Learn provides lots of ways for users to take charge of what messages and notifications they receive and how they would like them delivered. One of the insights I gained through interviewing students and staff as part of the Learn Foundations Project programme of user experience research was how students feel about all those notifications, […]

Last month saw the first Digital Skills Festival, organised by the Digital Skills and Training team, of which we hope there will be many more. Together, we facilitated four sessions on different topics across the area of learning design.   The first session, ‘How to… design a course online using ABC’, sparked a lot of discussion around how the pandemic has changed the way we teach. Participants were really engaged with how ABC can help them in […]

A couple of months ago, a project landed on my desk (virtually, in my sitting room, where I’ve been for 15 months) involving an investigation of current hybrid teaching and learning practice. The task was straightforward enough: find out what kind of hybrid synchronous systems are in place in other institutions worldwide. So, I spent […]

We are looking forward to presenting four interactive sessions at next week’s Digital Skills Festival. Each session is based on our experiences, particularly over the past year, when we moved our support for learning design online.  All of these sessions are open for booking by Edinburgh staff and students.  We look forward to seeing you there!    […]

Of all the things we do, learning design workshops were probably the last things we wanted to consider moving online; if it had been thought to be the better option, we probably would have already made that change long before lockdown. But when it was clear that we weren’t going to be able to hold […]

As part of Learn Foundations’ latest round of user experience research, I have been interviewing students and staff about their use of real-time virtual and hybrid classrooms. This post looks at the multitude of ways students access their virtual teaching spaces and how we can make them easier to find.   As we have moved […]

I’ve had a lot of comments recently, within training sessions and through support calls regarding Turnitin, that have really opened my eyes to the misunderstanding of the tool – that it’s being used as a plagiarism checker with no thought of what the generated similarity score really means.   The kind of fear that a […]

Sitting in our team EDE section meeting and listening to an update from the always engaging Lauren Johnson Smith on recent sign-up figures for online courses. When MSc Ancient Worlds was listed with 67 registered students at launch, it took a second or two for me to register why it was familiar before blurting out […]

Our Learning Design team has spent quite a lot of time over the last months thinking about the minute details of how students and instructors are engaging with learning technology in our current hybrid environment. My cohort in particular, the five new Learning Technology Support Officers who came into our posts over the summer, have […]

  I’m now 15 weeks into my new position as Learning Technology Support Officer for Educational Design and Engagement – and I’m seeing a lot of similarities from my previous position in Learning Spaces Technology. Both teams look after services, providing user advice and support, contribute to service improvement and course design. EDE mostly supports […]