In this Spotlight on Learn Ultra post, Karen Howie presents her take on the work being done to improve our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Karen is Head of Digital Learning Applications and Media in Learning, Teaching & Web (part of Information Services). Her team service manage all of our centrally managed teaching, learning, assessment and media platforms.
As the Service Owner for our Learn Virtual Learning Environment, my team and I are very focussed on the stability and security of our VLE. As you’ll know from previous blog posts, we are upgrading the Learn VLE to Learn Ultra, which is the next step in our VLE Excellence programme. The programme is focussed on improving the VLE for staff and students but also includes lots of work to improve its stability and security. Learn Ultra receives new features and improvements every month, which is far more frequent than the version of Learn we are currently on. I’m excited by the pace that Blackboard are currently pushing out new fixes and features.
You may remember that we moved Learn to the cloud in summer 2019. This change was primarily a behind-the-scenes change and provided us with 24/7 support for Learn and allows us to take advantage of regular, monthly updates without any downtime. These updates include new features, bug fixes and security patches. When Learn was locally hosted, security patching and changes to Learn required downtime. For example, in March 2019, we had to take Learn down for 8 hours over the weekend to apply an emergency security patch and we know this was very inconvenient for our users. Now that Learn is in the cloud, most work like this can be done behind the scenes with little or no downtime. When downtime is required, it is scheduled for times when we hope it will impact as few users as possible and we try to widely communicate it in advance so that students studying in other time-zones or those who are night owls are disrupted as little as possible.
Our upgrade to Learn Ultra starts on the 28th of June this year when we turn Ultra Base Navigation on. We do need downtime for this – we are doing a lot of configuration of the VLE in the background and the downtime gives us some space to do this without worrying about people using the system. When we make it available again, the entry pages will look a bit different (see Stuart’s Ultra Base Navigation blog post) but unless you are an early adopter, your course sites won’t be affected. The change to courses will happen for academic year 2023/24. We will be sending out lots of communications about the changes over the next month or so.
I am delighted that our upgrade to Learn Ultra is effectively providing us with a new VLE but with the advantage that our data doesn’t need to move. We manage Learn data closely. The same data is collected and processed, still safely stored in the EU. The administrative part of the system doesn’t change and we don’t need to re-negotiate our contract or rewrite our data protection compliance paperwork, it’s all exactly the same. It means we won’t lose access to any of our historic, archived course sites from previous academic years, but we get to take advantage of a more usable, accessible and mobile friendly user-interface plus some cool new features for the new Curriculum Transformation programme. I particularly like the new course overview page which allows you to easily search and filter your course list and the ability to create a recording to show other users how to pronounce your name (both coming with UBN).
If you have any questions about the upgrade and would like to find out more about the data and security and accessibility of Learn Ultra, please contact us via our email address: LearnFoundations@ed.ac.uk.
Karen Howie
Karen Howie is the Head of Digital Learning Applications and Media in the Learning, Teaching & Web (LTW) Directorate of Information Services (IS). She joined IS in summer 2018, coming from the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, where she was an IT Manager with a particular interest in learning using technology.
