The Staff Engagement Survey’s latest iteration was run in February-March 2025. I am pleased that Learning, Teaching and Web (LTW) had a survey response rate of 77%, higher than in 2023 (63%). This is also a much better response rate than the overall University (42%), and higher than ISG as a whole (75%). Overall, the …
Category: People, Place and Work
revisiting playful engagement
You may have seen a recent WonkHE article about playful leadership The case for playful leadership | Wonkhe It announces a new research project called Re:PLAY * and I am pleased to say that ISG University of Edinburgh is a partner in this research. It was interesting to me that when the ISG directors had …
Re-Opening the Eleanor Ormerod Room
I was very pleased to add another space named for inspirational women in STEM to our collection. Celebrating the re-opening of the Eleanor Ormerod Training room in the University of Edinburgh’s Main Library was fairly simple since Eleanor’s info board was already in this room, The LST team have refitted the room and installed lovely …
nice weather for ducks
On some of the hottest days of the year this week, I ventured southwards for two conferences, both featuring birds and both styled in hot pink. EchoExperience25 at the University of Nottingham https://info.echo360.com/attendee-hub-echoexperience-emea and UCISA Women in Technology in Liverpool WiT25 – UCISA At WiT Katie and I spoke about what works in our …
A Field Guide to Working in Higher Education
I am pleased to get my hands of a copy of this new book A Field Guide to Working in Higher Education The book is designed to support new lecturers who are joining HE from a background in a professional area or career rather than a career in academia. These new teachers draw on different …
how does your garden grow online?
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Delivering a University Web Strategy
The University Web Strategy (https://edin.ac/web-strategy-2018) identified a programme of activities, including the development of new web publishing tools or web publishing platform. “There is a fragmentation of technology, working methods and standards, which leads to uneven and, in some cases, broken user journeys.” – University Web Strategy The strategy stated that “it is important to recognise that technology is …
hoarding behaviour online
Hoarding and storage of old stuff indefinitely is a challenging user behaviour for several of our platforms. Cloud storage costs the university money. Users may be unaware of the need to align with data protection rules and to reduce our impact on the environment, every little bit helps and we have a huge amount of …