As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year. It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE …

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI.  If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this helpful description by Amazon).  They can do this on your behalf without your intervention.  …

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 …

In many ways the summer 2025 project of upgrading Moodle from 4.3.3 to 4.5.1 is an enjoyable one for the teams involved: it was the final upgrade of the long standing, and one of our favourite virtual learning environments (VLEs); the Apps team had upgraded the data server hardware and software in the past year […]

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 …