Category: People, Place and Work

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.

 

 

 

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!

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.

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  students from the College of Science and Engineering use LinkedIn Learning at a higher proportion than they were represented in the overall population, and at nearly double the rate of those attending Digital Skills Training.

Whereas students from College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine were more likely to take Digital Skills Training than use LinkedIn Learning.

Students from College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences  were slightly more likely to attend Digital Skills Training than use LinkedIn Learning, but the difference was not as significant as for the other Colleges.

 

 

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 is the first step in moving the University’s extensive credit short courses portfolio to the new Short Courses Platform.

The learners on our new platform will not have access to our closed Library collections, so all the courses will use open access materials on their resources and reading lists.

I am very pleased.

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 we value.

This is now becoming a theme for us to name rooms on-campus after inspirational women. There are so many rooms, buildings and roads named after men in this university it is great to be able to add some women’s names in there too.

We are featuring Bessie as the woman were are naming for today, but we have previously named Brenda Moon, Irene Young, Mary Somerville, Grace Hopper, Eleanor Ormerod, Marjorie Rackstraw, Annie Hutton Numbers, Xia Peisu and Charlotte Murchison

Bessie was born nearby, in the Vennel, which is now a very popular Instagram-able spot with great views up to the castle. She is famous for being a bag-pipe playing suffragette, but she’s also an alumna of Edinburgh. She studied French here and went on to a career as a music teacher and a modern languages teacher at Broughton High school, She married and lived  in Trinity and everyday for the rest of her life she played bagpipes at 11 am, which her neighbours obviously appreciated.  She died at 92.

But before that, when she was wee, played the bagpipes from a very young age. Her parents got her playing in the hope that it would strengthen her lungs against tuberculosis- an early example of proscribe culture.

Bessie and her mother were members of the Women’s Social and Political Union and that’s how she got her most famous gigs. She was invited to play the pipes in the famous procession down Princes Street, in 1909 she was 9. She also played lead the Scottish contingent at the Great Suffragette pageant in London in 1911. The procession was 5 miles long.

Those of you who study the history of the suffrage marches will know that they were difficult to organise because people had different ideas about who should go first and in what order, and which groups were more established, and in America, whether white and black women would march together or separately

In Edinburgh they decided to avoid all that and march in alphabetical order. Christabel Pankhurst was the star speaker at the march and afterwards she gave Bessie a brooch to commemorate the occasion- it was a brooch depicting queen Boudica,

Bessie continued to be actively involved in suffrage, wearing purple, green and white hair ribbons to school. And she piped outside Calton Gaol to raise the spirits of the suffragettes imprisoned there, who were being force-fed. The women were on hunger strike, and force-feeding of women at Calton jail started in February 1914, so around 110 years ago. Most of the force-feeding actually went on in Dundee and in London and She played the pipes on the platform of Waverley station as trains carrying convicted suffragettes departed to Holloway Prison in London.

It’s worth remembering that some of the convictions were for destroying property, damaging paintings of the King, blowing things up, it is hard to know how the campaign would have progressed were it not for the start of the First World War. One of the places they attempted to blow up was the royal observatory up near our campus at King’s Buildings. You can still see part of the bomb in the visitor centre.

Edinburgh University has connections to a number of Suffragettes, and a few years ago for the vote 100 campaign, colleagues and students worked together to create a histropedia timeline on Wikipedia,

The suffragettes and suffragists were campaigning for women’s rights, sex-based rights, struggling to get the right to do things like vote, access to education, the right have a bank account,  ability to get a mortgage in your own name , to not have to leave your job when you got married.

The right for all women to vote was not secured in the UK until 1928.  So we are not yet at 100 years.

The Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 It is sometimes referred to as the Fifth Reform Act.[2][3] The 1928 Act widened suffrage by giving women electoral equality with men. It gave the vote to all women over 21 years old, regardless of property ownership. Prior to this act only women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications could vote.

About 30% of my current staff in LTW are under 30, so the women in our office wouldn’t have been able to vote.

This was Tory reform and one of the reasons that Bessie later gave her Boudica brooch to Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to become Prime Minister. Some of those rights were still not in place until well into the 1970s, and still are not in many countries in the world.

I am privileged to have grown up in a time when I was able to go to university, get a job and pay my own mortgage. It wasn’t until the sex discrimination act 1975 after that banks were required to treat women equally and women were able to get mortgages in their own name without a male guarantor. Still women suffer a structural pay gap.  there is no English region where a single woman on median earnings can afford to rent or buy an averagely priced house.

But now we are allowed to have an education, and we can work in universities and so we do.  This year for the first time, LTW is equally filled with men and women and the pay gap is as small as I can possibly get it.

Our Learning Spaces teams teams’ fit out these rooms, and all the other central teaching spaces on campus- that’s 400 rooms, which a combined collection of around 10,000 pieces of kit.

if you were here last year, I made a tenuous connection between Charlotte’s work finding fossils in chalk cliff and classroom chalk,

This year I am going to make a similarly tenuous connection between playing the bagpipes and being heard.

Microphones and catch boxes.  Not only that presenter should be their microphones, but that students should not be shy in requesting a microphone if they want to speak, we have catch boxes available in every room and they are for students to use. Let your voice be heard.