E-learning Training Series: Semester 1, 2025-26

We are delighted to announce our training series for the forthcoming semester.

All training can be booked online using your Aberystwyth username and password. Our training booking system is now automated, so you will receive your calendar invitation within an hour into your calendar. Please join these sessions from your Outlook calendar.

If you have any questions, please contact us: elearning@aber.ac.uk.

As usual, our training sessions are grouped into 3 series:

  • 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.

In addition to the usual offerings, we also wanted to highlight the new sessions that we have introduced for 2025-26:

New sessions for 2025

E-learning Essentials

Using Microsoft Co-pilot for Learning and Teaching Activities

This session will introduce colleagues to Generative AI and offer the opportunity to think about ways in which you can incorporate Generative AI into your learning and teaching practice.

You can book your place on all the other sessions in this E-learning Essentials series via this link.

A reminder that all Essentials sessions are strongly recommended for any new members of staff in your department.

E-learning Enhanced

Become a Blackboard Document Pro

Blackboard Documents have had a complete overhaul in Ultra. This 30-minute pro session gives an overview of the new features and allows you to give it a go in your course.  

Blackboard Interactive Tools

We’ve combined our Discussions and Journals session into one. We’ll go through activity design for our interactive tools to help maximise student engagement.

Measuring and Increasing student engagement using Blackboard Tools

We will look at the analytical tools available in your Blackboard course to help monitor student engagement. We’ll use this to tailor messaging as well as creating other activities such as knowledge checks and learning module progression to help keep your students engaged with their learning.

Peer Assessment with Turnitin

One of the features of Turnitin is PeerMark which allows you to create peer assessment opportunities for your students. This is great to allow students to provide formative feedback on each other’s work.

Using the advanced features of Panopto

Want to spruce up your recordings? This session will showcase different ways in which you can use Panopto: from inserting quizzes mid recording, to give students the opportunity to get creative and use Panopto themselves. This session is great for those adopting a flipped classroom approach or who want to make use of Panopto beyond Lecture Capture.

Other sessions include the Blackboard AI Design Assistant and Advanced Vevox polling software design.

You can book your place on all the other sessions in this E-learning Enhanced series via this link.

E-learning Excellence

We’ve designed 4 new workshops for colleagues based on the 4 areas of the Exemplary Course Award. Looking at each aspect, colleagues will reflect on how their own courses can be developed.

The 4 sessions are:

Exemplary Course Design

Exemplary Assessment Design

Exemplary Interaction and Collaboration

Exemplary Learner Support

You can book your place on all the other sessions in this E-learning Excellence series via this link. Other sessions include Submitting an Exemplary Course Award.

If there are any other training topics that you’d like us to consider for Semester 2, please contact us.

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:

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.

Welcome to new staff joining Aberystwyth University

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.

All the information that you need is on the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit webpages. Our Supporting your Teaching webpages will help you with various teaching solutions.

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 one of two email addresses:

lteu@aber.ac.uk (for pedagogical and design questions, or to arrange a consultation) or

elearning@aber.ac.uk (for technical queries regarding our e-learning tools listed below).

Read More

Blackboard Learn Ultra Gradebook

In this blogpost we’ll be taking a specific look at the Gradebook feature in Blackboard Learn Ultra. The Gradebook is the new name for Grade Centre.

It is used to hold all student marks on a Blackboard Course.

The Gradebook is located on every course from the top menu.

Ultra Course with Gradebook highlighted

Students enrolled on the module automatically appear in the Gradebook.

When you get into the gradebook, you can toggle your view.

Default is a list of markable items on one tab and students on another:

List view of the Gradebook

You can toggle your view so that you can see the markable items and the students in one view.

Grid view of Gradebook]

Read More

Turnitin Building Block retired

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.

Students should download any historical assignments (from pre-academic year 2022-23) and save them.

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).  

Launch of Turnitin AI writing and ChatGPT Detection Capability

Turnitin icon

On 4 April Turnitin will be launching their new AI writing and ChatGPT detection capability which will be added to the Similarity Report.  Before colleagues start using the AI detector, we thought that we would caveat it with the following quotations from authoritative professional bodies in the sector.

Jisc notes: “AI detectors cannot prove conclusively that text was written by AI.”

— Michael Webb (17/3/2023), AI writing detectors – concepts and considerations, Jisc National Centre for AI

The QAA advises: “Be cautious in your use of tools that claim to detect text generated by AI and advise staff of the institutional position. The output from these tools is unverified and there is evidence that some text generated by AI evades detection. In addition, students may not have given permission to upload their work to these tools or agreed how their data will be stored.”

— QAA (31/1/2023), The rise of artificial intelligence software and potential risks for academic integrity: briefing paper for higher education providers

Please also see the Guidance for Staff compiled by the Generative AI Working Group led by Mary Jacob. The guide outlines suggestions for how we can explain our existing assessments to students in ways that will discourage unacceptable academic practice with AI, and also red flags to consider when marking.

You can read more about the Turnitin AI enhancement in this Turnitin blog post.

For guidance on how to use this tool, take a look at Turnitin’s:

Turnitin also published an AI writing resource page to support educators with teaching resources and to report its progress in developing AI writing detection features.

If you have any questions about using Turnitin’s AI writing and ChatGPT detection capability or interpreting the results, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).