I was delighted to be invited as to National College of Ireland to speak as part of their ‘Assuring Quality in Fully Online Programme Delivery’ event last week. A lovely excuse to visit Dublin again. I chose a gardening theme which enabled me to talk about the time it takes to grow online learning and …
Author: mhighton
adult Jewish human female
It was my honour this weekend to be part of a Bat Mitzvah ceremony for the daughter of one of my oldest friends. The Bat Mitzvah girl has grown into an engaging, lively, curious and clever young woman and it was lovely to see her take this step into adulthood as she comes of age. …
media, AI and students
I am pleased to be able to offer paid work to 20 student interns to work in ISG as captioners. Alongside AI tools which generate automated captions and transcripts, the human captioners ensure that the standard of quality is good enough to support students with hearing difficulties. This semester (to 5th March) they have …
International Women’s Day 2025
It was my pleasure to sit on a panel of women leaders talking about our careers in tech. We had a friendly audience and the event was very well organised by Ellen, Fiona and Katie. One of the questions from the floor was about women who have inspired us, and we all chose women who …
renewing senior CMALT
I am pleased to have passed the peer assessment for the renewal of my Senior CMALT. It didn’t take very long for the assessment to happen, for which I am grateful.
The fact that I do this openly on my blog and no special log-ins or access is req…
Saying goodbye to VLEs we have loved.
I have written before about the sad death of Aggie Booth and the end of Bodington VLE. Now it is time to wave goodbye to University of Oxford’s WebLearn. There is a celebratory event this week to remember our time working with WebLearn and all the support and innovations we shared in running and using …
The role of profiles
Currently, all staff members within the University are able to create a profile on EdWeb which enables them to present personal information, including biographical and contact details in a number of fields. This allowed information to be shared across multiple pages from a single source by adding the staff’s unique user number (UUN). Colleagues were …
technology is ‘what we can learn to do’
Ursula Le Guin once said ‘We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do‘. Last year more than 5000 people at University of Edinburgh showed up to learn new digital skills. 5210 to be exact. We ran more workshop events than ever before: 604, and we reduced …
achievements using AI
As you know, in December each year we do a round up of achievements over the last six months. Here’s a summary of the LTW achievements and initiatives from winter 2024, condensed into ten ‘lively’ bullet points by ELM AI: Edtech Ecosystem Expansion: Launched a new short courses platform, successfully integrating it into our existing edtech …
problems with lecture recordings?
People said our lecture recording wasn’t working properly. So we checked a thousand recordings. This is what we found: (Numbers given are out of one thousand and there is a percentage summary table at the end.) Empty room or blank recording. 98 instances where the room was booked and a recording scheduled, but no lecture …
SADIE: Scoping AI Developments in Edtech at Edinburgh University
I wrote a a while back about the start of our SADIE project looking at AI in the third party systems we provide for our students and staff at University of Edinburgh. Educational technology (EdTech) services have not been immune to the excitement and rushing wave of AI adoption. It is important for learning technologists …