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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  I’m now 15 weeks into my new position as Learning Technology Support Officer for Educational Design and Engagement – and I’m seeing a lot of similarities from my previous position in Learning Spaces Technology. Both teams look after services, providing user advice and support, contribute to service improvement and course design. EDE mostly supports […]

I’m building a boat. A wooden boat, in a traditional hand-crafted way, I’m a student on a course on boat building, to build an Arendalspram, which is a traditional small Norwegian wooden rowboat, popular along the Skagerrak (love the sound of this word, its sounds so Viking, its the sea between Norway and Denmark) coast, […]

The posters are up. The streets are filled to the brim. Performers are eagerly handing out fliers left and right. Last-minute tech rehearsals are happening all over the city. It’s August in Edinburgh. That means we have multiples festivals happening all at once and an influx of people who are all here for one thing: […]

The VLE Standards Project aims to review the current use of the University’s main virtual learning environment, Blackboard Learn and develop strategies to ensure greater consistency in the way it is used. Consultations with staff and students by the Learn Service team and the commissioned Headscape review in 2016 both indicated that inconsistencies across such systems […]