As we have adapted to home working over the past twelve months, many of our ‘traditional’ work practices have had to change along the way. As an Instructional Designer, a big part of my role is planning courses with teams through learning design workshops. These workshops are a hands-on, practical exercise in which the teams […]

Discussion is a powerful tool for online learning. It can help foster a sense of community and encourage peer to peer interaction and improve learner engagement. Discussion can take the form of debate or reflective sharing, giving learners the opportunity to expand upon and clarify their understanding of key ideas. It moves beyond more passive […]

Did you know that hiring for digital marketing roles has been growing nearly 33% year-over-year? As an MSc Marketing student at the University of Edinburgh, I found it no surprise that Linkedin has listed digital marketing as one of the fastest growing sectors in 2021 (source: CNBC). While the world has already been gradually leaving traditional media for digital over time, the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated the process. Many marketers immediately scrambled to reach consumers through the […]

Sitting in our team EDE section meeting and listening to an update from the always engaging Lauren Johnson Smith on recent sign-up figures for online courses. When MSc Ancient Worlds was listed with 67 registered students at launch, it took a second or two for me to register why it was familiar before blurting out […]

In this guest blog post Instructional Designer Lizzy Garner-Foy and Media Production Officer Callum MacPhail talk about how they created […]

This week I was fortunate enough to attend a presentation by Kenny Verbeke and Elke Vanderstappen from KU Leuven about their MOOC development processes. They shared how they were using MOOC quality gates (click on the image below for a… Continue Reading →

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 […]

2020 marks 5 years of the OER Service at the University of Edinburgh.  The service was launched in 2015 in […]

We heard some fantastic news last week – Graham Nimmo, Programme Director of the MSc Critical Care, has been awarded the Principal’s Medal for Exceptional Contribution 2020, together with David Griffith. I have worked closely with Graham since March on the (very!) rapid build, launch and three runs of the COVID-19 Critical Care: Understanding and […]

Our Learning Design team has spent quite a lot of time over the last months thinking about the minute details of how students and instructors are engaging with learning technology in our current hybrid environment. My cohort in particular, the five new Learning Technology Support Officers who came into our posts over the summer, have […]