Education and Student Experience Award Fund Recipients

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Earlier this year, Professor Anwen Jones announced the Education and Student Experience Award Fund at the 13th Annual Education and Student Experience Conference.

We are delighted to confirm this year’s winners and the 4 enhancement projects that they will be leading over the coming year:

  • Dr Elizabeth New, History and Welsh History: The Aber Medieval Physic Garden
  • Dr Emma Sheppard, Geography and Earth Sciences: Developing a Sustainable Student Gear Hub
  • Dr Kate Woodward, Theatre, Film and Television Studies: Inclusivity and Accessibility in Assessment Design and Feedback Practices
  • Dr Scott Tompsett, Department of Life Sciences: Pulling together – supporting teamwork assessment more effectively

Thank you to all applicants for submitting a proposal and to the awards panel.

There will be opportunities to hear more about these projects at next year’s annual Education and Student Experience Conference.

Exemplary Course Award 2026: Applications Open

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Applications for the Exemplary Course Award 2026 are now open.

The deadline for submissions is 12pm, 30 January 2026.

As part of this process, applicants are asked to identify 3 standout practices and assess their course across 4 areas:

  • Course Design
  • Interaction and Collaboration
  • Assessment
  • Learner Support

The application form is available to download from our webpages.

To assist colleagues, we have a training session available on Wednesday 10 December at 10:10. Places can be booked online.

In addition to this, we are running 4 E-learning Excellence training sessions (based on the 4 assessment criteria). These sessions are available to all colleagues, whether they are considering submitting an application or not. Places can be booked online.

If you have any questions, please contact the Digital Education Group (elearning@aber.ac.uk).

Weekly Resource Roundup – 3/11/2025

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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. 

Online events and webinars

November

December

Resources and publications

Other

  • Call for proposals (open dates) Unfiltered by EmpowerED: A Podcast Series where educators share unedited stories of inspiration and challenge
  • Call for proposals (open dates) Future Teacher Webinars
  • Webinar series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinars free open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.

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: B

Vevox Update: October 2025 

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There are some new features available in the latest Vevox (Polling Tool) update that we wanted to draw your attention to. 

For those unfamiliar with Vevox, the polling software can be used to ask students questions and for them to respond live using their mobile devices. For information on how to use Vevox, see our webpage. 

The update includes: 

  • Scheduled Surveys and Quizzes. You can make surveys and quizzes available outside of lecture rooms with automatic start and end times (note that the session needs to be started in Vevox for this to work).  
  • AI Question Helper. The AI tools will now suggest answer options based on your questions as well as creating a wider range of questions.  
  • Spin the wheel. A fun way of selecting a random option from a list, for example a list of revision topics, or group names for delivering presentations. Note that the person running the poll controls the wheel (not participants).  

Take a look at Vevox’s latest product update: October 2025 for the full update. 

If you have any questions on using Vevox please contact us (elearning@aber.ac.uk). 

Weekly Resource Roundup – 27/10/2025

WordPress User [mhj] Weekly Resource Roundup Leave a comment

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. 

Online events and webinars

October

November

December

Resources and publications

Other

  • Call for proposals (open dates) Unfiltered by EmpowerED: A Podcast Series where educators share unedited stories of inspiration and challenge
  • Call for proposals (open dates) Future Teacher Webinars
  • Webinar series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinars free open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.

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: BSky, X.com.

Turnitin App Retirement

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Turnitin has announced the retirement of their Turnitin app at the end of the year, December 2025.

The Feedback Studio iPad app will be retired and no longer available. Instructors can continue to access Feedback Studio as usual through Blackboard. This includes mobile devices and tablets.

Turnitin are working on developing a New Standard Assignment, so instructors can review and provide feedback on student work from tablets without needing a separate app. We will release comms regarding this new service in due course.

If you have any questions or concerns about this, please don’t hesitate to contact us (elearning@aber.ac.uk).

Merged Courses – our most frequently asked topic in September

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Policies and Information

We’ve had a look at all the queries that came into the elearning@aber.ac.uk inbox over September to see what the most common query was. And the answer is … Merged Courses.

So, here’s some useful information about merging courses which can help to answer some of your queries:

  1. A merge links two or more courses together in Blackboard. It is an effective way of dealing with separate courses that have the same content, so you don’t have to upload materials to more than one course. More information is available on the blog. Some cases where this might be useful are
    • Modules are taught the same content but there’s a module available for 2nd and 3rd years.
    • Modules that bring together different degree schemes and have different module IDs, e.g. dissertation modules.
  2. Courses aren’t merged automatically so you will either need to merge them via our new Module Partners tool or by emailing elearning@aber.ac.uk . If your courses were merged last year, you need to merge them again for 2025-26. If you want to check whether your courses have already been merged, you can use Module Partners (or email elearning@aber.ac.uk)  
  3. Students will see the module code and title of whichever course they are registered on. If you find that students can’t see content in courses that you think are merged, please check in Module Partners or email elearning@aber.ac.uk to check.

We’ve also had questions about enrolments – information about how enrolments work is available in our Access to Blackboard Courses FAQ.

Note: we produced the summary of our most common support queries using Microsoft Copilot.

Uploading Offline Panopto recordings 

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Policies and Information

Some staff will have made offline Panopto recordings because of the impact of an Amazon Web Services service disruption on Panopto on Monday 20th October.

All offline recordings will need to be uploaded to the Panopto servers before they can be made available to students. Instructions are available in our FAQ How do I manually upload Panopto recordings via the Panopto Recorder program? You can check teaching room availability from myadmin.aber.ac.uk > AAA/ATO (Aberystwyth Timetable Online)

We recommend that you upload any offline recordings with the next 7 days. If you have any questions, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk  

Join us for Fix Your Content Day 2025

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Inclusivity and Accessibility banner

On November 18, Aberystwyth University will join institutions worldwide for Fix Your Content Day 2025, hosted by Anthology. This 24-hour competition is part of our ongoing commitment to inclusive education.

We’ll be hosting a drop-in on 18th November between 2pm and 4pm in B23 Llandinam. E-learning Staff will be available to answer questions and help you use Ally (tea and biscuits also provided).

Together, we’ll aim to fix as many accessibility issues and course files as possible using Anthology® Ally. Every fix—big or small—contributes to a more inclusive learning environment for all students.

How you can help:

  • Review your courses for red and orange indicators
  • Focus on quick wins like adding image descriptions or improving Microsoft Word documents
  • Start fixing on November 18 and keep things going throughout the day
  • Aim for 100%, but improvement is what counts!

For more information on how to fix files using Anthology Ally, have a look at our FAQ on Ally.

Weekly Resource Roundup – 13/10/2025

WordPress User [mhj] Weekly Resource Roundup Leave a comment

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. 

Online events and webinars

October

November

December

Resources and publications

Other

  • Call for proposals (open dates) Unfiltered by EmpowerED: A Podcast Series where educators share unedited stories of inspiration and challenge
  • Call for proposals (open dates) Future Teacher Webinars
  • Webinar series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinars free open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.

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: BSky, X.com.