As Ramadan starts, we wanted to highlight a guide for educators that has been led by Oxford Brookesâ 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 studentsâ 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:
Acknowledge Ramadan
Avoid assumptions and ask
Adjust assessment timings
Offer asynchronous learning
Raise awareness and celebrate
Be inclusive and make sustainable change
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.
Outcome
AU will continue to use our current suite of e-assessment tools:
TurnitinÂ
Blackboard AssignmentÂ
Blackboard Tests Â
Assessed Blackboard ToolsÂ
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 assignmentsÂ
A Welsh language interface for marking and submissionÂ
Panopto submissions Â
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 weâll 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.âŻâŻOverall, 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.âŻTwo of these were ranked as regularly used:âŻ
Timed and automatic release of marks and feedback (78% of respondents)âŻÂ
Seeing whether students have viewed marks (60% of respondents)âŻÂ
Three features ranked as essential from an e-assessment solution:âŻ
Timed release of marks (66% of respondents)âŻÂ
Submitting on behalf of students (51% of respondents)âŻÂ
Revealing individual names whilst marking anonymously (51% of respondents)âŻÂ
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 didnât report many problems for either them or their students. However, they highlighted limitations in functionality, which meant that some of the pilot group didnât end up using Blackboard and SafeAssign at all:
Issues navigating the marking interfaceÂ
File size upload limitâŻ(SafeAssign will only check files less than 10Mb)Â
Lack of automated marks releaseâŻÂ
Anthology Ideas Exchange
Anthology Ideas ExchangeâŻallows all Blackboard institutions toâŻrequest and vote onâŻfunctionality 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 doesnât have an equivalent in SafeAssign, as well as changes to existing SafeAssign functionality. Some examples include:Â
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. Â
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 Iâve 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
February
28/2/2025 EmpowerED Webinars, A Webinar Series for Embracing Innovation in Teaching and Learning “an opportunity to celebrate and share success stories, showcase good practice exemplars and discuss the adoption of innovative approaches within teaching and learning with colleagues across the wider education sector.”
6/3/2025 Centre for Innovation in Education, University of Liverpool, Pedagogical-Informed Gamification Workshop: Integrating learning aims, objectives, and assessment into game-based solutions (hybrid in-person and online event)
11-12/3/2025 Jisc, DigiFest (hybrid online and in person in Birmingham, online access free of charge)
Beckingham, S. (n.d.), Reverse Social Media [card set], Social Media for Learning, “This card set considers what you want to achieve first and then offers examples of tools to help you do this”
TIRIgogy ConnectED Podcast series, “Teaching Intensive Research Informed Pedagogy Series for Professional Development. In each 10-minute episode, we dive headfirst into the most pressing issues facing Higher Education today.”
University of Birmingham (2/2025), Education in Practice (6)1, “This is an issue that has sprung out of our Education Excellence Conference in September 2024, which focuses on GAI in higher education.”
Other
Call for proposals (open dates)Unfiltered by EmpowerED: A Podcast Series where educators share unedited stories of inspiration and challenge
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree 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: 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 Iâve 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.
28/2/2025 EmpowerED Webinars, A Webinar Series for Embracing Innovation in Teaching and Learning “an opportunity to celebrate and share success stories, showcase good practice exemplars and discuss the adoption of innovative approaches within teaching and learning with colleagues across the wider education sector.”
6/3/2025 Centre for Innovation in Education, University of Liverpool, Pedagogical-Informed Gamification Workshop: Integrating learning aims, objectives, and assessment into game-based solutions (hybrid in-person and online event)
11-12/3/2025 Jisc, DigiFest (hybrid online and in person in Birmingham, online access free of charge)
Institution of Education Sciences, ERIC: Educational Resources Information Center, US Department of Education, “comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information”
Foundation for Critical Thinking (n.d.), Defining Critical Thinking, The Foundation for Critical Thinking
Korpen, C. (n.d.), Self-Study for Teaching Documentation, University of Virginia Teaching Hub (resource collection) “How do you successfully document your teaching? In this collection, you will explore self-study approaches that provide you with an authentic representation of your teaching based on evidence of what you do in your teaching.”
Watchman Smith, N., Naughton, C. & Garden, C. (2025), Student Belonging Good Practice Guide, RAISE Network, Focused on Research into Student Engagement
Other
Call for proposals (open dates)Unfiltered by EmpowerED: A Podcast Series where educators share unedited stories of inspiration and challenge
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree 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: X.com, BSky.
Innovative Pathways to Empowering Learners: Adapting, Engaging, and Thriving
The main strands of this yearâs conference are:
Adaptable assessment design
Student engagement and autonomous learning
Community building
Technologies to enhance learning
Online learning
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 doesnât 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.
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: âInnovative Pathways to Empowering Learners: Adapting, Engaging, and Thrivingâ.
The conference will have the following strands:
Adaptable assessment design
Student engagement and autonomous learning
Community building
Technologies to enhance learning
Online learning
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, weâre 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 Universityâs 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.
2. Compare poll results in your session
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.
3. Downvoting options
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.
4. Alternate result display
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.
5. Number cloud question release
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.
6. Text walls formatting
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.
7. PowerPoint real time results
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.
8. Rich text options for question formatting
Bold, italics and underline are now options in the question formatting.
9. Attendance tracking
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.
10. Custom profanity filters
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.
The Digital Education Group in partnership with the Careers Service are pleased to announce the theme for our next Mini Conference.
Building on the success of last yearâs Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, we will be revisiting the topic of employability with the theme Employability and the Inclusive Curriculum.
The mini conference will take place online on the morning of Tuesday 8 April.
The full line up will be confirmed in due course but we are pleased to announce that the Careers Service will be launching their new toolkit for embedding employability in the curriculum.
Bookings for the event are already open. You can book your place online.
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 Iâve 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.
28/2/2025 EmpowerED Webinars, A Webinar Series for Embracing Innovation in Teaching and Learning “an opportunity to celebrate and share success stories, showcase good practice exemplars and discuss the adoption of innovative approaches within teaching and learning with colleagues across the wider education sector.”
6/3/2025 Centre for Innovation in Education, University of Liverpool, Pedagogical-Informed Gamification Workshop: Integrating learning aims, objectives, and assessment into game-based solutions (hybrid in-person and online event)
11-12/3/2025 Jisc, DigiFest (hybrid online and in person in Birmingham, online access free of charge)
Agarwal, P. K., & Bain, P. M. (2019), Powerful teaching: unleash the science of learning, Jossey-Bass. Also see Agarwal, P. (n.d.), Retrieval Practice and Free resources, PowerfulTeaching.org
Columbia University Center for Teaching and Learning, Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning (podcast series) “Our mission is to encourage instructors, students, and leaders in higher education to reflect on what they believe about teaching and learning.”
Compton, M. (8/2/2025), Old problem, new era “What is cheating, anyway?”, HEducationist
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree 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: X.com, BSky.
In the February update, Blackboard has improved the workflows for Assignments and Tests and further enhanced the AI Design Assistant. Additionally, there are new options for managing and creating content and some improved accuracy when uploading grades and feedback.
Assignments, Tests, Marking and Grades
Conversion of existing assignments to new assignment workflow
The Create Test and Create Assignment workflows used to share the same content settings, but the workflows have been separated since last August. This monthâs update will run an automatic bulk conversion of any assignments created before August 2024 to ensure that all assignments past and present will benefit from this new workflow. See the August 2024 Blog for details on the workflow differences.
Assignments following the conversion: There will be no option to add questions to assignments and attempts will only be created with students interact with the assignment, such as submitting a file or adding content. Clicking on the assignment will not create an attempt.
Tests following the conversion: Tests with questions will remain the same. Any tests without questions will be set to Hidden from students. When you copy tests over from previous modules, they will also be set to Hidden from students. Some assignment-specific options have been removed from the test settings menu:
Collect submissions offline
Use grading rubric
Maximum points
2 grades per student
Peer review
Additionally, the functionality for student visibility options and release conditions for tests have been updated. Now, instructors must add one or more questions to their test to make it visible to students or to add release conditions. This ensures that students only see assessments that they can actively engage with.
Image 1: Settings panel with assignment-specific options removed.
Masking access codes for Tests
In the past, when an exam invigilator entered an access code for an online exam using Blackboard Tests, the code was visible on the screen when entered. This compromised the security of the testing environment. Now, the code is masked (******) to ensure enhanced security. An option to view the code is available but the default state keeps it hidden which provides better privacy and protection during exams. Image 2: Masked Access Code.
Improved accuracy when uploading grades and feedback
Instructors can now upload grades and feedback for assignments, journals, and discussions with improved accuracy. Previously, uploaded grades were always stored at the override level, which left any underlying attempts or submissions ungraded. This caused the Needs Grading and New Submission flags to remain visible, even when grading had been completed offline. Uploaded grades and feedback are now correctly mapped to the corresponding attempt or submission which reduces confusion and provides better clarity for instructors. See guidance on Working Offline with Grade Data for further information.
AI Design Assistant
More generated questions and Learning Modules
When using the AI Design Assistant, instructors can now set the number of questions generated for tests and question banks to a maximum of 20. The maximum number of learning modules that the AI Design Assistant generates also increased to 20. There is also an added option to exclude descriptions from learning modules generated by the AI Design Assistant. Instructors now have the option to write their own descriptions.
Image 3: The Auto-Generate Questions page displays a new maximum number of questions of 20.
Blackboard have added a new image block to Documents. Image blocks are used to upload your own images, use the AI Design Assistant to generate images, or select images from Unsplash. Image blocks can be moved throughout a Document, just like other block types. You have the option to resize images, set height, and maintain aspect ratios in image blocks.
Image 4: The new image block option in Documents.
A dedicated image block makes adding images more apparent. Adding images via the image block also reduces white space around images and provides greater control over content design. For more information on using Documents in Blackboard see Enhancements to Documents.
Changing Folders to Learning Modules
Instructors can now change a folder to a learning module or a learning module to a folder. Benefits of changing a folder to a learning module include:
Thumbnail images: Learning modules come with thumbnail images, which provide a visually appealing course experience.
Forced sequencing: Instructors can force students to navigate learning modules in linear paths.
Progress bar: Learning modules have a progress bar for students that highlights the number of items that they need to complete and their progression on those items.
Previous and next navigation: Students can quickly navigate to the next or previous item in a learning module.
It is also possible to convert a learning module to a folder, though we would not recommend this, as it will remove the added benefits of using learning modules as listed above.
Image 5: The new option to change a folder to a learning module in the dropdown menu.
Idea Exchange
This section aims to keep you updated on progress of enhancements requested on the Blackboard Anthology Idea Exchange. The following three items have changed their status to âPlanning to implementâ:
Support for a Dark Mode in Ultra Courses
Ability to add metadata to questions in tests and banks
Organising Pools
If you have any enhancements to request from Blackboard, please get in touch with the Digital Education Group.
