We are happy to announce that the University has officially reached an incredible milestone of 4 million enrolments on our 80 free short online courses! A huge thank you to our keen learners who engage meaningfully with the courses and participate in lively discussions.    These online courses are completely free to take and have no entry requirements. Led by world-class academics and supported by teaching assistants, they […]

It is essential that we tackle the biggest challenge of our time – climate change – by giving each of us the knowledge and tools we need to make a real difference. Dr. Erika Warnatzsch and her fellow MSc Carbon Management alumni have put in tremendous amounts of effort to create course content for the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Several colleagues from the Educational Design & Engagement team were able to attend the annual eLearning@Ed Conference on April 23rd, below is a summary of highlights from the day. The theme for this year’s conference was “Designing for 21st Century Learning.” Mark Wetton Attended “Co-Creation: Student Ownership of Curriculum” by EUSA’s Dash Sekhar, VPAA and […]

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 […]

CETIS (The Centre for Educational Technology, Interoperability and Standards) gathers together learning technologists with an interest in the innovations and underpinning work (standards, metadata) needed to ensure our technology serves us, and not the other way around. Colleagues on CETIS staff have long been recognised as leading the field in this area, and providing strategic […]

A personal view of the Partnership in Assessment and Feedback event in Edinburgh, April 2014. I hadn’t expected it to be fun. But it was, thanks to a range of interesting speakers and, more importantly, a range of participants willing to engage with the issues being raised and discuss how some of these ideas might […]

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 […]