Category: Virtual Learning Environment(VLE)

Course Creation 2025-26

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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)

WordPress User [kaw] Accessibility, Blackboard, E-submission, Panopto, Training and Support, Turnitin, Virtual Learning Environment(VLE) Leave a comment

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:

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:

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

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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

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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

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Blackboard Logo

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

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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:  

  1. Timed and automatic release of marks and feedback (78% of respondents)  
  1. Seeing whether students have viewed marks (60% of respondents)  

Three features ranked as essential from an e-assessment solution:  

  1. Timed release of marks (66% of respondents)  
  1. Submitting on behalf of students (51% of respondents)  
  1. 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

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Blackboard Logo - Blackboard by Anthology

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.

Ally AI Alt Text Assistant

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If you are stuck for ideas for the alternative text on your images, the Ally AI Alt Text Assistant can give you suggestions.

Screenshot of the ALT Text screen with Auto-generate description highlighted

You should always check the suggestion provided by the AI Assistant as it may not always provide an accurate description of the image. You can edit any the AI generated suggestions.

Have a look at the accessible learning material guidance to find out why Alt Text is important. The Poet training tool provides guidance on how and when to use Alt Text as well as online tools to practice creating useful Alt text for images (please note that the Poet web site is an external site and is not available in Welsh).

Blackboard Assignment with SafeAssign Pilot

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A big thank you to all the staff who have signed up to the Blackboard Assignment with SafeAssign pilot. There’s still time to volunteer if you are interested (email elearning@aber.ac.uk).

Since the last blog post, we have made SafeAssign available for use in Blackboard Assignments. We have also held the first two training sessions. More training sessions will be organised for semester one – visit the Events and Training page to book a place.

We’ve been exploring some of the options for marking in Blackboard Assignment that staff might find useful:

  1. Delegated marking allows staff to mark essays by group. If you divide up marking in your modules between several members of staff, then delegated marking will help you.
  2. Parallel marking allows two staff to mark a piece of work independently without seeing each other’s comments or marks.
  3. Anonymous comments. By default, marking comments in Blackboard Assignment contain the name of the staff member marking. If this is not appropriate for your marking, you can make them anonymous (see below).

Please note that deleted Blackboard assignments can be recovered for up to 30 days after deletion. If you need deleted assignments restored, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk as soon as possible, providing details of module and the assignment name.

Anonymous Comments

When you create a comment, click on the anonymous marking icon

Screenshot of a Blackboard Assignment comment box with the anonymous marking icon highlighted

You can edit existing comments to make them anonymous by clicking on the comment.  Click on the three dots in the top right-hand corner of the comment and then click on Anonymous.

Screenshot of a Blackboard Assignment comment box with the three dots and Anonymous option highlighted

For further information on the marking tools available in Blackboard Assignments, see Blackboard Annotate Guidance.

Supporting your students

To help your students use Blackboard Assignment to submit their work and find their feedback, we strongly recommend that you include the following FAQs in Assessment and Feedback Learning Module in your Blackboard course:

SafeAssign

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We are looking for volunteers to evaluate an alternative to Turnitin for text-matching and marking. This alternative is called SafeAssign. SafeAssign is part of Blackboard.

Training will be provided, and support will be available during the semester from e-learning support staff. We will ask everyone taking part in the evaluation to complete a short online survey before and after the trial. We will also invite you to a meeting at the end of the semester to share your experiences. 

Please read the information below about this evaluation which will help you decide whether you would like to take part. If you want more information or would like to volunteer, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk

What is SafeAssign?

SafeAssign is a text-matching tool provided by Blackboard. It is included in our main Blackboard licence. SafeAssign is an alternative to Turnitin.

Why are we evaluating it?

AU used SafeAssign before we started using Turnitin. As part of our commitment to making sure that we are using the best tools available, we would like to evaluate whether SafeAssign would be appropriate for text-matching. This evaluation has been approved by the Academic Enhancement Committee (May 2024).

What will be different if I use SafeAssign instead of Turnitin?

Some aspects of marking and submission will be changed:

  • New submission, marking and text-matching tools
  • A different database of assignments and sources for text-matching. This database won’t include previous years’ submissions from AU.

You’ll see some new features:

  • Text highlighting
  • Welsh language interface for submission and marking
  • View and retrieve previous student submissions

And some features will not be available:

  • You will need to post marks manually rather setting a release date and time. However, this will give you a little more control over when marks are made available to students.
  • Submit on behalf of students
  • Switch off anonymous marking for individual students
  • Rubrics and quick marks can’t be exported from Turnitin, although similar tools are available in Blackboard.

Full details of the features of both Turnitin and SafeAssign are available.

Welsh language

All elements of this evaluation will be available in both Welsh and English. This includes help guides, training, support, and evaluation. SafeAssign itself is translated as part of Anthology’s commitment to Welsh. Welsh language text is including in the text-matching service.

What will I have to do if I volunteer?

We strongly recommend that modules included in the evaluation use SafeAssign use the tool for all e-submissions during the duration of the module. This helps both staff and students become familiar with SafeAssign rather than swapping between multiple submission and marking tools.

All staff involved in the submission, marking and moderation for the module will have to use SafeAssign (note that this includes external examiners). If you volunteer a module that has multiple staff marking on it, please make sure that they are all aware, and have all received appropriate training (see below). We will provide all external examiners with information about the evaluation.

We strongly recommend that you provide a practice submission for your students before their first assignment. This will make sure that they know how to use SafeAssign correctly. We will provide guides and FAQs for students which you can link to from the Assessment and Feedback area of your Blackboard course.

What training and support will be available?

We will publish guides and FAQs for staff and students on the LTEU website. We will also run training sessions on how to create submission points and how to mark. Full support will be available to staff and students throughout the term.

How will it impact my students?

Submission will be different for students; one advantage of using SafeAssign is that students will get an email receipt. Students will also see their feedback in a slightly different way. We will provide full support for students.

Can I talk to someone about this?

Contact elearning@aber.ac.uk for information and to discuss whether SafeAssign is appropriate for your module.