In March this year, I began a secondment to Information Services (one day-a-week) in which I shall be evaluating the impact of learning analytics data on students’ academic performance. The courses I am involved with are all online, part-time Masters programmes, delivered via bespoke virtual learning environments (http://www.essqchm.rcsed.ac.uk/). We enrol around 400 students annually which allows […]

We were welcomed to the Leeds venue on a rather grey morning by a bright and cheerful Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou, our Heads of E-Learning Forum (HELF) event coordinator. The meeting got off to an engaging start by Neil Morris, Director of Digital Learning, and host from the University of Leeds. Professor Morris described their strategy and […]

My first impression after arriving at the venue of INTED2014 (10th-12th of March, Valencia, Spain) was the conference’s size. I was immediately reminded of the organisers’ original promise of a truly international event with 650 delegates from 75 countries. The promise had been kept, and as a result here we all were in a massive […]

Report on Scot-bug meeting held on 27th February at the University of Aberdeen. Scot-bug is the Blackboard users’ group for Scotland. Scot-bug draws its membership from all of Scotland’s HE and FE institutions and holds three to four meetings a year in institutions around the country. Learn Analytics Richard Burrows of Blackboard announced that a Learn […]

Last March I was given an interesting new project to work on: The aim of the project is to deliver an interactive educational resource discovery tool that enables staff or students to answer a pedagogic or learning question they are trying to satisfy. The tool will act as a bridge between the technology enhanced learning […]

On 14th November Imperial College London hosted a “Video, lecture capture and the student experience” event focusing on the use of Panopto for lecture capture. The talks took place in Imperial’s impressive great hall, and the historic rooms of 170 Queens Gate, with presenters including Tom Davy (CEO of Panopto), Professors Debra Humphries and Omar […]

Turnitin is a plagiarism detection tool and it is marketed as such to its customers (educators). As a detector of plagiarism, Turnitin’s accuracy is quite high and has proven to be a popular choice amongst educators. Especially in the field of online learning where Turnitin’s submission tools come in very handy. However, as with many […]

Learning Analytics has rapidly become a “hot topic” in Higher Education. Our teaching and  learning activities online now generate “big data” and there is a need to manage and understand that data, to make best use of it at national, local, institutional and school level.  All sorts of work is being done on developing this […]

Susie Greig and I recently attended a workshop called Cheap & Cheerful: Approaches to Multimedia organised by the Institute for Academic Development (IAD). This workshop was full of great ideas to use free and easy multi-media applications to create learning and informational multi-media assets for your course and/or website. The first presentation ‘Podcasting for free […]

The University makes use of the Bristol Online Survey service, which allows staff and research students to build and manage online surveys. The service comes from the University of Bristol and the support team there aim to be responsive to the particular needs of the HE community. As part of that, a new version of […]