Streamlining complex courses in Learn Ultra
To support colleagues with the move to Learn Ultra, additional Migration Assistants were brought onboard in the run up to Semester One to provide expertise around moving very large and complex courses.
In this post, Migration Assistant Paula Sivandan shares some advice for streamlining complex courses.
The launch of Learn Ultra for the 2023-24 academic year is the culmination of three years of planning, development and collaboration. It is a significant change to the way we use technology to engage our students, support their learning and ensure that learning is accessible to everyone. As the 2023-24 academic year approached when all courses would be hosted in Learn Ultra, a number of Schools identified several particularly complex or difficult courses and requested support from the Educational Design and Engagement (EDE) team. As such, the opportunity to join the EDE team to provide specialist Blackboard Ultra support at the final stage of the migration was compelling. Building on the work of our early adopters and continuing the close collaboration between academic staff, the schools’ learning technologists, and the project team was key to the successful course migration.
The starting point was a review of the original course with the course organiser, to better understand what worked well, what could be improved, and to identify where students had fed back challenges they had encountered. For many complex courses, with multilevel hierarchical structures and legacy content, developed over many years by large academic teams, the new flatter structure within Learn Ultra provided the impetus for a course redesign.
Whilst every School and department has its unique identity, the determination to create a better student-centred learning environment was consistent across the schools. Fortunately, good course design can also be simple with five key thoughts to consider:
- Ease of learning: How quickly can a new student navigate through your course while learning the material?
- Efficiency of use: After students are familiar with your course setup, how quickly can they accomplish tasks?
- Subjective satisfaction: How much do students enjoy working through your course material?
- Usability: Can users with different levels of ability, experience, knowledge, language skills, hardware, or concentration level use your course easily?
- Accessibility: You want people with different abilities to receive the same level of information, services, and use. Is your course a level playing field?
(Source: University of Edinburgh. (n.d.). Course Design. https://uoe.sharepoint.com/sites/LearnUltra/SitePages/2.aspx)
With these principles in mind, we set about streamlining the complex courses. In response to resounding student feedback, courses are structured around weekly learning modules, where students find everything needed for their learning in an easily accessible, efficient and engaging format.
With this in place, the course organiser reviewed any legacy content and their current learning material was migrated to the new Ultra courses. In addition, semester-long documents were divided into more user-friendly weekly modules, or topics that span three or four sessions were reworked to systemically lead the student through the material using the forced sequencing feature.
On occasion, a topic-based structure was necessary, particularly where individual faculty teach specific topics within a course. However, a weekly-structured student interface could still be achieved with the judicious use of course links. In a similar manner, creating topic-based revision folders using course links, answered a common student request for more structured revision material.
Increasingly, students are accessing learning material via mobile devices and Learn Ultra responds to this by resizing and reorganising the content displayed. This combined with the need to ensure that learning content is accessible to all our students, necessitated a review of much of the existing material. Working closely with the academic teams to create accessible materials, involved adding alternative text, tagging pdfs, avoiding the use of scrolling text or conveying meaning through colour. When it was necessary to display information in tables or via diagrams and graphs, these where often rewritten directly in HTML to display correctly across devices. Where possible, PDFs or links where replaced with Permalinks to the University Library’s DiscoverEd resources, ensuring correct attribution and access to alternative formats where possible.
This is not to say that solutions were always easy or obvious. Often, the changes demanded a willingness to stay open-minded, to be student focussed and to consider all the options presented. They required an investment of time, when academic staff already have many competing priorities and responsibilities. However, the most improved courses exemplify the synergy of subject expertise, learning design and technical knowledge of the Ultra platform and are well worth the effort. The success of the complex course Ultra migration is a reflection of the collaboration of everyone involved and their commitment to creating the very best learning experiences for our students.
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