Nelly and I were invited to speak at Kaltura Connect in London today (at the fantastic Science Gallery @KCL).  Kaltura is the service we use to provide our own Media Hopper Create service for media storage and streaming.  It was a fun day, we got a chance to catch up …

I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day. Some brief highlights from me…. I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life …

Ada Lovelace Day was on the 14th of October this year.  We’ve been celebrating her day here in IS for a decade now (long before I joined IS) and this year, like the last 2 years, I was on the organising team for our celebration.  This year we had an …

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 […]