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 system.

The Leeds and Oxford teams met in Oxford in 2005 to discuss development of Bodington in collaboration with Sakai. When Leeds University opted in 2006 to select a proprietary system (Blackboard) for their next VLE, Oxford was left as the sole large-scale developer of Bodington and this situation was untenable. It was at this point that Oxford decided to seek an alternative platform (with a bigger and better community) and chose Sakai Learning Management System, deploying it as WebLearn in  2008.

WebLearn Sakai was first installed at University of Oxford in March 2007 and I joined from University of Leeds in 2008, when it was just a baby.

My memories of working with the WebLearn Team at Oxford are from 2008 to 2014 when I was Head of the Learning Technologies Group (LTG) and then Director of Academic IT (Learning and Teaching).

  • Working with really talented open source development teams. Adam, Mathew, Colin, Roger and Colin taught me most of what I learned about open source and the potential for using technologies in unusual ways. I attended several Sakai conferences with them over the years and there always seemed to be people who really cared about the systems they built and the community involved in developing the product.  The nice thing for me about WebLearn was that it was flexible enough to not be built on the same assumption as the large proprietary systems. Oxford at the time was not driven by a module catalogue which rolled over and refreshed every term. It was based around the teaching which was done by colleagues over many years and with different students groups. The starting place- that one goes to Oxford to ‘study with’ -puts the academic colleague at the centre of the teaching and builds the online spaces around them. Some colleagues at Oxford chose to have a place in the VLE for all their teaching, with resources for first years, third years, post graduates etc  grouped within that. I was pleased that we were able to build that for them. It was nice that we were not in a ‘technology says no’ conversation’.
  • The Sakai Community was for me, a place to meet some very interesting colleagues and researchers, some of whom I still count amongst my friends (looking at you Nynke, Michael and Alannah). It was also a place with some big personalities, Fun evenings with Michael, Ian, Nathan and Dr Chuck.
  • I was also pleased in LTG and OUCS to have talented researchers who worked closely with as the WebLearn team to think about what we could discover about how VLEs and OER could support student learning. Liz, Joanna and Jill really were ahead of their time in bringing a bit of academic rigour to what we were doing.
  • The WebLearn training and support teams made sure our VLE met users needs and Fawei continued to promote and celebrate each use in departments and colleges. Adam has been continuously blogging it since 2009 2009 September | WebLearn Blog and projects using WebLearn regularly featured in the OxTALENT awards.

In recent years, after I left in 2014 to join University of Edinburgh, Oxford changed VLE again and opted for Canvas.  People sometimes forget that when we move to a new VLE  the learning technology teams still have to run the old one for several years to enable course to be taught-out and keep access to any materials which staff and students might need for archives, assessment or appeals.

After several years of running in parallel with the University’s new virtual learning environment (Canvas),  WebLearn was finally closed in 2022 and decommissioned in mid-November 2024. At its peak WebLearn at Oxford had 47,000 users and hosted 101,000 separate sites.

I am sad to see it go.

 

 

 

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 able to update their own staff profile which would then automatically be updated on the pages where that profile appeared. 

However, our research suggests that only a fraction of University staff make use of their online profiles, and of the profiles that do exist, many contain minimal or out-of-date information. This, coupled with the platform upgrade has provided us with an opportunity to reassess staff profiles and improve the feature.

Our next  new project will:

  • Explore the opportunity to improve the provision for staff profiles on the University website by using the functionality of the new platform to optimise this type of content.
  • Research the current use of staff profiles in EdWeb and the expectations and requirements of academic and professional services staff for the display and presentation of their profile content.
  • Research whether colleagues believe there is a requirement for staff profiles on the University web publishing platform (EdWeb2), or whether there is a desire to optimise the display and presentation of staff profile content hosted elsewhere e.g., on LinkedIn, Research Explorer (PURE), or other platforms, databases and repositories.  

Find out more: New Project will improve Staff Profiles

technology is ‘what we can learn to do’

Digimap cake. Get your geospatial skills here.
Digimap cake. Get your geospatial skills here.

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 our ‘no show’ rate by nearly 15%.

‘No Shows’ at free training events are a challenge for all training providers I expect. We are using new techniques to structure our programmes and get them as close to ‘at need’ as possible.

Having just launched a programme of AI training which is ‘sold out’ for months ahead, I think we might do even better this year at meeting demand in our organisation.

Digital Skills Programme | Information Services

 

 

 

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:

  1. Edtech Ecosystem Expansion: Launched a new short courses platform, successfully integrating it into our existing edtech ecosystem, attracting over 2500 learners across 200 courses, with a whopping 1 million page views!
  2. Web Migration Marvels: Smoothly transitioned 161 websites to a new platform, involving the migration of 80,000 pages, 90,000 images, and training 800 colleagues, despite the hair-raising complexities of the ISG website debacle.
  3. AI Adventures: Rolled out the SADIE project to explore ethical AI integration in educational technologies, sparking lively discussions and critical thinking across the board.
  4. Digital Skills Dynamo: Delivered 305 sessions in our Digital Skills Programme, elevating 2593 learners to digital prowess and cyber savvy status.
  5. Green Web Warriors: Launched a comprehensive initiative to promote sustainability in our digital estate, culminating in a report hefty enough to rival a master’s dissertation and recruiting three eco-conscious interns.
  6. Caption Craze: Wholeheartedly embraced our captioning service, making automatic captions the new normal for Media Hopper Create videos, ensuring accessibility isn’t just an afterthought.
  7. Migration Maestros: Completed a gargantuan migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10, a logistical feat involving years of planning and a cocktail of technical and copyright debt.
  8. Festival Frenzy and Windows Win: Navigated the summer festival season with flair while deploying Windows 11 across all teaching rooms—a double triumph in operational excellence and timing.
  9. Induction Innovation: Refined our induction and onboarding processes for staff based on fresh feedback, fostering a quicker sense of belonging and smoother integration into our LTW family.
  10. Community and Recognition Revelries: Celebrated the extraordinary efforts of LTW staff with numerous awards and recognitions, including Reward Vouchers and Staff Recognition Awards, proving every day is rewarding work in LTW!

LTW’s tapestry of teamwork weaved these achievements into an impressive display of collaboration and innovation, proving that when it comes to pushing the boundaries of educational technology and services, we definitely know how to put on quite the show!

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 took place. 

On discussion with Timetabling this was not unexpected, it is a legacy issue not related to the recording service.  Reasons for this could include a course changing or being cancelled and the room bookings not being removed from the Timetabling system.  A room change within one working day would not be able to filter through the services in time.   Timetabling had no way to know a course had been cancelled unless course staff told them. The other disadvantage of this is that the room booking remains in place and no one else can book it. 

We discounted this in the final summary. 
Microphone not used.   110 times.  This is a user error and makes the recording unusable and obviously impossible to provide captions/transcripts for.
 
Recording stopped in room near start.  35 times.  This is a user action and makes the recording unusable.
 
Recording paused.  2 times.  Using the pause button in the room at the start, making the recording unusable.
 
Microphone temporarily muted.  24 times.  This would be done by the user in the room and would make part of the recording unusable.
 
Audience microphone not used.  48 times.  This can be for a variety of reasons, including logistical ones.  It would result in questions/answers from the room not being heard and would make part of the recording unusable.
 
Microphones not used by all speakers.  4 times.  Forgetting to hand over the microphone or the other presenter(s) not wishing to use a microphone could be reasons.  In these cases, part of the recording would not be usable.
 
Audio quality poor, audio unclear or static.  15 occurrences.  These are technical faults and have been reported and investigated.
 

 

Results Summary. 

This seems to indicate that user error was far more likely to be an issue with the recordings than technical issues with the room. 

Summary of non-technical or timetabling issues. User based issues.   Number  % 
Mic not used count  110  10.7 
Recording stopped or paused.  37  3.6 
Partial audio issue from muting, audience or other speakers.  76  7.4 
Total checked  1028   
Total problems  223  21.7 

 

 

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 in central services to understand the risks of new features being rolled out by our existing technology partners and retain the ability to assess and choose which ones we switch on for use by our community.

It is a fast moving space:

  • An AI detection feature was added to the similarity checking service Turnitin in April 2023.
  • Various AI helper tools have been added to our virtual learning environment Learn since July 2023.
  • Wooclap added an AI wizard to generate multiple choice or open questions in November 2023.

All these services are under the control of the University to enable (or not) and are all currently switched off at Edinburgh due to risks identified.

The biggest barrier to adoption for AI tools is likely to be clear assurances from suppliers on the compliance of their AI features with University policy and legal obligations. We need a common process  which will allow us to be consistent in the evaluation and adoption of AI tools and features. 

The processes we will now use have been developed carefully by senior learning technologists with expertise in providing our central systems. For the most part they are an extended reworking of existing processes for the introduction of new non-AI features into services. As ever we need to take into account the workloads of learning technologists and ensure the processes we develop should not be much of a burden on service teams to adopt these and extend them to AI features. 

Since assessing risks of AI tools will soon become a regular or routine part of business as usual, it is important that decisions on the enabling of AI features are transparent to users. The  Edinburgh AI Innovations Service Release Tracker, and the wider SADIE SharePoint site will give the rationale behind the approach adopted and decisions made. It will also provide advice on the risks of using a tool even if it has been made available. 

The adoption of AI tools and features will likely require a review of University policies, potentially including but not limited to the OER, Lecture Recording, Virtual Classroom and Learning Analytics policies, to take account of the risks identified as part of this project. 

The Scoping AI Developments in EdTech at Edinburgh (SADIE) project was set up to standardise an approach for service teams to test and evaluate the utility and suitability of the AI tools and features being made available in the centrally supported EdTech services. The approach developed looked at the risks of adopting a particular feature and calls upon the expertise of learning technologists within the Schools, as well as that of the service managers in Information Services, in evaluating them. 

We will be monitoring progress closely.

Delivering a University Web Strategy

Cool graphic designed by our cool LTW graphic design service

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 not a solution but an enabler. Whether delivered centrally or locally, there is a clear need to empower our staff by providing them with the intelligence, tools, standards and resources to attract and engage users.” 

Building a New Platform

 Our Web Publishing Platform (now named EdWeb 2) project’s aim was to create a web publishing platform for our publishing community within a strong web governance framework. Therefore, this project should not be viewed solely in isolation but within the wider context of the web strategy. The goal was to create a platform that could be continually improved, meet the immediate needs of our existing editorial base but also meet the needs of Schools and business units that had never used the central service for web publishing before.  

The web strategy identified the following common approaches:  

  • Improve the quality of our web estate and online channels through the adoption of an inclusive and supportive governance model  
  • Enhance the accessibility and security of our web estate by establishing and evolving University-wide standards  
  • Enhance solution and content quality by improving the digital skills of web publishers and practitioners; establishing a common understanding of web roles and capabilities; and delivering web publishing and management tools 

“The strategy does not set out to answer the exclusive needs of a business area or address a single specific University activity. As a pan-institutional strategy, it establishes a framework for the use of web technologies, both centrally and locally, to achieve business goals.” – University Web Strategy

To address these common approaches the web publishing platform aimed to deliver a product that was flexible and geared for iterative improvement to support ongoing business and user demands.  

The delivered solution needed to support central and local innovation, allowing website teams in schools to make use of and extend the product appropriately, aligned with agreed University standards and guidelines.   

This project has delivered the platform and associated processes to create the web publishing services that will support this strategy. 

This includes a high-quality, future-proof and long-term sustainable University web publishing platform, aligned web publishing services, training and a support model, all backed up by a team with the requisite knowledge and skills.  

Successes 

Planning 

  • Platform training programme with the planning, development and roll out in very close collaboration with our  Digital Skills team was very successful, and receiving excellent feedback (Phase 2 – Deliverable 1.3) 
  • Major achievement to deliver a fit-for-purpose, web platform, fulfilling the targets set regarding flexibility, migrating over 60 sites live despite some of the complex issues faced by the project.  (Phase 1 – Deliverable 1.3) 
  • Early and ongoing engagement with the service users, and the wider web publishing community, was essential to ensure the web platform developed in a meaningful way to address their external audience engagement needs. (Phase 1 – Deliverable 1.2, 7.1) 
  • The project has delivered a solution in line with the original University Web Strategy in terms of the flexibility offered and that the offering should appeal to Schools and business units that have never used the central service at all for their web publishing. For example the School of Chemistry now has a live site on EdWeb 2.  (Phase 2 – Objective 4, Deliverable 4.1) 

Developing for our Wider Community   

The University of Edinburgh is a highly devolved organisation in terms of physical locations, organisational structure, decision-making and budgets, purposes, goals and audiences.  

Aside from the central team, our community extends across the organisation, from system administrators and developers to UX and user-centred design practitioners, content creators and marketers, each operating with significant autonomy and responsibility for their own sites. We had to take this into consideration as early as possible in any decision-making process, and to emphasise the importance of user centred design, backed up by user research, and using the experience and expertise of staff around the University.   

The new platform had to work for existing users of our CMS but also support the needs of our devolved community of developers and administrators who are responsible for building, developing and managing our wider web estate, from colleges and schools to individual research projects.  

We chose to continue using Drupal as this platform and surrounding processes support highly distributed development, allowing code contribution back to a managed common modular code base.  

Project Approach  

The project was approached in two main phases, with the ultimate goal to have introduced the new web publishing platform and having all relevant EdWeb content and sites migrated to the new platform by November 2022 (the initial deadline for Drupal 7 end-of-life).  

The deadline of completing the migration needed to be moved due to the extremely complex nature of the websites built in EdWeb, and the differences between the two platforms, as well as ongoing resourcing issues and is currently set for November 2024.  

The project involved the application of Agile methodologies using the Scrum framework and has tried to use a user-centred approach to service design wherever possible.  

“User-centered design is based on the understanding of a user, their demands, priorities and experiences and when used, is known to lead to an increased product usefulness and usability as it delivers satisfaction to the user. “ – Wikipedia User-centered design 

 

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 cloud storage being used. Our first batch of deletions resulted in the total number of courses in Learn being reduced from 91k to 65k courses.

Our media platfrom has 69,000 items on it which have never been played.

Understanding digital sustainability is a key knowledge set for the future.

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 Ultra upgrade project oversaw the successful upgrade of the University’s VLE from Learn Original to Learn Ultra. It focused on improving usability and accessibility based on feedback from students and faculty, aiming to create a more user-friendly and inclusive learning environment. 

This report presents an evaluation of the key decisions made by the central Project Team that have led to the successful delivery of the upgrade project. 

The evaluation combines qualitative and quantitative data sources to provide a comprehensive analysis of the delivery of the Learn Ultra upgrade project: 

  • A campus-wide student survey that gathered responses from 391 undergraduate students on their experiences with Learn Ultra. 
  • Semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, including senior stakeholders, learning technologists, teaching office staff, academic colleagues, and relationship managers. 
  • Focus groups with the project’s implementation and user groups. 
  • Profession-specific focus groups with learning technologists, teaching office staff, and academic colleagues. 
  • Secondary analysis of existing data sources, including user experience (UX) data, Early Adopter feedback, training feedback, and internal project reports.  

 The evaluation identifies eight key overarching decisions made by the Project Team that have led to the success delivery: 

  • Upgrading the existing VLE, rather than procuring a new provider. 
  • Treating the upgrade as a Change project. 
  • Implementing a pluralistic governance framework. 
  • Extensive multimodal communications and engagement. 
  • Establishing the Early Adopter Programme. 
  • Creating an extensive training programme. 
  • Focusing on a user-centred upgrade approach. 
  • Enhanced focus on accessibility. 

Additionally, the evaluation identifies three themes that were found to be important to successful local upgrades: 

  • Pro-active local Change approaches and project ownership. 
  • Effective relationship-building and collaboration. 
  • Tailored local training and ongoing support. 

Our evaluation report makes a number of recommendations to the University for future projects. You can read more on our internal Learn Ultra Evaluation (sharepoint.com)

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 send me their list of team achievements, so if you think they might have missed any, now is the time to remind them.

As I read through their lists this time I am struck by how much time we spend on procurements, replacements and migrations as technology changes. Some of our funding comes from capital pots, which might usually be used for buildings. But technology changes much faster than buildings and we have a rolling 5-10 year plan to replace platforms and technologies as ( or before) they go out of date.

It takes  an enormous amount of work it takes to move from one platform to another.

If colleagues suggest we should get a new VLE, or a new portal or a new media asset management platform it is a huge amount of work and sometimes it feels like there is very little gain. Migrations and replacement projects seem often to be replacing like with like. So it is important to be able to identify the benefits which we will see, improvements in managing, keeping up to data and mitigation against risk. Risks in LTW are risks for the whole institution.  If we don’t have up to date robust systems, learning teaching and the student experience will suffer.

Never underestimate how much work a procurement, replacement or migration can be. But no one will thank you for it. It is the hidden labour behind the fancy new tools colleagues and students demand.

I have spoken much about the upgrade and migration work required for Learn Ultra.

We’ve have also moved away from QMP on-Premise to the Cloud – Karen H estimates this was the longest upgrade project we’ve ever had.  Early next year for complete decommissioning of the on-premise system and then we’ll have our celebration.

Our largest migration on going is a huge move of the entire University website (1.5 million pages) from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10.   Of those 1.5 million pages I’d estimate around five of them were the same, so the work to automate this lift and shift at scale while building a new platform in flight has been a huge undertaking. Perhaps we were naive fools even to try.

We have new colleagues in our website migration project team. we have worked hard to find creative technical solutions and to keep colleagues with us through the move. We introduced more resource and optimised our processes and engagement.  Current migration count is 75 completed, 86 still to go, almost 50%. EdWeb to Web Publishing Platform migrations | Website and Communications

By the next LTW All Staff in December, all the migrations will be completed. And Stratos and I are looking for a date for the ‘end of migrations’ party.

That will be a well-deserved celebration.