Scottish Blackboard User Group (Scot-BUG) – July Meeting Highlights
The most recent Scottish Blackboard User Group (ScotBUG) was hosted by The University of Edinburgh at Argyle House. Bringing together members from across Scottish and Northern Ireland further education institutions to discuss all things Blackboard related. A very good turnout for this ScotBUG user group with 36 participants in attendance across a hybrid setting.
Karen Howie of Edinburgh University hosted the meeting and also very kindly brought some cakes and treats along for those lucky enough to be there in person! It was a busy agenda for the day which included vendor led discussions and presentations as well as user experience presentations;
Anonymous Marking Focus Group, Fredrik Klemming (Blackboard)
First up was Fredrik Klemming from Blackboard. An interesting discussion took place around “What is preventing instructors from grading more efficiently using the anonymous workflow?,” challenges faced by different Universities/Schools and the need for some form of progress tracking.
Although usually the lead marker may come in right at the end, sometimes the markers may gather after the first few are done and, on the other hand, the marking lead may need to have an overview of the progress of the marking. As a result, it may be needed to allow for both approaches. In addition, it was also discussed the current complexities when needing to check individual anonymous submissions.
Show, Don’t Tell: Encouraging Staff to create Award-winning Learn Ultra Courses – Rob Farmer (University of Northampton)
Up next for the day was Rob Farmer who is a Learning Technology Manager from The University of Northampton. Rob shared through this presentation how they have turned the transition into Ultra as an opportunity to encourage staff to create good Ultra courses. The two key tools have been the creation of an exemplar Ultra course – so that staff could see what a good Ultra course might look like – and an in-house Ultra Course Awards scheme to recognise and reward staff who were designing good Ultra courses. As a result, they have observed an improvement in terms of student engagement have resulted in improvements regarding student interaction and time spent in the award-winning courses compared to the average figures of all VLE courses.
It would be interesting to analyse the correlation between award-winning courses and student’s marks/success.
University of Aberdeen’s experience with the Turnitin deep integration – Dr. Sara Preston
University of Aberdeen’s team offered an overview of the Turnitin deep integration showing what it looks like, how it interacts with Ultra and some of the main changes. Perfect timing as we here at The University of Edinburgh being our ‘Turnitin Integration with Learn Assignment Early Adopters’!
It was very interesting to not only get an overview of how the Turnitin deep integration works with Ultra but to also get an insight into why Aberdeen wanted to make the move to deep integration, issues that they have faced and the workflows that they have adopted.
Optimising Learn for staff and students – our user-centred research and design approach Emma Horrell (The University of Edinburgh)
A practical introduction to UX research, Learn UX, UX techniques and the impact in service design delivered by Emma Horrell, User Experience Manager at University of Edinburgh.
The user experience at the University is described as a visualization of a partnership in Blackboard Learn between Staff and students. Staff need to share resources and reading lists with students, mark assignments/provide feedback whereas students need to find and access their course content/submit their assignment easily.
The system needs to work as efficiently as possible, easy to achieve tasks and consistent experience both for the students and staff. The main UX techniques used were presented including Interviews, Top task surveys, Card sorts, Usability Tests and Playbacks.
Some of the highlighted contributing factors of Good UX in Learn are listed below:
- User interface structure
- Service support
- Staff training
- Content design
- Best practice guidance
Discussion about AI tools in Learn – Led by Karen Howie (The University of Edinburgh)
As we here at Edinburgh begin to think about the AI features that are part of Learn. Karen led a discussion to find out which institutions have turned on AI features within Learn and what guidance they’ve put in place.
It was great to hear from Emma who is based at The University of Dundee and also Sara from The University of Aberdeen who have recently switched-on AI features within Learn. Both institutions are still in the in the very early stages of using AI features within Learn, with Aberdeen looking to work with some Schools to find out how they are making use of AI within Learn and if efficiency gains are being achieved in terms of creating of learning module materials.
It will be very exciting to see how both institutions make use of AI features within Learn going forward, hopefully we can revisit this at the next ScotBUG.
Update from Anthology Together 2024 – Jo Kinsley (Blackboard)
Jo Kinsley from Blackboard shared an overview of some of the new features released recently highlighting the “New content designer” and the “Knowledge check”.
The New content designer allows much more flexibility in how you can structure the content. All the content will be in blocks now, allowing to quickly move content around by dragging the blocks and reshape what the page is going to look like. This is on test Learn at the moment.
The other highlighted new feature is the “Knowledge check” which allows to add an answer to a multiple-choice question. This will be useful to create formative questions to check how the students are working through the content and also provides information regarding student participation.
We are already looking forward to the next ScotBUG!
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