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.
In LTW we meet in persontwice yearlyfor 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than buildings and we have a rolling 5-10 year plan to replace platforms and technologies as ( or before) they go out of date.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.
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 aim to promote an inclusive culture in my organisation. I have a focus on promoting cross-generational working. We welcome student interns as staff, and while not all students are young, they do tend to lower the average age about the place.
I am delighted to have such a great group of interns who work with us in Learning, Teaching and Web Services (LTW) all year, across all of our teams and projects.
Currently we host around 40 interns. In the summer we will add around 20 more.
I am pleased to see we will have new interns looking at AI in L&D, Green Web Estate, VLE Excellence, Web Migration, Accessibility, Training and Events and Communications.
All our internships are paid. We aim to support students at times of rising living costs by providing high quality work experience opportunities which will offer them a head start into digital jobs in the future.
There is a sudden urgent interest in improving systems which support assessment in the University. Possibly related to the considerable impact felt from the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) by the staff union (UCU) last year.
The role of learning technology systems in enabling assessment, and the student experience of assessment ( and feedback) is key. Well-designed workflows in systems can relieve pain points and save time, – particularly in an institution with many devolved systems and practice. Systems and platforms can also be used to monitor activity and make more visible areas of overload or duplication.
We have a number of projects planned as part of our on-going programmes of Digital Estate Planning (DEP) and VLE Excellence.
Work is progressing at the start of 2024 to map the within scope, outwith scope and overlaps between the technology projects.
Choosing names for these projects is complicated because there are so many initiatives now in the area of feedback, marking and assessment, so I have divided them up into a set of acronyms which double as a celebration of some of our historic education pioneers.
FLORA (Formal exams, Learning, Online Rubrics and Assessment) for Flora Stevenson, one of the first women in the United Kingdom to be elected to a School Board.
LOUISA(Learn Optimised for In-course Submission and Assessment) For Louisa Stevenson, campaigner for women’s university education and co-founder of Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University.
SADIE(Scoping AI Developments in EdTech at Edinburgh) for Sadie L Adams, influential Black American suffragist
LAURA (Learning Analytics in ULTRA) for Laura Willson, engineer, builder, working class hero.
PHOEBE( Portfolios for Online, Experiential, Blogging and Evidence) For Phoebe Byth, Edinburgh campaigner for women’s training and employment.
This year we will be naming of the Bessie Watson Lecture Theatre in the Outreach Centre, Holyrood Campus on International Women’s Day 2024.
Please join me from 9.15-10.15 a.m. on Friday 8th March to honour Bessie Watson (1900-1992), Scotland’s youngest suffragette.
Bessie marched and played the bagpipes for the Women’s Social and Political Union in the early 20th century, aged just nine. She continued to be involved in the suffrage movement throughout her childhood, piping outside Calton Jail to raise the morale of the imprisoned women. She went on to study French at the University of Edinburgh, and had a career teaching violin and modern languages across the city.
We will also be editing Wikipedia. to help write women onto Wikipedia as part of IWD 2024.
“Women in Red” – a Wikipedia editathon will celebrate the lives and contributions of all the inspiring women of Scotland (and around the world) missing from the world’s go-to site for information.
This event will focus on the women activists, past and present, who have campaigned for women’s rights, education, universal suffrage and global justice around the world.
Where and when – Friday 9th March, 1pm-4.30pm in Digital Scholarship Centre, Main Library
FLORA (Feedback, Learning, Online Rubrics and Assessment)
Ensuring staff and students have an appropriate platform for Exams / Digital Exams
Digital tools to support assessment done under exam conditions (with an open question about what ‘exam conditions’ mean in digital contexts … could be in-person computer lab, online, take-home … and involve different types of restrictions to support academic integrity: locked browser, in-person invigilated, online invigilated, open book, various levels of time restriction).
The reliability and security of digital exam platforms is essential for delivery of high stakes elements of students’ experience at the University of Edinburgh. The current situation and digital estate add complexity, stress, burden, and confusion to the workload for both staff and students. It is not sustainable and carries several risks to university business of marking and assessment.
Analysis work done in the Autumn of 2023 looked deeper into exams, taking testimony from Teaching Office staff across all schools, to build a clearer understanding of what exam provision looks like across the institution. This included what role technology plays in exams, marking and exam boards. Gaining insight into what changes are anticipated in the use of technology to support exams, marking and exam boards. Plus looking to identify barriers to the wider adoption of online exams.
The analysis has shown that as an institution we do not fully understand how many ‘digital exams’ take place as there is no central collation of this data, but we do know that many different types of exams involve a digital element in their workflow e.g. scanning and marking.
This project through its various work packages will look to better ensure staff and students have access to appropriate platforms for Exams / Digital Exams. This will include the aim that exams are not taking place on the main virtual learning environment (Learn), but are on separate, robust platform(s) designed to support assessment done under exam conditions. The project will also examine the reasons behind institutional exam data being disjointed and present options for change.
Why now?
The reliability of assessment platforms is essential for delivery of high stakes elements of students’ experience at the university of Edinburgh. The current situation and digital estate add complexity, stress, burden and confusion to the workload for both staff and students. It is not sustainable and carries a number of risks to university business of marking and assessment.
A previous procurement failed, but we must try again, 5 years on, with better knowledge and more support from the digital estate strategy governance processes. The market (after covid) has changed and we think suppliers are more attuned to UK HE needs.
The ISG teams who will lead this work have successfully delivered the VLE upgrade and are ready to revisit this area now. We want to provide good assessment platforms to the University in line with business needs.
The project will have three elements. Institutional gap analysis to fully understand the current picture for assessment and exam workflows at the university. Once requirements have been established the procurement of an exam system can commence if necessary. Additionally, the project will examine, and if appropriate procure a tool to support the marking process on digital, or digitised paper exams.
The impact we expect on people is:
improving the staff and student experience: Staff will find the new services easier and quicker to use giving them back more time to do other things. Also, there should be opportunities to do more innovative assessment types where needed.
For students their assessment experience will be better – with more consistency over platform usage, giving them the chance to become familiar with them. They should be easier to use and more reliable, reducing student stress.
Closer working relationships between ISG LTW with Exams Office and Timetabling unit timetabling information about exams/types of exams to allow support requirements to be pinned down in advance of diet. At the moment, it’s hard to do this, so this would be better.
Mitigate risks around poor experience, poor support, high stakes data on random platforms.
Easing the strain on availability of physical spaces for exams/during exam periods.
The project team wanted the name of the project to be reflective of the work, memorable and to ensure ease of recognition when there are other large initiatives across the institution that may overlap with teams across the campus.
FLORA was suggested for the pioneering history of the person Flora Stevenson (Flora Stevenson Wikipedia) and also that it could fit much of the scope of the work we are looking to take forward.
Thank you to everyone working on starting our sister projects, LOUISA and FLORA for our focus on how our systems are used to support assessment. If you would like to know more about some inspirational women Louisa Stevenson – Wikipedia and Flora Stevenson – Wikipedia
LOUISA (Learn Optimised for In-course Submission and Assessment)
At the November 2023 Learn Ultra project board, we discussed the business analysis that was undertaken via the Learn Ultra project, focusing on assessment and feedback practices across the University, and the workflows which interacted in/with Learn.
The business analysis identified that there was an inconsistent approach to assessment and feedback practices within and across Schools, resulting in unnecessary inconsistencies impacting on both staff and student experiences. Many of these complexities and inconsistencies are of our own making and arise from the culture and distributed nature of the institution. It will be a challenging process of change to tackle these in ways which benefit but do not disrupt the aims of teaching and assessment. I am confident that the engagement we have done and the experience of our previous project s to optimise the learning environment will stand us in good stead.
LOUISA (Learn Optimised for In-course Submission and Assessment) and is currently being planned as a 3-year project that will adopt a similar working partnership approach to its predecessors (Learn Ultra and Learn Foundations), working closely with Schools to understand their current workflows and practices and looking at where there are opportunities to improve.
In Scope
All courses on the VLE (on-campus and online along with undergraduate and postgraduate);
All coursework within the VLE;
Creation of consistent approaches to assessment and feedback within the VLE;
Removal of all non-coursework assessments (such as digital exams) from the VLE;
Review, design, and delivery of a suite of training courses to support with assessment and feedback within the VLE;
Review and streamlining of both VLE-native and VLE-integrated assessment and feedback tools to support key assessment practices;
User experience review of current assessment and feedback workflows;
Programme of communications and engagement to gain buy-in;
Learning Analytics and reporting of assessment and feedback within Learn.
Development or procurement of new tools or systems to support with assessment and feedback;
Exams, Remote proctoring and invigilation( a separate, sister project FLORA, will look at these).;
Monitoring of staff performance;
Developments to existing integrations and tools.
LOUISA will build on the existing knowledge gathered around pain points in relation to assessment and feedback to help understand changes required to enhance and provide a more consistent student and staff experience moving forward.
Our systems provide a deadline for student submissions and also a feedback return date by which time the staff need to have submitted feedback. All feedback is revealed to students (other than those with extensions) at the same time. New functionality in Learn Ultra will help to consolidate workflows and reduce our reliance on multiple systems.
3-year project beginning July 2024;
Split across three phases:
Phase one – July 2024 to July 2025: Business Analysis/User Experience and Early Adopters;
Phase Two – July 2025 to July 2026: Delivery of new workflows and with at-scale training;
Phase Three – July 2026 to July 2027: Embed and Evaluate.
Project closure – August 2027.
Thank you to everyone working on starting our sister projects, LOUISA and FLORA for our focus on how our systems are used to support assessment. If you would like to know more about some inspirational women Louisa Stevenson – Wikipedia and Flora Stevenson – Wikipedia
This project will support improving the student experience by ensuring that students, teachers and student support staff are making best use of the data, information and dashboards that are currently available in Learn, and other centrally supported learning technology applications, to gain useful insights.It will tackle perceived gaps in reporting, activity data and tools and ensure that more people know where to look and how to use the information.This project will identify data, information and dashboards that are currently available in Learn, and other centrally supported learning technology applications, that may be useful for both staff and students to enhance the student learning experience. The project will work as part of the VLE Excellence programme to improve staff and student digital experience and enhance engagement by enabling staff and students to access relevant data to support and advance their teaching and learning. Where skills and knowledge gaps are identified, the project will develop digital skills training resources to help students and staff make best use of existing information in an informed and ethical manner.
The project will include a key theme of digital and data Skills training and development to encourage data fluency and ethical data driven decision-making amongst colleagues who teach and support learning.Together with our Educational Technology Policy Officer and Learning Analytics governance group, the project team will review the institution’s Learning Analytics Policy, Principles and Practice and may propose updates, changes and amendments via Senate Education Committee.
The Learning Analytics project will set out to achieve the below objectives:
Identify useful learning analytics data currently available to staff and students. The project will focus on Learn in the first instance before looking at applications that interface with Learn, with the potential to include other centrally supported learning technologies as time allows.
Explore how courses can be structured to provide better information.
Identify skills gaps and development required by staff and students to be able to access and benefit from existing data and dashboards.
Develop digital skills training and resources for staff and students.
Review and revise Learning Analytics policy, principles and practice.
Review composition and remit of the Learning Analytics governance group established by Senate Learning and Teaching Committee (LTC) and Knowledge Strategy Committee (KSC) in 2018 to scrutinise plans for substantial new learning analytics activities.
Share learning analytics practice with other institutions across the sector and learn from their experience.
Benefits and Success Criteria
As a result of the Learning Analytics project, the below benefits are expected to be achieved:
Raised awareness of existing learning analytics data and how it can be used to enhance teaching, learning and assessment.
More consistent, accessible data in Learn.
Improved student experience.
Published support and guidance for Learn and platforms that integrate with Learn.
Improved digital skills and data fluency for staff and students.
Learning Analytics policy, principles & practice that are current and fit for purpose.
Renewed engagement with learning analytics for teaching and learning across the institution.
Network of colleagues sharing learning analytics experiences and practice.
PHOEBE ( Portfolios for Online, Experiential, Blogging and Evidence)
we will be reviewing our e-portfolio and blogging tools.
For Phoebe Byth, Edinburgh campaigner for women’s training and employment. One of the first Scottish women to be elected to public office Phoebe Blyth – Wikipedia
She had opinions on ‘Women’s work’ and gender stereotypes.
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.
