Friday 30th January

Dear All,

Thank you for your work this week.

Thank you to you all for doing your Info Sec training. LTW are all up to date.

Thank you to everyone who helps with the school accessibility reports Accessibility reviews of courses in Learn and the CIO updates for Gavin.

You will have seen instructions from James for our next baking session- we are raising money for Alzheimer Scotland. Lets go out with a bang, not a whimper. Raising Dough for Alzheimer Scotland

Thank you to those involved in thinking about new short courses Ten reasons to use the Short Courses Platform in 2026

Thank you to the LTW Heads for their lively contribution to our awayday and constructive feedback to me. I shall focus on my affirmations.

Thank you to everyone embarking on the process of attracting our summer interns who will join us in the new place.

In staff news, Cari’s secondment to DSDT is coming to an end this week, and she is moving back to EDE. We will soon be waving goodbye to award-winning Ari from our online learning marketing team. She introduced us all to TikTok. Ask her what she is doing for her next new thing.

I hope you are all continuing to experiment with ELM. Moves are afoot to update the student AI guidance with reminder that no student or staff member ( that means you) should be providing their university logon credentials to AI Agents as it contravenes the existing university Computing Acceptable Use Policy. Important to point out that the prohibition on the sharing of logon credentials with AI Agents (or any other external services or human) is not just for VLEs, but for any university systems requiring a logon.

Despite concerns from some parts of the University, we aren’t looking for ways to block ‘em. The way AI Agents work as they can exactly mimic normal Web usage – means that it is not realistic, and probably not appropriate or economically feasible, to block all usage of AI Agents and also there might be some quite interesting uses to be explored. Your ideas to me, please.

Speaking of interesting uses, Teviot is reopening Teviot reopening. Time to reminisce.

‘No spirits and precious few women’ : Edinburgh University Union, 1889-1989 – University of Edinburgh

Congratulations to those who have received news that they are shortlisted for ISG awards, seem like a long time ago that we nominated, but the awards are coming up soon. ISG Staff Recognition Awards

Have a good weekend,

-Melissa