Friday 4th April

Dear All,

Thank you for your work this week.

Some of you may have noticed a University network outage last Saturday or came back on Monday to a lot of emails from monitoring systems saying our services had all been down. Luckily it was a short outage but given every one our mailing lists and IS alerts were impacted, it might be worth thinking about how you’d communicate service issues or between yourselves if we lost Teams, email and/or mailing lists as part of an outage. Make sure you have a plan B in-case your usual comms channel isn’t available.

Thank you to everyone who took time to respond to the staff engagement survey a few weeks ago. I now have sight of the results and you will too soon. I am very pleased to see that the LTW results are mostly positive, and more positive than the average across the University as a whole. But there is always work to do to build our LTW community and I am looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday next week for our multi-cultural Potluck Picnic. Still time to sign up to attend or bring a dish. There will be an opportunity to win free tickets to visit LTW’s 2025 ‘ Spring on the Wing’ mascot animal at Edinburgh Zoo.

Kudos to the Online Course Production Team who launched their latest online course on Tuesday this week – “Slay Speak: It’s Giving Gen Z”. Talking about the course, the team said: Bestie, are you having a tough time connecting with your children or grandchildren? Are you feeling salty because you don’t understand what young people are saying? Wondering what it means to be a rizzler, and why your nieces and nephews keep calling you the ‘GOAT’? Sign up for our free short online course, “Slay Speak: It’s Giving Gen Z” and get infinite aura points with the nonchalant teens in your life.

Congratulations to everyone involved in the Edinburgh Awards again this year. Jonathan and Ewan supported 16 completers of The Digital Skills Specialists Edinburgh Award and 7 for Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia. The students have worked very hard during this cohort and the projects have been the most impressive to date. 130,000+ words added to Wikipedia (80,000 more than last year) and over 595,000 pageviews

While we have several teams away at conferences this week – notable the Anthology Learn conference at Durham University- we also have some astronauts in the studio. They’re in filming some updates for the space courses and MOOC videos but unfortunately they didn’t come with any tartan space suits.

If you would like to be part of a new LTW podcast series, contact Edward Enejoh in DLAM.

Have a good weekend,