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of University staff make use of their online profiles, and of the profiles that do exist, many contain minimal or out-of-date information.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.
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.
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.
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
