I don’t really understand how we got to the end of August (well, nearly) already. It feels like minutes ago we were welcoming the summer in with our new intern cohort and today is the day that most of our summer internships finish. I can’t tell you how much I …

The numbers have been crunched, the results are in.  We’ve had record usage of our lecture recording service by our staff and students this year! We’ve had a whopping 40,160 recordings created since June 2024 and a massive 28,945,731 minutes of lectures watched in the same time frame. Of course, …

I’ve had an exciting week so far (and it’s only Thursday), in a good way rather than a bad exciting week (which sometimes happens but is less fun….!).   We had 3 new interns join us in DLAM (David, Hera and Otis) more about that in a future blog post) to …

I’ve long been interested in the value of AI and where and when it is particularly useful or gimmicky.  Given the impact of AI on the environment (and costs), I often reflect on whether the AI input is worth-the-impact. I have been using ELM to help tidy up and reword …

Many of you will be aware of our FLORA project (if you aren’t, find out more on Melissa’s helpful FLORA blog post).  Named after Flora Stevenson, a pioneer of education for girls and women but also a quirky acronym – Feedback, Learning, Online Rubrics and Assessment.  FLORA was really our …

  We’ve been really lucky to work with two amazing recent graduates (Martina Emmerich & Zoë Brunner) from the Natural Language Processing Unit in Informatics as part of our Captioning Service Project, who’ve been looking at how we might be able to use GenAI to improve the accuracy of automated transcripts and captions on lecture […]

A guest blog post from one of our human-captioners, Ellie Kerr. Ellie joined us back in 2023 and is one of our original captioners – when we only had a team of 2. Now we have 20 part-time captioners who work on correcting automated captions across our lecture recordings and other media.   I never […]

I wrote a blog post in January 2023 (where did the time go!?!) about the work we’ve been doing on data retention for our services.  Work has continued in the background and currently we are almost at the point of: Automating the deletion of courses and users in Learn.  Sean …

When I went to university, we didn’t have lecture recording. To be honest, I’ll admit that when I went to university, the ‘AV kit’ in a room was an overhead projector and a chalk board.  I struggled with lectures.  They were often boring to my 18 year old self and …

AI is getting more accessible (as in more easily available or pushed-down-our-throat, depending on your perspective).  My home Windows 11 laptop now has the ‘free’ version of copilot on it, in the taskbar, pretty obviously it’s also available in the Bing search and I’m expecting Apple Intelligence to drop onto …