Category: Learning, teaching and web services

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Summer interns 2024

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.

The 2024 summer internship adverts are live on Unitemps: University of Edinburgh Jobs – Unitemps

Marking and Assessment projects 2024 – a crowded space

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.

 

International Womens Day 2024

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

Book your spot via Eventbrite here.