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 …
Category: People, Place and Work
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 …
Evaluating VLE change
The University of Edinburgh’s Learn Ultra upgrade aimed to enhance the virtual learning environment (VLE) to better support the diverse student body and align with other strategic initiatives and objectives. The Learn platform hosts over 6,000 courses with an average of 39,000 daily logins from students engaged in on-campus, online, and hybrid studies. The Learn …
summer migrations
In LTW we meet in person twice yearly for LTW All Staff meetings and our summer gathering this year takes place next week at the recently opened Bessie Watson Lecture Theatre at the Outreach Centre. There will presentations from colleagues, group exercises and snacks. Every 6 months I ask each of the LTW Heads to …
who learns online and who attends class?
We have been looking at the data about students attending skills courses. At University of Edinburgh students have a choice of whether to work through online materials in LinkedIn Learning at their own pace or to attend synchronous teacher-led sessions with our Digital Skills Training team, in person or via webinars. The data show that …
Short Courses Platform
Our new Short Courses Platform has met its first major milestone. We have 18 early adopter courses and over 250 learners enrolled and using the new learning environment. This allowed us to establish and test the basic platform configuration including notifications, basic learner/course set up, as well as the courses templates, training and guidance. This …
International Women’s Day 2024-Bessie Watson
My honour to open the Bessie Watson Lecture room on International Women’s day. Beautiful ribbons in green, white, purple and red! Not yet 100 years. Thank you to Lauren Johnston-Smith Lesley Greer, Katie Grieve Karen Howie Ellen Groen, Susanne Knowles for organising and Gillian Kidd for the fabulous artwork. These women have got the skills …
Building a new learning platform for University of Edinburgh
It’s not often you get to start from scratch putting together a new learning platform for a University. Most learning technologists and digital leaders have experienced the procurement of a replacement VLE, or a migration or upgrade. It is rare that we get to work with partners to design from the start, thinking about the …
improving accessibility
Every year we take a snapshot of accessibility in our VLE. Over the summer 3,508 documents across 1,441 courses from across the University were reviewed against a defined selection of accessibility criteria by our excellent team of interns. The results were encouraging: 87.6% of documents reviewed were named appropriately (i.e. so that users can anticipate …