As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year.
It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE institutions has been depressing and frustrating alongside balancing it all against the rise of AI and how quickly technology is changing as a result of it.
However, as usual, my team have achieved so much. Our Director asks us for our 6 top achievements before our LTW all staff which happens on a 6 monthly basis. It’s a brilliant way to remind ourselves of what we’ve been up to (because it’s so easy to focus on the next thing and forget everything that’s happened).
So here is a little reminder or us DLAMers (Digital Learning Applications and Media) on our achievements over the last year. Give yourselves a pat on the back and a cheer.
- Working with other parts of LTW and units around the University, we created a web catalogue for our new Short Courses Platform (SCP). This has all been a huge amount of work but it’s such a fantastic service. It provides an easy workflow for those who want to be able to offer these courses. Prior to our SCP, units and Schools were pretty much on their own. There was no central place to advertise or find them, no easy way for learners to pay and no online teaching & learning platform for those who needed it.
- Our writing up of our digital exams project (FLORA). Although paused for now, we pulled a huge amount of data together, the Project Board worked really well together to develop a collection of recommendations and a business case for a follow on project. Hopefully we’ll get the ok to move on with that project at some point. The FLORA findings are on SharePoint, so only available to users within the University but if you are interested and are from outside the University, drop me a line.
- We had a record breaking academic year for lecture recording, when I looked at our numbers in June, we’d had the biggest number of captures in the history of the service for the 24-25 academic year. Although I don’t have the official stats from our supplier yet for December, i can see that the calendar year numbers for 2025 are almost the same as the full 2024 numbers so I’m confident we’ll be celebrating the biggest calendar year yet for lecture recording at Edinburgh.
- 2025 has also been a great year for interns in DLAM. They’ve just been so awesome giving us insights into caption and lecture recording quality, sustainability, accessibility and extracting new views of our services (through data) which we’ve never seen before. I’m hoping we can continue this work going forward.
- We also did a huge amount of work (with support from Info Sec and folk in Apps and ITI) to switch MFA on for our services.
- Our development team rewrote a feed from our timetabling system to push groups into our Learn VLE. It had been misbehaving a bit and it wasn’t providing logging with the detail we needed. It’s now way more efficient, sustainable (and environmentally friendly as an unexpected bonus!) and just much easier to manage.
- We restructured our unidesk queues too – this sounds minor but it’s been in my to-do list since I started this job back in 2020. I can’t claim the credit and need to credit Mark Findlay (with our Service Management Team) for getting it over the line.
- And we did more work (with colleagues in Applications Directorate) on data retention and deletion. And more will follow in 2026. Trying to keep our services cost effective and sustainable.
- And we had the best DLAM Festive Quiz ever. Joe is an excellent quiz host and is 19 Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers tall. Read into that what you will.
- And of course, we did what we do every year, managing our services, working with suppliers, helping users with issues. Keeping the show on the road.
And obviously there’s loads more I haven’t mentioned, but I’ll stop there.
Phew. A big round applause for everyone. Well done! See you in 2026.
