Last week I attended the Digifest 2024. It’s nice to see some old peers and meet new people in person, and mostly support my colleagues (Dr David Pike and Alina Bajgrowicz) to present “Engaging students and staff with generative AI ethical dilemmas”.
Here I jot down some key takeaways. A few key speakers call themselves as Futurists. There were highlights on ‘community‘, ‘environment‘ and ‘immersion‘. For example, the 17 goals released by the United Nations, which well linked to our recent Academy for Learning and Teaching Excellence talk event about climate change and the use of En-ROADS Simulator. What can we do as an individual about our space environment, where 50k objects (4k satellites) in the space that can affect us? Dr Moriba Jah raised the issues of space leftover objects, and cleaning them is very costy. But I wonder why did human being generated these objects initially. Shouldn’t the ones who generated them take the responsibility for cleaning their leftover objects?
A few important but not new things are below that I should remind myself of more often:
In life/work, we should try not taking ‘assumptions’. This is quite hard as it connects to our prior knowledge and experience. I think it’s a challenge to our cognition ability, from awareness to consciously making changes.
Nowadays with online communications and mobile phones, persisting distraction is unavoidable. Don’t forget to use the Eisenhower Matrix.
Many things/ideas we already know. How we interpreting what we already know into future matters.
A few noticable changes are:
“Data analytics” is maturing, therefore enabler roles such as data engineers and data managers are required more for data governance and data interpretation.
By 2025 many new jobs need to be reskilled. More people will choose to work for themselves as entrepreneurs. “Adaptive to changes” and resilience are curcial in employability skills.
Four areas matter in workforce in future: Is it your interest, Are you good at it, Is it well paid and Does what you do make you feel adding value to the world.
Comparing to my Digifest experience in 2018, this time new technology (products) seems not so highligted/addressed. It has become a part of our work/life. There were hardly robots, big touch screen, and VR equipment.
Seems people didn’t tweet as much as before (the Covid time). I wonder if people have started to use LinkedIn more or have they moved to use other social media tools?
I haven’t written blogs for a while due to my job and personal conditions have been changing.
I realised the “Dunning Kruger effect” on me here as I thought I will keep writing and maintaining my blogs as usual. This over-positivity and self-ability estimation made me understand myself even better. I had draften a couple of posts in my spare time over the year, but haven’t completed them. Let’s not slip this one again.
With two previous attendance experience of ALT conferences, I know it’s often compact and full of interesting sessions (see the programme details). I favour the ALT community not only because the variety of professionals who openly share their practices, experiences, lessons, expertise and visions, but also due to its reflective approach to CMALT (It’s not a life certificate but an ongoing reflective practice). Despite my institution didn’t/does not support my SCMALT membership, I continuously encourage my colleagues to achieve one. “Reflection and review is a process that allows you to remain conscious of your performance over time.” (Clear, 2018, p.250).
It’s the 30th anniversary of ALT. There are also many changes about ALT. I am pleased to get the opportunity for attending the ALT conference online, which I unfortunately could not gain the benifits of meeting and interacting with old and new peers in person, however, it did allow me to be away from my work emails/Teams messages to some extent. It indeed allows me to gain insights, learn from peers, and check my practices.
Things I very appreciated are (only list a few here):
I can play the livestream sessions from the start if I was late to join (It’s like traveling through time, isn’t it?) or if I want to switch and join in a different session during a presentation. On the spot, it would be discouraged to leave one session room and go to another room in the middle of sessions because it’s impolite as well as can end up missing both session parts. The technology brings such flexibility well.
The platform strcuture is clear and easy to navigate.
The support guide sources are very useful.
It covers wide range of rich timely topics.
A few inconvenient things are:
The vevox.app seems not connecting to different sessions and I couldn’t check back a session’s questions page easily (I might not get how to use it in a right way.).
The slides related to each session are unvailable from the session box, which I haven’t worked out how to get them yet.
The online view of the presentation screens in some rooms was small and blurry. It’s difficult to see the content clearly.
In a couple of sessions, the sound was not recorded, and I didn’t know how to tell them.
I started to think more of leadership not only because of my position/team/institution but also because of the situations and culture that I wasn’t facing before.
Anne-Marie Scott‘s keynote speech covers her perspectives on leadership and her experiences and tips on leadership. There are not many new points but how these points are put into practice does matter a lot. These include taking a step at a time, planning for multiple scenarios, leading by developing others, qualifying your time, taking time for refill and refocus, and building trust. I learned that we need to accept the complexity and uncertainty in our work. To me, trying to simplify and change it is like fighting back against the pull of entropy.
From Tim Neumann, Rich Osborne, and Abbi Shaw’s session “Distributed Leadership in Digital Learning: Agile Adjustments, Brisk Breakthroughs and Controlled Chaos”, I learned an Agile project management approach. I quite like the reflective way of viewing how they have led digital learning strategy and practice changes.
“Digital shock’” was a new term to me even though its explanation wasn’t new to me. It’s like a buzzword in the conference, which made me think of the “digital natives”. I guess this term was from the JISC International students’ digital experiencereport. The session “Equity, diversity and inclusion: understanding international students’ ‘digital shock’” delivered by Elizabeth Newall, Tabetha Newman and Diana Catana and the Day 2 Keynote Student Panel presented many examples of “Digital shock”. Linking to my own expereince, after moving from a Russell Group university to a young culturally diverse university, I have been facing enormous requirements for improving digital learning services for “digital shock” students: 25% of the student population are international, 70% are mature returners to eduation, and 15% of the student are part-time. Many of them don’t have a laptop, need a lot of extra support for academic writing and understanding computer applications, or don’t know how to seek help. Recalling my own experiences as a mature interenational student 20 years ago, I had a good laptop, had a small cellphone without using wifi, had enough support of academic writing (not by using technologies like Turnitin, ChatGPT, Grammarly or Studiosity but from staff), and had a personal tutor. The big differences between that time and now perhaps are the mobile devices, VLE, social media, AI, and rapidly increasing requirements for good Internet and Wi-fi connections and digital literacy support.
From Coline Loughlin and Ben Parker’s session “Investigating the Relationship Between Virtual Learning Environment Engagement and Academic Outcomes Using Learning Analytics“, I learned that students spend 60 hours on average on viewing content, with a range of 12 hours to 75 hours. It’s interesting to see a pattern that they are trying to find. To the current stage, they noticed that over the point of 45 hours, the positive correlation between students’ spending time on learning content and their assessment results does not continue. It becomes inversion correlation. I’d like to follow their next stage research.
The VLE review seems a common institution task over the last 5 years, especially during the pandemic time, people have seen its importance and constraints. As I am involved in our institution’s VLE review, I was pleased to learn other institutions’ experiences, approaches, and lessons no matter what platform they changed to. Will Moindrot and Ben McGrae’s session “Diamond ranking and kaleidoscope eyes: engaging stakeholders to tune-in to our VLE review” caught my attention. I made a brief comparison as follows.
University of Liverpool
My institution
Moved from Blackboard to Canvas
Not decided yet
To engage student feedback, they provided £50 Amazon voucher for students.
Some of us felt £25 Amazon voucher was enough, but a colleague who undertakes many student studies suggested £50.
They provided Tier 1 24/7 support.
We discussed about 24/7 support and found in fact, it’s difficult for us. I learned that our libraries actually hardly have out-of-hour staff.
Different tools: buddycheck, H5P, Canvas Studio
Studiosity, Mentimeter, MyProgress
Innovative approaches: student partnership; p2p community of practice
Similar to them, we used surveys and focus groups.
Findings: 54% of students use their Canvas mobile app Students did not immediately see the VLE as a space for peer-to-peer engagement.
Emerging results: mobile learning, more VLE training
Their findings of student opinion on VLE
I agree the view that VLE review is not about platform itself. It’s about how you use the platform. People could use the same platform for different purposes and ways. We should focus more on the student experience. When we review a VLE, we should ask what our insitution defines our VLE role and what’s its identity. This is from the session “Digital Platforms – Mind the Gap” by Zac Gribble. I also enjoyed learning from the Day 3 Keynote speech from Satwinder Samra: “Keynote Collaborative Practice: Designing, Communicating and Diversifying Architecture”. His drawing of user experience illustrates what we are doing in our VLE review which is reviewing technologies use and supporting needs in the student journey.
In relation to digital transformation strategies and approaches, I got insights from Elaine Huber’s session “Leading transformational change in higher education: A critically reflective lens” (Note: they moved from Blackboard to Moodle). The Systemic Design Framework is new to me and I’m keen on learning from the Characteristics of Changemakers Series.
AI is another inevitable topic. In the session “Providing guidance and support to academic staff about the challenges and opportunities of generative AIs/LLMs”, Paul Finley and Matthew Wood shared three lessons in their practices of supporting AI uses.
Keep it simple.
Prepare for hooks, delivery, and materials. (I think their initial approach to encouraging staff to give AI tools a go is the same to what we are doing. However, I think we all need more designed activities for supporting students and engaging students as partners to explore AI uses.)
Planning for the long term.
The pre-recorded session “Corpus of student uses of AI foundation models to improve their assignment reports” from Eric Atwell and Noorhan Abbas presented how they designed assessments that studied Computing students’ experiences and opinions in exploring AI technologies to complete their assignments. The studies show the benefits and limits of using ChatGPT vs. BARD, Grammarly vs. Microsoft Word, and ChatGPT vs. Google Scholar, which is useful for us as we are studying our students’ experiences and views on using ChatGPT, Studiosity, and Grammarly.
I was thankful to hear student voices from the Day 2 Keynote Student Panel (the three students are from Russel goup universities). There are many valuable feedback and I joted down the ones that made me ponder further.
There needs more studies on understanding how online and viewing videos impact on student learning.
The need of more staff quick interactions.
The need of multiple ways of notifications about learning content updates.
The need of pre-support for digital skills before starting their university life.
Clarify course resources and requirements for technologies that are needed in study.
Not enough encouragement from staff to allow students speak up and ask for help.
Online and physical spaces for students to ask questions. (I know my previous insitituion has provided an online community plaform for all students and staff. I hope my current institution will reduce email uses for such purposes and provide a community platform too.)
It’s difficult to avoid using AI. The gap between students who have the knowledge of using AI well and who do not have knowlege of using it will become bigger and bigger.
Celia Popovic presented her study on staff’s opinions of turning on camera in online learning (see the session “Selfie Generation: but not in class”). I quoted the information from her abstract as follows. I’d agree that “… camera use is treated by instructors as a proxy for student engagement“. To be honest, I think there are more complicated elements behind the scene. For example, when with some specific people in the online session, poor Internet connections or solw computer devices, how much interaction it requires, encouragement to students, consistent guide to online etiquette across all online sessions, the insititution culture and so on. Based on my own experience of online meetings, people did not turn on camera each time. If it’s a webinar or one presenter leads a talk, most people will turn off the camera tacitly and when they speak, many of them will turn on their camera. If it’s a small group discussion, the people who don’t turn on the camera the first time tend to never turn on their camera. I presume in an online meeting that requires attendees’ interaction and input, turning off the camera would bring unnecessary challenges to attendees who have a hearing impairment. With my personal bias, turning off camera in a meeting with someone at the first time and not explaining why is unprofessional behaviour and disengagement attitude.
Reasons cited by students for turning off their cameras include (Castelli and Sarvary, 2021, Hariharan and Merkel, 2021): • Concern with appearance • Privacy, such as family or living arrangements visible • Discomfort with being looked at constantly • Doing the same as everyone else • Being judged for their behaviour (eg non-course related activities)
We use ‘EdTech‘, ‘digital technology’ and ‘learning technology’ interchangeably. We continuously face the tasks of procuring, selecting, evaluating, and developing technologies for supporting education needs. Anne-Marie Scott’s session “5 Things You Need to Know Before You Buy Edtech” was another wonderful presentation that shared tips of supporting EdTech and made me ponder our practice more.
It’s surely not enough to cover everything I learned from the 3-day conference in a blog post. I appreciate peers took the time to share their practices, projects, tips and insights. I appreciate ALT organised people in the EdTech area together, which allowed me to see the trend/changes, challenges, solutions, and possibilities and to reflect on my own practices. Congradulations to the ALT awards winners, who are excellent exemplars in improving edcuation.
One of the benefits we have since pandemic last year is many conferences/events that were used to be fewer chances for us to attend due to budget have become free for attending online. #BbWorld21 is one of them. I want to express my gratefulness and appreciation for these organisers. They have made a lot of effort on supporting wide communities, and provided opportunities for us to carry on knowing the latest research, new development, use cases, challenges, solutions, trend, and take time to rethink our own practice. Indeed great thanks to the presenters too.
BbWorld 2021 was taken on 13-15 and 20-22 July. Because of different time-zones, most sessions were at afternoons and in evenings in BST. I realised that I have already accumulated a list of need-to-watch-later recordings from different resources, so I attended a few sessions that I thought would be the most useful for and relevant to my work in hand, and gave up most sessions that were of my interest. This is one of tips I learned and made changes of – to use my time more efficient and live a mindset of not feeling that I have missed important information. As I know that selected sessions and content will be available in the event platform in the next 30 days, and later will be available in the Blackboard Community site.
My first focus was the Roadmap sessions as they provided the latest updates from the supplier. It’s vital for us to learn if any expected functionalities will be delivered and we can feed them into our own action plan. I like the plan of development was presented by time ranges: current available, 1-3 months, 3-6 months, and 6 months above. However, I have to check back roadmap recordings later if I want to find some specific development information. I was thinking if Blackboard could provide an online active Roadmap version (something like this), it might be even better for all customers to have an overview and find a plan of a specific functionality when they want to. I’m sure internally Blackboard has such methods of developing products.
I attended three sessions in this topic of Accessibility and Ally, from Michael Shaw (University of Lincoln), Fiona MacNeill (University of Brighton) and a group of Accessibility Champions (Adam Elce, Claire Gardener, Kristen McCartney-Bulmer and Ben Watson) who shared their views/experiences.
The University of Lincoln developed an Accessibility Toolkit, which is for supporting digital content accessibilities. I have seen some universities have provided such support resources. I think in my institution, I developed a guide as a tech guide to Ally which is for VLE content, rather than for wider digital content. Our web team developed some guide to accessibility for web content. What my institution needs to improve is to combine materials created by different support teams together, redesign and make them as an institutional accessibility support source.
Seems many universities have provide Accessibility mandatory training as a staff CPD course. This is a good way to make staff be aware of why and how to improve accessibility quickly. I think there are some well-developed Accessibility training courses that universities can adopt or introduce to their staff if they haven’t had developed their own Accessibility training courses.
UX design is not new, however it seems that people have talked about it increasingly since last year. I first learned it from one of my courses – Interaction Design in 2003, which made me realised cognitive and social issues. In the Ally European User Group meeting of March 2021, Fiona MacNeill presented her experience of supporting Blackboard Ally adoption in the University of Brighton. She shared more in the #BbWorld21 too. I have learned from her presentations:
Project planning template and interactive whiteboard tool – Mural template.
Engaging activities – using escape rooms to bring learners into the accessibility learning journey.
If you are interested in UX design and interaction design, the UDL Guidelines and IDEO may be helpful as a start.
Other popular topics include Application integration, Data Analytics and Blackboard Ultra courses.
I haven’t used the Developer Documentation site yet, it is definitely very useful for people who support integration between systems and understand how to use Blackboard data and reports. Blackboard provides regular training webinars, and supporting courses via the Blackboard Academy for people to learn the Ultra course. They are good resources if your institution does not provide training. I do recommend people register Blackboard Community and the #BbWorld21 to check any topics that are of interest to you.
At the beginning, I was thinking to use “online education” in the post title rather than “education”. However nowadays in HE, how many courses/programmes without online activities? Do I need to specifically say “online”? Cardiff University CESI colleagues have put great effort on making the Teaching and Learning Conference 2021 happen online. A big thumb up to them. I have managed to attend some sessions today. Here to jot down my takeaways.
To discuss the online education, two hours were not enough. Considering the wonderful keynote talk from Dr Tim Fawns, I’d like to reflect on three things particularly.
Self-directed learning
Self-directed learning (also self-regulated learning) is one of the theories I like to use in my practice, especially when I generate support materials. Tim mentioned it in the teaching context. Although I don’t teach, I embed this idea into my design and often explain to people why I designed it in such way. I expect learning materials that learners visit are latest, accessible, easy to follow, and mostly relevant to their context. This may not be related to their specific discipline/study, but absolutely about the feature/functionality that they use, for instance, it helps them to learn what could happen if they do not click the “Submit” button after uploading their Turnitin assessment. Tim pointed out that we should not leave the teaching materials for students to self learn, rather we need to tell students what it is, what they could do and how they may go through the materials in line with the topics. I nodded indeed. I often provide feedback channel with support materials and track the usage data regularly to see how users have interacted with the materials. However, unlike teaching and learning, the challenge for us is that most users are unwilling to spend time on telling us the details of their experience and what exactly are the barriers for their use. Apart from I take the ownership of this process and make it as a research project, then I could go to collect such data from users. Otherwise there is little opportunity for us to really look into the outcome of self-directed learning in our practice. This is also an ongoing challenge for IT – how much research we would have time to do when evaluating our delivery design in supporting teaching and learning.
Technology & pedagogy
Over the years, people criticise that technology drives pedagogy. Although I work in IT, I never felt so. With working experience in software development, we always take users’ requirements the first. So from my bias view of supporting users, the software is formed by users. Therefore systems we support are largely shaped and improved by what users wanted it to be. On another hand, I do see the impact of technology on people (education), such as who don’t need mobile phone and the Internet over last year? Technology impacts our methods. I see them interplay. I guess the view of “Tech drives pedagogy” was related to how much control/administration that users have and who have the ownership of evaluating, purchasing and supporting technology. I like Tim’s model of technology and pedagogy (see below tweet).
I have been guilty myself of simplifying things by saying ‘pedagogy before technology’ but really like @timbocop’s ‘entangled’ model #LTCU2021pic.twitter.com/G0pssvMaMP
I agree Tim’s viewpoint of honesty. I think no matter it’s teaching or supporting teaching, honesty is a necessary rule if we really want to engage the learners. I mean the teacher and the student are both human. Honesty is the invaluable trait in building human relationships. The purpose of education is to gain knowledge, to learn skills, to grow, and to explore unknown. When I was a child, I had a mindset that a teacher is not for questing how much they know, a professor knows everything of the subject; a doctor knows everything of their field. Questioning a teacher in classroom is strange. I think I started to learn critical thinking and understand why professors encouraged us to inquire when I took my Masters programme. I wish I had been led to see honesty of whom a teacher is in an early age.
More
In addition, I have enjoyed a lot of Allan Theophanides‘ “Pecha Kucha” presentation of A-Z of LT. May be because the topic is so close to my daily work. I like the little timer on each page and the simplicity of how he explained the technologies.
Since last year, there have been rapid increasing opportunities for us to participate in online conferences and activities in relation to eLearning. This kind of free availability never happened before the Pandemic outbreak. The good is that I have many upcoming options of learning opportunities, such as to learn the latest good research results, practice cases, recent issues/trend/concerns/discussions. I take them as CPD opportunities. The bad is to hugely challenge efficiency and productivity regarding my time and workload. Considering my time, energy and wellbeing, I have given up some. I was off twitter for about 7 months although I use Twitter as a rich learning resource. I had to tell myself it’s ok to miss some resources from there.
Looked back my calendar, and noticed that I have attended at least one conference/event that has included the topic of accessibility monthly since January. There are more forthcoming.
January – Cardiff University IT Staff Conference 2021
The Kent Digital Accessibility Conference 2020 was like yesterday, and I took some time to attend the Kent Digital Accessibility Conference 2021 (You can get all session details from this website). I have to admit that I have learned a lot from the University of Kent Digital Enhanced Education webinars and the Digital Accessibility annual conferences.
Accessibility is in my daily practice and over a year I have made changes as follows.
Remind colleagues to check and improve accessibility of their documents if I notice a problem.
Suggest people to be aware of the accessibility issues and improve content accessibility if I assist their online courses.
Keep my knowledge updated and keep learning from communities and accessibility experts.
Share resources in our internal community.
#KentDigitalAccessibility2021 was a super accessibility event. I’m grateful of the organiser and presenters’ effort and time. I was able to attend all sessions in the morning and one session at afternoon. Here I recap what I learned from the event.
First, there are many support that we can get to help our institutions to improve (digital) accessibility. Although I don’t work in a role of accessibility support particularly, accessibility is with everyone for everyone. This is not new from this event, but I found the Accessibility maturity framework developed by Alistair McNaught Consultancy and AbilityNet is a very supportive tool that helps institution leaders to define what need to change. I learned more from talks from Dan Clark, Michael Vermeersch, George Rhodes and Richard Morton.
From Michael Vermeersch’s talk, I know that I have recognised Microsoft accessibility features and are using them. I recently encountered an issue of “Check Reading Order” warning in a file, which I found it’s time consuming to fix if it’s a complex diagram in PowerPoint with many animations on the diagram items. I was glad to see Michael demonstrated these features. Furthermore, I learned the Microsoft developed support materials. A diagram of how to enable accessibility would be useful for us to check how we have done so far.
From George Rhodes’ talk, I learned findings of how Accessibility Statement prepared in FE. Again it addressed the “lack of initial individual engagement”.
AllAble finding VLE in FE
AllAble research finding mystery shopper
AllAble research actions so far
From Richard Morton’s talk, I learned the mobile apps exceptions complying with WCAS 2.1 level A and level AA. It is an app or not an app. How to test mobile apps. What happens about non-compliant apps and sites, and CDDO resources.
The criteria do not apply to apps
Second, understanding student needs is key. I don’t normally have opportunities to work with students and see how they use technologies and know barriers that technologies/content bring to them in relation to accessibility. Therefore, talks like what @Paul_GeorgEnder and Wayne Wilsdon have given about their experience and thoughts are very welcome. This caused me to think two things below.
They need to use assistive technologies. In the session I noticed that the camera facing Wayne Wilsdon was not in a good angle. However he wouldn’t know what was the right angle due to blindness apart from someone told him. No one next him could give him a hand neither. So I was thinking – Don’t we have AI technologies such as eye movements, face recognition and video surveillance? If the camera could recognise his position, adjust angle automatically and captured his movements for this presentation purpose, it would improve everyone’s online experience, wouldn’t it?
I would expect in future there is a conference that only students as presenters to show us their accessibility awareness, their experience of the impact by accessibility improvement, their research and stories about accessibility.
Third, as usual, some new resources to read and take some into my practice.
GDS (Government Digital Service) Accessibility videos. “The accessibility monitoring and accessibility capability teams and functions have all moved from GDS to CDDO” quoted from Richard Morton’s presentation. CDDO refers to the Central Digital and Data Office.
Thank Blackboard and the community. This is the second time that I attended the Blackboard TLC Europe online (26-28 May #TLCEUR2021) due to the pandemic impact. Appreciated the opportunity. The advantages of attending it include:
The event was organised as half-days across three days which could leave me another half days to deal with my daily work.
It’s free for anyone who are interested in Blackboard to attend. It helped people who didn’t have opportunities to attend this kind of conference because of funding limitations, far distance, time and so on. All session recordings are available for us to play back (until 24 June 2021).
Gaining ideas about some of the work I am doing. Learning from peers about how they have tackled issues and supported teaching and learning during the lockdown situation. Catching up the recent uses and topics that I don’t have many opportunities to notice. Getting inspired by their work, experience and stories. I saw self-motivation, curiosity, bravery and collaboration from Helen Sharman‘s talk. I saw zest, self-regulation, positive and flourish from Charlie Cannon‘s talk.
I wouldn’t be able to attend all sessions in the conference. Here I highlight those helped me the most.
Assessment
Requirements for supporting eAssessment and online procurement have been ramping up since last year, not only because the teaching and learning move to be online and distant, but also the possibilities of adopting new approaches. We need to redesign assessment, feedback and procuring approaches and review its policies, process and technologies. The discussions about “Assessment FOR learning or Assessment OF learning?” made me think more about why do we assess learning, the tools: Turnitin, Blackboard assessment tools, Xerte LIT/xAPI, Respondus and Möbius, how we have used them together to support different types of assessment, what are the constraints and what are changing. The resources below are added into my following-up reading list.
The MoCo user group is one of my favourite groups in the Blackboard Community. Amy Eyre and Helga Gunnarsdottir have made a lot of effort on leading the group. I have got a lot of support about Collaborate Ultra from the group. Helga’s talk about a UWE’s solution of supporting assessment using Collaborate Ultra showed an innovative example of what we could create based on users’ requirements. The UWE’s own developed Collaborate Assessment Tool bridged the gap that the current Collaborate Ultra cannot do and an inconsistent workflow due to technology limitations between online sessions, assessment and gradebook. The Live Assessment Decision Tree (made by Xerte) is also a showcase of how Xerte technology can be used to assist users to choose a suitable technology support solution.
Data and Analytics
Data is powerful when it’s used for the purpose. Students can use it to learn their own learning progress and be more aware of their learning experience. Educators can use it to identify learning issues and analyse the effectiveness of a course design. Managers can use it to investigate a tool’s adoption and monitor the use of the service. Data-driven approaches became a trend. For me, it is what we often called something “evidence-based”. The key of using data is how we can retrieve data from different relevant systems easily and securely and ethically, and flexibly customise them to be presented as different formats that fit into the users’ demanding. This is an area that I’m interested in exploring sooner.
Dr Charles Knight‘s talk (University of Salford) has shed light on the issues on understanding users’ real requirements when providing Blackboard’s Data and Analytics solutions. Very useful advice.
The pandemic lockdown assisted the rapid changes of online learning. It required vendors to improve the products responsively and quickly. The Blackboard Roadmap session always provides us an idea of what would be delivered and considered so that we could made corresponding decisions and work out solutions according to the institution’s strategy. It’s very clear from Bill Ballhaus‘s talk that SaaS, Blackboard Data, Ultra course experience, personalised learning are their focus. I was delighted to see the improvement of these features below and expect the upcoming release.
System stability when supporting hugely increased uses
Proctoring Framework – Ultra Course View (now)
MS Teams Integration – Ultra Course View (Pilot, now)
Audio/Video Feedback – Peer and Course Announcements (1-3 months)
Gradebook use improvement (1-3 months)
Collaborate Gallery View to students and side by side with content (1-3 months)
Automated Captioning with Collaborate (1-3 months)
Maximum upload file size limit (3-6 months)
Pronouns, Name Pronunciation, Preferred name (3-6 months)
WYSIWYG Instructor Feedback (3-6 months)
Blackboard Learn group integration with breakout groups and Collaborate (3-6 months)
Last but not least, I think people (especially those who use technologies daily) could stay clam when technology failed. Perhaps this is a notable outcome of remote online working since pandemic outbreak.
I become more and more interested in Accessibility and assistive tools since my mother started to say more often that she cannot hear what I said over video calls and she cannot see clearly if she is not close to the screen, which my father seems ok at present.
I’d like to understand her experience and see if there are good solutions to help her. Of course someday I may have similar experience due to ageing, accident, heredity, or misunderstand an interactive design, who knows.
The accessibility helpful resources that I regularly learn from are below:
Last week, two conferences were available for me: Gregynog Colloquium Online (10-11 June) and #KentDigitalAccessibility2020 (9-11 June 2020). I prioritised my time to attend the second conference. If it’s not the lockdown situation, unlikely I had the opportunity. Thus very appreciate the University of Kent has organised the online event. I realised that a lot of changes I need to take into practice and more good tools I can use immediately even though I have started slowly.
First and foremost, I started with “creating/editing content” as this probably is the most common thing I do daily. About emails, I have already been very careful of using colours based on previous learning. However, I don’t think I checked the links and the attached images a lot, so from now I remember to give more meaningful link description and image names.
what is an accessible link for everyone?
I will think twice when I generate a PDF file. One thing I am happy that I have done recently is to move many PDF guide files into one web object (using Xerte). I checked the improved guide (it’s about Blackboard Collaborate Ultra) using the Accessibility Insights for Web. This handy tool can tell me right away what accessibility issues that my web pages have. So I improved the colour contrast of the links and the footer. It’s so common to forget the colour contrast problem when we look at the whole web page layout and content. Meanwhile, I checked my blog. I now know the green link colour (#28B463) does not meet the minimum ratio requirement for 4.5:1. As I’m using a free WordPress theme, I only can change the colours partially, but I have improved it to a higher ratio (5.1:1) rather than just using a colour that I like.
What’s so bad about PDF?
Over the past two months, I heard searchBOX from webinars. But I didn’t know what I can use it for. Thanks for Huw Alexander’s presentation in the conference, I learned that what textBOX does and the ideas behind when describing images. Definitely I will try the suggested ways to break down an image and see how to describe it.
Furthermore, I was surprised that there are so many tools that Microsoft and Google have provided to support accessibility and help us to improve accessibility (I mean for us who create digital content) that I haven’t noticed. I used the Word Check Accessibility often as it helps me to compare the results to Blackboard Ally feedback. I haven’t used the Dictate and Editor, Read Aloud features a lot. However, I tried Read Aloud as I feel it can help to free my eyes. Then I noticed that why a good link description is so crucial in the content. If it’s a URL format, it reads letter by letter. How terrible it is to hear a link by letters and how frustrated it is to not be possible to follow! It’s so easy to find a piece of inaccessible content. Well, it never can be done by one day. Let’s start from the Accessibility fundamentals and any new content that we need to generate from now on. Start small but consistent steps, such as adding ALT text to images, use colour contrast checker to check colours, providing meaningful links, use Accessibility checker or other tools to check the document accessibility.
To me, every session was useful in the three days conference. I do recommend people to check back the recordings.
In addition, apart from we, who create content, need to start create accessible digital content, teachers need to teach students accessibility as a part of their degree too. Below are two useful resources.
Who would know that the coronavirus changed the world and affected almost everyone’s life more or less.
I didn’t plan to attend this year’s Blackboard TLC Europe (18th May – 5th June), which supposed to be hosted in Amsterdam, during the time when I would have been exploring Tibet.
Well, then I got the chance to work from home (from 18th March) which avoided to cycle in the changeable UK weather and immediately became isolated (still not sure this is lucky or unlucky). I was able to attend online conferences which I wouldn’t have had chance to attend. Moreover, plenty free digital resources became available online.
It’s a kind of strange also because I received unexpected Skype messages, emails, alerts at any time once I was online. Hardly imagine that I talked to many unknown students and staff over online calls (especially oversea) in the past two months than I did in the past five years. What an amazing change!
I would say thanks to Blackboard first for making the TLC Europe free for anyone to join online.
I attended some sessions when I thought I could deal with multiple tasks at the same time, which was obviously not good. So I watched the recordings afterwards when I could. Here I’d like to highlight my key takeaways.
First, SaaS (Software as a Service) + Ultra experience is the way. It’s important work on our schedule. What works, what doesn’t and why on SaaS are the things I paid attention to. The Information Gathering for Migration source is particularly useful for us at this stage.
Second, Accessibility becomes more important than before (I mean “the old normal”) not only because of the regulation but also because of the virtual and digital environment. On 21st May, it’s the ninth Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Probably, I was too slow to notice this, it’s the “ninth” year! We have Blackboard Ally, but we need to make more people to start the first step to make the digital content accessible as soon as we can.
Third, Blackboard Academy Catalog is improved and there are more timely training courses for supporting Blackboard users. The conference sessions and details were published in a TLC Europe 2020 course via the website (Very different from previous conferences). However, it’s unavailable after the event ended, which means I cannot find the recording links to share and you are unable to view the recordings now. However, Blackboard provides many training sessions regularly, and if you missed one of the sessions, I’m sure you can contact the presenters, they are always helpful and like to share experience/ideas.
In addition, many of us have never had opportunity to attend the BbWorld conference. This year, the BbWorld + DevCon 2020 is scheduled on 6-22 July. It’s online and free for joining.
Three days after the conference, I still laugh and feel the fun when thinking about the real-time subtitles* (technology+live stenographers) in the speaking from Dr Malcolm Murray, Bill Ballhaus and Kathy Vieira; I still feel the inspiration and think the faintly visible ideas about what we can do when recalling the playful learning from Dr Katie Piatt‘s talk; I still feel the joy and encouragement from the vivid conversations and sessions with people from different institutions. Indeed the members of the Durham Centre for Academic Development deserve a big thumbs up and huge thanks.
Now I got a bit time to check my notes and the resources I couldn’t read thoroughly at the time.
My first purpose for attending the conference was to expand my knowledge and find solutions to problems we are facing (e.g., e-assignments, assistive technologies, Accessibility training and support, issues when adopting Ally, benefits and risks in moving to SaaS and Ultra). I always wished we could have done something differently quickly.
The accessibility is an inevitable task on our road-map and the conference theme focused on accessibility, which helped me to gain the most of it. Firstly, the Blackboard Ally Data workshop delivered by Nicolaas Matthijs was very helpful. Through a hands-on exercise to understand our institutional reports data in a comparison view have made more sense than just reading through the isolated reports. I learnt that we have used the type of PDF files a lot in our system, which means the accessibility score in our reports would be very different (i.e., lower accessibility scores) from those institutions that have used more of WYSIWYG types or other types. It’s good to know that on the Blackboard SaaS, the Ally reports will be a part of the Blackboard data which is available automatically. I wondered if we don’t have Ally but are on Blackboard SaaS, can we use the Ally institutional reports directly? It’s also good to learn that the most common difficult accessibility problems to support are below, which help us to prepare and provide more support for these issues.
internal templates – this requires all teams to check and update their existing templates.
headings problems – I experienced a problem myself recently
Secondly, I have realised the good work from the University of York in supporting Accessibility via Richard Walker‘s talk in the “Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations – November 2019 Update” webinar and Lilian Soon‘s presentation in the Ally User group 2019 November meeting. I also know Lilian’s excellent work together with Alistair Mcnaught and Ron Mitchell in the Future Teacher Talks. It’s nice to meet Lilian again in the conference and attend her workshop about using Kotter’s eight-step change process in improving accessibility support practice. I was dreaded when she showed a spreadsheet for checking their VLE accessibility without using Blackboard Ally based on their VLE Accessibility Review Guide**. It just looked like awfully a lot of manual work! We rely on Blackboard to provide an accessible platform and the Ally to help us identify accessibility problems. Of course things like the system outlook, the module template, the customised module menus and the embedded external content can be customised, accordingly such Accessibility Review Guide would be extremely useful. There were other useful resources from the University of York that I list here.Â
Thirdly, many people/institutions have done a great amount of work and shared their experience with us. I missed some interesting sessions, such as the “Aligning Microsoft Teams and Blackboard” presented by Claire Gardener, the “Enabling virtual classroom technology for the whole institution” presented by Tom Foster, and the #BbMOCO pre-conference workshop. I managed to reach the useful resources as follows.
Matthew Deeprose’s presentation about Blackboard Accessibility (115 pages!). There are many important highlights. The slides 16, 35, 46, 51, 66, 69, 79, 92 and 113 had called my attention particularly due to my support experience.
Definitely useful for us to understand the most common accessibility problem – contrast issues. The Contrast Ratio checking table is helpful, I make a note for my team. Also, I installed the Microsoft’s Accessibility Insights tool***, and found it’s very handy to check accessibility on a web page. I tried it on our Blackboard system and noticed it can check the third-party tool like the Eesysoft Support Centre too. One thing to remember is to refresh the page, otherwise, the marked-out checking results on the Eesysoft Support Centre window will not disappear after closing the window.
The Southampton’s branding provides a very clear guideline. I run a quick search from our University website and found the similar support information. Unfortunately, it’s not public-facing, so I am unable to share it.
I’m looking forward to seeing the enhanced ATbar being available in the Blackboard Community as I used it on my blog and CMALT site. I’m interested in how well it has supported users in Blackboard when thinking about the Blackboard’s own inconvenient settings – the ‘Change Text Size’ and the ‘High Contrast Setting’ via the Global menu.
Tim Smale’s blog post about the conference. This is very helpful as he noted some of my missed sessions, especially the Turnitin workshop. I don’t know how he had time to jot down the sessions. He must have noted things in his blog during the session.
My second purpose for attending the conference was to present our work with Eesysoft and share our experience with others. The key benefits for us to use the tool include:
to allow us to deliver contextual support in Blackboard easily (aiming for supporting learning design models and approaches into activities),
to understand how the system have been used (aiming for strategical evaluation, monitoring, cost-efficiency analysis), and
having the capability of intervention (either from the perspective of supporting teaching and learning enhancement or from the perspective of improving a service).
My third purpose for being the conference was to learn new things beyond my field and networking. I noticed that many attendees are working on CPD design and staff engagement (or having most relevant responsibilities for them). A successful sustainable service/support requires the organisational structure, the adopted service approaches, principles and leadership connected well. I feel it’s a bit magic that some universities could roll out Ally in a few weeks without delivering staff accessibility training at first and didn’t get many complaints as we thought it would be, and some universities treated Blackboard help materials support as a separate part from the IT service. One important impression I had was from what Dr Katie Piatt said, “… Probably I was senior enough to say …” when someone questioned her how they dealt with different voices about playful activities in VLE. Leadership is such a crucial element in innovation and changing management. Another good example of Ally support is from the University of Reading ****. It shows a support model of leading teams and their responsibilities clearly. Some people may see Ally is just a checking tool. I seem to take it as more than just another tool in Blackboard but a handy accessibility enhancement solution.
To be realistic and to not be overly eager to many fantastic ideas and possibilities, I reviewed my notes from the last year’s Blackboard TLC conference and again use the MoSCoW method to create a plan.
Must have
âž½ Review and improve Blackboard Collaborate Ultra support materials relating to accessibility and inclusivity.
âž½ Checking Ally(accessibility) support materials in Eesysoft and make the new structure available.
âž½ Improve the Blackboard Ally support materials for our IT staff, especially the information for supporting assistive tools, contrast ratio, mobile accessibility, and equations.
âž½ Blackboard Ally availability goes ahead
Should have
âž½ Comparison of Blackboard managed-hosting and SaaS, learn what SaaS does and doesn’t. Do we have resources ready?
âž½ Map out the Accessibility Support Staff Engagement teams, what we have and what we need to develop.
Could have
➽ Move to SaaS – to meet and discuss with the universities that have been on SaaS
Won’t have (this time)
âž½ Very accurate live captions – Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Skype, Panopto
NB:
* Providing accurate captions will be the upcoming task.
** The guide can be very useful for us when we are doing our VLE review.
*** I will improve the accessibility of my blog using the existing good tools.
**** Thanks for Anne-Sophie De Baets having taken the photo of ‘Ally – Staff Engagement from the University of Reading’. I couldn’t attend that session. I hope you don’t mind I keep it.
Finally, I must admit that the Durham University has put their heart and soul into the event. I had entirely enjoyed the time there, never thought we would be in a show of murder mystery when having a good meal in the Durham Castle.
The Blackboard TLC 2019 ends. Big thanks to Blackboard and the University of Northumbria for the collaborative conference, and the speakers who shared their experiences and stories. Now it’s the time to polish up my notes and reflect on my experience over the three busy days.
I think the key discussions are still around (1) user experience – accessibility and Ally, (2) learning analytics – (Blackboard) data and (3) the platform – SaaS & Blackboard Ultra.
I can’t recommend the Blackboard community groups enough. I found it’s a good way for me to learn solutions and new things about the technologies we support. It’s a repository where I can find useful support materials and ideas. It saves my time when I am able to reuse some excellent support materials. There are always one or a few peers to answer my questions and help me understand the tool and the design ideas behind. Congratulations to the MoCo User Group chairs Sarah Sherman (BLE) and Amy Eyre (University of York) who won the Blackboard Catalyst Award for Community Engagement.
Visions, why and how
Blackboard announced its EdTech platform which aims for supporting connected user experience, academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insights. The journey for us will be self-hosted service -> Blackboard managed-hosting -> SaaS -> Blackboard Utlra.Â
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The University of Northumbria presented their journey. I would say the most difficult part is to have a clear strategy as a guideline. I was very impressed with their rapid process of moving from Blackboard managed-hosting to Blackboard Ultra. Undoubtedly many teams have worked together to contribute to the successful transform.
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Revisit the known
From learning design to students experience investigation, many useful cases and experiences were shared. It’s always nice to recall the resources again.
First, the keynote from Professor Kevin Bell (Western Sydney University) called us to rethink learning, learners’ experience and what skills students need to have. It brought concepts, designs and practices of gamification (the idea, the book), ubiquitous content (a quote about information), story arc (also narrative arc) (an explanation, storytelling), intrinsic motivation (an explanation, Dan Pink’s TED talk about motivation), credentialing mistakability (Professor James Arvanitakis’ talk) and more. I quite like the innovative example of UNIV 291 Courses. Making students take the ownership of the learning activities and feel they are an important part of the group that affect the activity outcomes. Gaming, is very psychological. It’s about curiosity, control, challenge, enjoyment, self-value, and satisfaction.
  Â
Second, what is learning capture? Jim Emery (Glasgow Caledonian University) presented their project that encourages us to think out of the box. Don’t just create videos of lectures.
lecture capture vs Learning capture
examples of learning capture
lecture capture resources
Third, Blackboard Data is a new unified, cross-portfolio data and reporting platform. It is a SaaS platform itself and has been integrated with Blackboard SaaS only. Obviously, Cardiff University VLE won’t be able to use it yet. Here are the platform displayed by Rachel Scherer (Analytics Product Director) and the Blackboard Binding Corporate Rules (BCRs) for authorisation.
Fourth, Brian Finnegan (Director of Educational Consulting) introduced the new Blackboard Training and Professional Tool. It was designed to support requests such as pre-sessional students to use VLE, a way of supporting prospective students, pre-enrolment engagement, viewing students journey and so on. However, we have a student journey tool. Do we want another tool? I think the key problem here is not the tool, but the management policy and workflows, the data flows and the regulations of managing and using the data. Â Â Â
Last but not least, Karen Howie and Paul Smyth (University of Edinburgh) showed how they have improved student experience with VLE, which focused on 6 streams: VLE templates, template checklists and guidance, redesign of training, agreeing consistent terminology, automation of processes and finally measuring and evaluating the impact of the project. They have used the Elements of User Experience framework (developed by Jesse James Garrett) to improving their service based on their findings.
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To-do and To-ponder
One good thing about attending conferences is to get great insights, ideas and inspirations. However it’s not good to have many wanted things and ideas together at the same time. I use the MoSCoW method to help my next-step plan.
Must have
âž½ Blackboard Collaborate Ultra – A “First step of delivering online session checklist” (ideas from the Amy Eyre’s Online Workshop/Seminar Requirement Form, the University of York)
âž½ Review our existing support materials and improve the icons. (ideas from Steinar Hov and Paul Ole Hegstads’ Eesysoft experience of using Eesysoft, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Should have
âž½ Comparison of Bb managed-hosting and SaaS, learn what SaaS does and doesn’t. Do we have resources ready?
âž½ Revisit our design (surveys and communication methods) of evaluating user experience of VLE (ideas from Karen Howie and Paul Smyth’s research and improvement work, the University of Edinburgh)
âž½ Explore Blackboard Coursesites
âž½ Check GDPR (T&C) for our supported learning technologies
Could have
âž½ Blackboard Ally – to review the Ally report my colleague has written.
âž½ Move to SaaS – to meet and discuss with the universities that have been on SaaS
Won’t have (this time)
âž½ Blackboard Data
âž½ Blackboard Ultra
More…
With speaking to people from different universities, it’s fairly clear that the VLE system support and the academic activities support relating to use VLE must work closely. Those who have been in the same team/division work more productively and feel less stressed.
It’s very nice to see old peers and meet new people. Interestingly it’s the first time in the UK someone asked me if I have a business card. No, no, since LinkedIn, Twitter or personal web pages are well used, I am a visible/searchable person online. Newcastle is a wonderful city. I had taken the opportunity to see the beautiful seven bridges in the sunrise and the Angle of the North in the sunset. I was very impressed with the City Campus East, Northumbria University (though the lecture halls do not have charging points). I also wonder if students will miss the support posters in the lift. I didn’t attend the DevCon, some interesting information can be seen via #BbTLCEUR.
Web n' Circle 