Tag: learn

LAURA Project

LAURA (Learning Analytics in ULTRA)

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.  

 Scope

  • Learn VLE; 
  • Applications that interface with Learn; 
  • Learning Analytics Policy; 
  • Learning Analytics Principles and Practice; 
  • Learning Analytics Governance Group. 

 

Laura Annie Willson – Wikipedia

strategic review of VLEs

It’s been a big year for our VLE, Blackboard Learn.

We have had Learn at University of Edinburgh for a long time. VLEs are not a particularly new technology, they’ve been around for more than 20 years. In other countries VLEs are known as LMSs: learning management systems.   In the UK virtual learning environments (VLEs) suffer from a branding which often makes them sound more immersive and dynamic than they are.

Given the size and scale of our curriculum Learn does a lot of heavy lifting which may have gone largely unnoticed by the majority of teaching staff until this year. Every course has a place on Learn to manage learning materials and groups. The learning platform is integrated into other core systems and the timetable. It draws together data from across the university to ensure that the right people have access to the learning materials and communication tools that they need.  Every year in June it rolls over and all the course spaces are replicated, ready to be filled with new materials for new students. The older course spaces stay put and students retain access to the materials and discussions from previous years to aid their revision and progression.  Many of our library resources are lisenced only for course groups and Learn makes it possible for us to make those available to select groups.

The history of VLEs at Edinburgh is characterised, as with so many areas of the university, by a proliferation of local solutions which were unsustainable and confusing for users. In the past our distance learning courses were offered on 13 different platforms, each with their own technical teams and support requirements. As the platforms aged Knowledge Strategy Committee recognised the risk of this technical debt and and in order to sustain the online distance learning activity  which brings the university thousands of learners each year we have migrated all that distance learning to Learn through our VLE consolidation project. We are now able to support this aspect of university business through a single helpdesk and the 70+ online distance learning masters level courses are now delivered on Learn.

The work on the VLE consolidation project occupied all of the effort of our ISG technical teams for several years. This left us frustratingly far behind other institutions which have been investing in their undergraduate VLE.  That began to change in 2019 when we embarked on our Learn Foundations project in an attempt to tackle the aspects of confusion and inconsistency which were badly impacting our students’ experience.  The Learn Foundations project now involves 21 Schools and we have worked closely with local learning technologists, teaching offices and student interns to deliver this change. 4,000 students have been involved in our user research and 40+ interns have worked to map, analyse and improve course areas online. The work has been shared in reports, presentations and posters  at University of Edinburgh Learning and Teaching conferences and has won awards within the global community of Learn institutions.

In the last 2 years we have engaged with thousands of Edinburgh students in the biggest co-design exercise the University has ever carried out on its VLE.  We have built up a very rich and detailed picture of what students and staff need to do in Learn, and why.  The detailed UX work we have done as part of our Learn Foundations project has given us a hope of being able to optimise our support services to support a broadly similar template.   The schools who have been part of that project have benefited from support in migration, accessibility and training.

We moved Learn to ‘the Cloud’ before the pandemic and I hope to  move it to the next version (Ultra) soon. This year the amount of activity in the VLE has grown considerably and both the license and storage costs have increased. It is even more important now that colleagues ensure that they consider course design to make the best use of the platform for teaching. Training in all aspects of using Learn is available to all and we offer a bespoke programme of support for ‘An Edinburgh Model of teaching online’.

If we were ever to move VLE it is this work on Learn Foundations which would make that even possible.  I hope that in the near future we will have support from across the university for a more root and branch overhaul of our main teaching platform.  It would be a huge, multi-year project involving every course leader, every school office, every local learning technologist, large IT teams, changes to all the training, integrations, helpdesks, student handbooks, support pages and changes to teaching practice, but I think that the lessons learned from teaching this year and the institution-wide work on curriculum review will be a great place to start.

If we were ever to move VLE. It would be expensive. And it would take years. We’d be running systems in parallel for years, so its hard to see this as a cost effective option. We would need to be sure that there are  tangible pedagogical benefits and improvements to the work our VLE does for us now.

 

‘Letting a thousand flowers bloom’ results in technical debt for the future.

Back in the day  there was not central platform, in an attempt to encourage and support innovation schools were given pots of money to build locally the tools they felt they needed.   13 local VLEs were spun up by the groups who were delivering distance learning with Distance Education Initiative (DEI ) funding. It was a worthy strategy of supporting local innovation but it resulted in a huge technical debt which was later transferred back to Information Services  and we have spent years (are still) sorting out.  Over the last 5 years those 13 local VLEs have decayed and failed, and in order to sustain the activity the university has invested heavily in migrating that distance learning to Learn ( VLE consolidation project) .

The roll-out  of Learn across UG teaching wasn’t managed consistently either.  Every course leader and school did their own thing, leading to years of user confusion from students as they moved from course to course. In the last 2 years we have engaged with more than 4,000 students in the biggest co-design exercise the University has ever carried out on its VLE.  We have built up a very rich and detailed picture of what students and staff need to do in Learn, and why.

The detailed UX work we have done as part of our Learn Foundations project has given us a hope of ever being able to optimise our support services to support a broadly similar template.   The schools who have been part of that project have benefited from support in migration, accessibility and training.

 

VLE resilience

We moved Learn to ‘the Cloud’ before the pandemic and I hope to  move it to the next version ( Ultra) soon. Hopefully that will improve the interface and  make colleagues happy ( er).

Last year we had an embarrassing 240 minute outage at the start of term. Learn wasn’t actually down, we just couldn’t access it, which is basically the same thing.

Other than that we had 39 minutes down for a whole year.