Six months of EDE achievements

Every July and December we have a full Learning, Teaching, and Web Services directorate meeting and I’m asked (along with the other section heads) to submit our top six achievements from the previous six months, so we can jointly celebrate the work of LTW. Well, it’s been an interesting year and the last six months in particular have been like no other I have experienced. I thought it might be nice to share the EDE highlights from July to December 2020 as a reminder of how much we have achieved as a team (note: there are more than six and this is not an exhaustive list!).

The Learn Foundations project recruited and managed 44 student summer interns who migrated over 3000 courses from 20 schools into the institutional template.
We trained almost 3000 staff how to use the learning technologies required for hybrid teaching, including 650 staff who went through the 7-week experiential staff develop programme “An Edinburgh Model for Online Teaching”
We helped helpline deal with a record number of calls about using learning technology: 2178 between July and October; at its peak in week 2 of teaching this was 5 times higher than last year.
We helped develop 5 student transition courses about hybrid teaching.
We created 1 new Professional Certificate, 2 new free short online courses (3 more in production) whilst continuing to coordinate 46 free short online courses, with a learner enrolment increase of 378,027 since June.
We helped set up 9 new media studios and produced 140 hours of footage in 15 weeks and 40 Home Studio kits shared with local teams.
We successfully moved ELDeR and ABC workshops online.
We ran a programme level ELDeR for the Mastercard foundation including attendees from Edinburgh, Libya, and Uganda co-producing a foundations for all programme for refugees: a synchronous 2-day learning design workshop spanning multiple time zones.
We set up the first university-wide advertising campaign to promote UOE online learning was run by LTW, generating a 35% increase in applications and new students to PG online degrees this year (compared to 2019).
We published 22 new highlights to the OER Showcase https://open.ed.ac.uk/edinburghs-oers/
We promoted the use of open licences for educational media that has helped 3916 videos in Media Hopper Create become publicly and openly available to the community.
We successfully designed and supported the launch of PebblePad resources/workbooks/templates for both MBChB (undergraduate medics) and Vet School, supporting a move away from tradition exams in some of our most high profile programmes.

On top of all that 8 new colleagues joined the EDE section this year, integrating into the team whilst working remotely: Jess, Laurie, Mari-Nikol, Robyn, Maz, Alan, Ed, and Rebecca. I’m amazed at how strong the team spirit is under these circumstances, and how well we’ve all come together to achieve these outstanding results. Thanks to each and every member of the EDE team for all your dedication and commitment this year.