This year’s Learning and Teaching conference has the theme Innovative Pathways to Empowering Learners: Adapting, Engaging, and Thriving and will be taking place between Tuesday 8 and Thursday 10 July 2025.
You can register for the conference online.
We are delighted to confirm our keynote for our mini conference on Tuesday 8 April.
Dr Aranee Manoharan from Kings College London will be joining us.
Please see below for an overview of Aranee’s keynote and a biography. You can book your place for the mini conference online and we will be announcing the full programme in due course.
If you have got any questions regarding this event, please contact the conference organisers on elearning@aber.ac.uk.
In this keynote, Aranee will introduce an approach to inclusive curriculum design that supports all students to develop the knowledge, skills, and experiences required to successfully navigate the rigours of a VUCA 21st century. The presentation will explore the key principles of inclusive curriculum development that supports student and graduate outcomes, before sharing how employability can be integrated effectively through subject teaching & learning – including using a programmatic approach to curriculum design and high impact pedagogies and assessments. The session will share a range of tools that Aranee has developed through her work with academic and professional services teams in this area; all of which can also be found in the QAA-funded toolkit for Inclusive Employability Development through the Curriculum that she led with colleagues at City University and University of London.
Dr Aranee Manoharan, PhD, SFHEA, FRSA
Aranee is Senior Associate Director for Careers & Employability at King’s College London. With experience across the areas of teaching, student experience, and educational development, as well as EDI and governance, she specialises in taking a whole student lifecycle approach to improving student outcomes. An Advance HE Senior Fellow, she specialises in inclusive approaches to curriculum design to support student and graduate outcomes and has significant experience working with academic teams to facilitate real-world learning, using high-impact pedagogies and assessments, delivered in collaboration with community and industry partners.
A committed advocate for equity and inclusion, Aranee serves on a number of advisory groups, including the Institute for Student Employers (ISE) EDI Working Group; Royal Society of Biology HUBS Awarding Gap Network; Advance HE’s Race Equality Charter Governance Committee; and as a Board Director for AGCAS, where she leads the social mobility, widening participation, and regional inequality portfolio. Aranee is also the Director of AM Coaching & Consulting, a consultancy that supports organisations to establish inclusive working, learning, and research cultures.
What’s new in Blackboard March 2025
In the March update, Blackboard has changed how release conditions work with due dates and included the ability to copy banners from one course to another. Other updates include enhancements to Tests, Assignments, & Gradebook, and Discussions.
When instructors customise release conditions for a content item, the due date for the item is now included with the date and time fields.
Image 1: The due date of a content item now displays after the date and time fields
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This means that due dates must be between the release conditions of Date/Time that have been applied.
Instructors now have the option to copy banners between courses. Banners can be copied from Ultra or Original courses.
Image 1: The Copy Items page now has the option to select the course banner under Settings
Follow the instructions on copying content for further information.
The following enhancements are grouped under tests, assignment, and gradebook activities.
A new and enhanced student-facing submission review page for tests has been developed.
The new layout means that all feedback is clearly laid out and easy for students to identify.
Image 1: The student view of the graded test submission includes a submission timestamp, submission receipt, and feedback for individual questions.
If the test is visible and feedback has been posted, students can access the review page from:
If a student submits multiple attempts, they can review each attempt on the submission review page. The instructor defines which attempt to grade in the test’s final grade calculation setting.
Please note that this does not affect online exams as we advise that the test is hidden from students to prevent them seeing their results.
Instructors can now configure visibility for calculated columns from Items Management in the Gradebook by click on the associated calculation:
Grading rubrics on Blackboard Assignments can pop out into a separate window as part of the assignment workflow.
Image 1: Instructors can pop out the rubric by selecting the expand icon in the rubric panel.
When the pop-out rubric is open, the ability to add Overall Feedback and grade with the rubric in the main grading interface is inactive. This prevents an instructor from editing the same information in two separate places simultaneously.
We recommend using two screens with this enhancement.
Several improvements have been made to Discussions:
Image 1. A long discussion post displayed in its entirety with a grey background.
We made several changes to enhance the accessibility of key features on the discussion home page.
Image 2. The changes made to the discussion home page included the addition of an Edit button and a count of posts and replies.
The Discussions page will only be available to students if any of the below conditions are met:
System administrators can now reveal the identity of the author of an anonymous discussion post or reply. If you are running an anonymous Discussion and need to de-anonymise a comment, contact elearning@aber.ac.uk outlining the course, discussion, and post, as well as the rationale for requesting it be de-anonymised.
If you have any enhancements to request from Blackboard, please get in touch with us via elearning@aber.ac.uk.
As Ramadan starts, we wanted to highlight a guide for educators that has been led by Oxford Brookes’ Professor Louise Taylor (along with several other collaborators).
During this time, those observing Ramadan, will abstain from food and drink during daylight hours.
The full guide can be accessed and downloaded from this webpage.
The guide outlines the potential impact of Ramadan on students’ learning and offers some adaptions that may want to be considered. Oxford Brookes have produced a 7-minute video of students sharing their experience of Ramadan. The guide draws on surveys from HE professionals to provide an evidence-based approach and offers 6 ways in which we could adopt more inclusive learning:
The guide concludes that its key message places importance on initiating discussions with Muslim students.
As a community, we hope to build on this work for next year, using this guidance as a starting point.
We are passionate about inclusive education practices and would love to showcase them at the forthcoming Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. If you adopt inclusive practices in your teaching, then do consider submitting a proposal for the conference.
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.
AU will continue to use our current suite of e-assessment 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:
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.
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:
Three features ranked as essential from an e-assessment solution:
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:
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.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. Social media: X.com, BSky.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. Social media: X.com, BSky.
We are now inviting proposals for the 13th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, Tuesday 8-Thursday 10 July 2025.
Submit and view the call for proposals online.
The theme for this year’s conference is:
Innovative Pathways to Empowering Learners: Adapting, Engaging, and Thriving
The main strands of this year’s conference are:
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.
If you have any questions, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.
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:
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.
Vevox, the University’s preferred polling solution, has some great new features from its September 2024 and December 2024 release.
For colleagues unfamiliar with Vevox, it can be used to make your teaching more interactive, and to help decision making in meetings. Participants use mobile devices to engage in real-time polling, but there are also options for asynchronous Surveys and Q & A boards.
All these updates are available on this YouTube recording and via these release notes:
Session hosts can define labels that are now visible and usable by participants. This means that participants can optionally tag their Q&A messages with a pre-defined label. For example, you may wish to have a label for Assessment to allow students to link their questions to a tag.
This is a useful activity to measure the impact of a teaching session. Ask students one question at the start of the session to gauge their level of understanding and then ask them the same question at the end of the session to see if their understanding has changed. See the Vevox update for instructions on how to achieve this.
By default, the Q and A board allows participants to upvote questions. This means that you can order questions by those which the majority of participants want to ask. Vevox has introduced a Downvote setting which you can toggle on to allow your participants to downvote questions. You can change these settings in the Q and A setting interface.
Responses to MCQ poll questions can now be displayed in different ways. You can use the traditional bar graph but you can now choose to display your output as a pie chart. You can change the view in real time by having the Vevox admin panel open on one screen in the lecture and having the presenter window projected.
The number type poll now gives instructors the option to display how the output is shown with a new Word Cloud style interface. You can choose to have this as an output from the poll question interface.
Results for the answer style question now show in a more streamlined fashion when publishing the results. Rather than showing the output in full, the first couple of sentences display. The instructor can click on the comments they want to highlight and it will show the full response.
The PowerPoint integration has been updated to be able to show WordCloud, Pie Chart, and Number Cloud results live. Further information on using the Vevox PowerPoint integration is available on their webpage.
Bold, italics and underline are now options in the question formatting.
For identified polling, you can run attendance information from the data reports. You can then see when participants joined the session and let the session.
As account administrators, we can add words to the custom profanity filter. This will be applied to polls, surveys, and q and a features. If you have a word that you would like included in the profanity filter, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.
Further information and support is available on our webpages: Polling Tool : Information Services , Aberystwyth University.
Previous updates and case studies are available on our blog.