Learn Ultra Early Adopters: From Old and Busted to the New Hotness
Having moved his complex course Practical Geochemistry and Data Analysis into Learn Ultra early as part of the Early Adopters programme, Dr. Alex Thomas, Senior Lecturer of the School of Geosciences, outlines some of the highlights of his experience with Learn Ultra.
I’ve been calling the old version of Learn ‘old and busted.’ So, there’s ‘old and busted’ and then there’s the ‘new hotness,’ right? Like in Men in Black.
Learn Ultra is the ‘new hotness.’ Here are some of the things that I really liked about it.
Documents
So, both ‘old and busted’ and the ‘new hotness’ have the ability to build documents – you could type up a document and put things in that document such as headings, pictures and all kinds of stuff. The difference is that in Learn Ultra, these documents are easy to put together in a way that looks really good and, importantly, work for the students, on mobile devices. I spent time moving my content from a deep folder structure and unpacking a lot of it into Learn documents. Initially, I did this because I had “run out” of folder levels allowed in Learn Ultra and I found I could use a document as if it were a folder by dumping files into them. I then realized that these documents can be used to make content much more accessible for students and provide information in a much more coherent way. It makes it more accessible for students as you can include bits of text around images, explain what was in the lecture, where the slides are, provide information on practicals and so on. So, everything is clearly organized. I used the documents to group weekly activity for a lecture and associated practical session but there are lots of other ways you can collate material in documents.
Improved navigation
I’ve made it easy for my students to go from the ‘important, essential’ materials to the ‘extra’ materials – the extra work that will help them go up a degree classification. The pathway is ‘this is the stuff you have to do from the lecture’, which is packaged in one place, through to the resources they need if they want to dive in further. It’s all still easily findable without having to dig through folders. It’s impossible to hide things in folders with the new, shallower folder structure so that limitation is really quite useful.
Easy build
You can drag and drop files into your courses in Learn Ultra to build them so it’s just easier to add content in Ultra – much more flexible than the older version of Learn. Overall, it’s just simpler to create your courses overall.
Linking content
It is easier to make linked content. So, for example, if you have a very complex course, you can say ‘here is a link to the assessment’ or a link to another week’s reading material and let students know that they should go and revise it. In ‘old and busted’ Learn, creating links was just the wild west and all kinds of things could go wrong. So, I think that’s a real positive.
Rethinking course content
I think moving to Learn Ultra is a good opportunity to think about what you expect your students to do with your course material. There’s an opportunity to think about how we can simplify what we want students to be doing. And, that’s not necessarily to reduce the amount of work students do overall but to make it easier for them to find what is important.
Staff can get to know more about Learn Ultra by attending a 10 Things to Get Started in Learn Ultra training session.
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