It’s hard to believe that it has been a year since the pandemic began, but here we are! In April 2020, we created the short online course, COVID-19 Critical Care: Understanding and Application, to meet the pressing needs of healthcare workers around the globe. I worked closely with the team to build the course on […]

As part of Learn Foundations’ latest round of user experience research, I have been interviewing students and staff about their use of real-time virtual and hybrid classrooms. This post looks at the multitude of ways students access their virtual teaching spaces and how we can make them easier to find.   As we have moved […]

I posted my first sketch in the Sketch-A-Day app after weeks of marvelling at the talent on display every day and losing the nerve to get started. Finally, I decided to contribute to the day’s subject: Pigeon. My pigeon has had a wobbly landing and is balancing on one leg, symbolic of my own wobbly […]

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 […]

In these strange lockdown times, it feels like extra effort to keep our mental health on a high, and I’m sure it’s even more challenging to be upbeat while juggling work, family and the general devastation that the virus has caused. With all that going on, what if you are having a rough time at […]

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 […]

In order to mark five years of Open Education Resources (OER) at the University of Edinburgh and to coincide with […]

We’ve been creating free short online courses since 2012, and have created more than 80 courses hosted on three partner platforms, Coursera, edX and FutureLearn. We’re fairly sure that we’re the only UK university to partner with all three of these major online course platforms! These partners and their websites are huge marketing machines, taking […]

ABC Learning Design is a hands-on, collaborative workshop in which academic teams map out learning sequences of content to create a storyboard for their course. Originally developed at UCL, it is used across the University and beyond, and has been key in the redesign and development of on-campus courses for hybrid teaching and learning. With […]

I’ve had a lot of comments recently, within training sessions and through support calls regarding Turnitin, that have really opened my eyes to the misunderstanding of the tool – that it’s being used as a plagiarism checker with no thought of what the generated similarity score really means.   The kind of fear that a […]