make sure that you scan the correct orientation. Once you have done a scan, have a go at copying and pasting your text into Word so you can see what students might see or hear.
The PDF24 tool (available in the AU Company Portal) can also convert a non-OCR document into an OCR version. How successful this is will very much depend on the contents of your original document.
Students can make use of Google Lens to read documents in Blackboard and lens does seem to do a good job at reading out handwritten text. Have a look at guidance from Guide Dogs for more information. There are also more ideas for students on the Perkins website. If you do, make use of Google Lens:
- Don’t use it to look at things that contain personal information about individuals
- Have a look at the Google Privacy policy for more information about how your data is used
Blackboard Course Creation 2025-26
We will be creating the new blank Blackboard courses for 2025-26 on Monday 2nd June 2025.
Once courses have been created, we will run a weekly feed between the Module Management System and Blackboard to reflect any updates or changes. Students won’t come onto courses until registration has been completed in September.
If you want to know more about why we create blank courses at the start of each academic year, do take a look at our blog post on Course Creation from 2024.
Update on Blackboard Assignment and SafeAssign Pilot
Since September 2024, Information Services (IS) have been running a pilot of Blackboard Assignment and SafeAssign to evaluate the use of SafeAssign. This is part of our commitment to making sure that we are using the best tools available. The purpose of this blogpost is to summarise the outcomes of our pilot.
18 staff volunteered to use Blackboard Assignment for submission and marking, and SafeAssign for text-matching. These staff were based in seven different departments and taught a range of UG and PG modules. All staff were offered training and provided with written guidance on using both Blackboard Assignment and SafeAssign. The training sessions provided an opportunity for staff to discuss different assessment scenarios with E-learning staff and to ascertain the suitability for Blackboard Assignment and SafeAssign. We also sent out surveys to staff on their use of e-marking and feedback tools.
A big thanks to all the staff and students involved in the pilot and all those who completed the surveys.
Outcome
AU will continue to use our current suite of e-assessment tools:
- Turnitin
- Blackboard Assignment
- Blackboard Tests
- Assessed Blackboard Tools
The pilot allowed us to reflect on the requirements for an e-assessment solution. It was clear from this that we need a combination of different solutions for different assessment requirements.
We would recommend Blackboard Assignment be used for:
- Multi-part assignments
- A Welsh language interface for marking and submission
- Panopto submissions
One of the main purposes of the pilot was to investigate the efficacy of SafeAssign and its functionality as a text matching solution. Over the next few months, with input from stakeholders, we will decide whether we leave SafeAssign switched on and we’ll communicate this decision after Easter.
Survey Results
As well as taking part in training, staff in the pilot were asked to complete a survey before and after using Blackboard Assignment and SafeAssign. The first survey was about their use of Turnitin, and the second one was about their experiences of using Assignment and SafeAssign.
We also sent out the first survey to all staff asking for their feedback on Turnitin, and use of Turnitin tools that have no equivalent in SafeAssign. This survey was designed to help us understand whether any of the features in Turnitin are essential to the AU marking and feedback process. Overall, 71 staff took part in these first surveys.
Some of the most frequently used and important features in Turnitin are not currently available in Blackboard and SafeAssign. Two of these were ranked as regularly used:
- Timed and automatic release of marks and feedback (78% of respondents)
- Seeing whether students have viewed marks (60% of respondents)
Three features ranked as essential from an e-assessment solution:
- Timed release of marks (66% of respondents)
- Submitting on behalf of students (51% of respondents)
- Revealing individual names whilst marking anonymously (51% of respondents)
The key finding from the survey was that timed release of marks is considered both important and used frequently by staff, making it an essential requirement for any AU marking and feedback system.
The second survey was sent to just the pilot group and asked them about their use of the tools in Blackboard Assignment and SafeAssign, as well as their recommendations for changing submission and marking tools. 6 staff responded to this survey. They generally found it easy to use Blackboard and SafeAssign and didn’t report many problems for either them or their students. However, they highlighted limitations in functionality, which meant that some of the pilot group didn’t end up using Blackboard and SafeAssign at all:
- Issues navigating the marking interface
- File size upload limit (SafeAssign will only check files less than 10Mb)
- Lack of automated marks release
Anthology Ideas Exchange
Anthology Ideas Exchange allows all Blackboard institutions to request and vote on functionality enhancements to the product. As a result of training sessions and staff feedback, we made 21 suggestions via the Anthology Ideas Exchange. These were a mix of Turnitin functionality that doesn’t have an equivalent in SafeAssign, as well as changes to existing SafeAssign functionality. Some examples include:
| Enhancement Request | Ideas Exchange | Status |
| Schedule grade posting | 3052 | Future consideration |
| See if students have viewed feedback | 1612 | Planning to implement in the next 6+ months |
| Anonymous marking switched off before grades released | 1685 | Follow up |
| Annotate comment library export / import | 1751 | Future consideration |
| Submit on behalf of students | 164 | Planning to implement but this will initially only be to submit in draft attempts made by students. |
| Scheduled Grade Posting | 3052 | Future consideration |
| Increase file size limit for SafeAssign | 5711 136 | Future consideration |
If you have suggestions or changes for any part of Blackboard on that you would like us to add to the Ideas Exchange, please email elearning@aber.ac.uk. You may also be interested in the new section in our monthly update blog which highlights any Ideas Exchange ideas that we have added or voted for which have been added to Blackboard.
Accommodations and Exceptions
Blackboard has some options that you can use make sure students get any individual assessment arrangements they may need.
Accommodations are applied to a student on a course level and will apply to any Blackboard Assignment or Test in the course. However, it does not apply to Turnitin assignments. Accommodations are good for students who have an ongoing arrangement that does not vary between assignments on the same course.
Students can have a Due Date accommodation or Time Limit Accommodation.
With a Dute Date Accommodation, work will never be marked as late in gradebook, although you are able to see when it was submitted. A Time Limit Accommodation gives the student extra time on any assessment with a timer.
Students with accommodations have a flag which is visible only to staff in the Grade Book, Roster, and on the Assessment. If a student with an accommodation is part of a group assignment, all students in the group will have the accommodation applied for that assignment.
Exceptions are made for students at a course level for individual assignments. Again, they do not apply to Turnitin assignments. Exceptions are good for students who may have a deadline extension for an individual piece of work. Exceptions can be used for additional attempts, rescheduled due dates, or extended access. Exceptions can only be applied to non-anonymous submissions – this means that they are useful for multiple choice tests that don’t require manual marking. They are visible only to staff through the Gradebook or Test Submission page.
All the information about Accommodations and Exceptions is available on the Blackboard Support site.