Blog posts

Panopto EMEA Conference 2019

The Digital Education team recently attended the 2019 Panopto EMEA Conference in Euston Square. Morning coffees quaffed and croissants consumed, the conference commenced with the opening keynote delivered by Eric Burns, Panopto founder and CEO.

Opening keynote – Eric Burns

Eric welcomed the delegates and began with a demonstration of how far the platform had advanced in the past decade, comparing the first iteration of the Panopto Silverlight player with the modern equivalent.

The keynote centered on the technological and cultural changes that have impacted Panopto. The talk was subdivided into the following topics: The Shift from hardware to software, the cultural normalisation of video in academia, the rise of multi streaming, the consumerisation of technology and the death of client software. 

Turnitin User Summit 2019

This was my first time attending the annual Turnitin User Summit and it gave me an opportunity to learn more about the latest products released. This was also an opportunity to find out if existing issues are being developed out the system.

To begin the conference Turnitin presented us with some statistics, as of November 2019:

  • Turnitin Services are used in over 169 countries
  • With over 29 million active users
  • 1,040,917,465 papers have been submitted

This reflects on how many institutions are now dependant on Turnitin for, plagiarism detection, integrity checking, marking and grading.

They Road map for Turnitin focuses on improving the current product as well as the release of two new products, including Gradescope and the Authorship tool.

Blackboard TLC and DevCon – Newcastle 2019

A rather sunny Newcastle was the destination for this year’s Blackboard European Teaching and Learning Conference.  The 4 day event, which was split into the DevCon and main TLC conference, took place in Northumbria University Business School.  We will be looking at some of the highlights from both events.

Blackboard DevCon

Welcome & No REST for the Wicked: The Latest on REST APIs in Blackboard Learn

DevCon 2019 kicked off with a welcome from Mark O’Neil and Scott Hurrey, they discuss the outline of this year’s DevCon, including events and tasks scheduled for the day and how they have had to improve the Developer Community to meet the demands of its users.

19th Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference 2019

For most, January might be a month of quiet consolation, with that weary post-Christmas feeling hanging heavy… But not for the nation’s E-learning teams however: each coming January means the Durham Blackboard Users Conference! The focus for the 19th Durham Blackboard User conference was “Fail, Fad or Future”, asking users of Blackboard to be honest with their experiences with Blackboard, acknowledging that some ideas will fail – some are just a passing fad – but some will be integral to the future of how we support and use e-learning systems.

The conference was opened by Rosie Jones, the Director of Library Services at the Open University.

Panopto Conference 2018

The E-learning team recently attended the Panopto EMEA Conference in Euston Square. The conference opened with an abundance of coffee and pastries (and weirdly rose water on tap) – before heading into the auditorium for an opening talk from Dave Cormier. Cormier is best known for the coining the term MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), and seemed to be somewhat of a celebrity in the teaching and learning sphere.

Cormier spoke about the best way to utilise video for learning. He emphasised that basic, simple tasks could be taught using high budget, high interest videos because they are unlikely to change.

Developing a Batch Actions tool to streamline Panopto administration

Imperial College London are the number one user of the Panopto Lecture Capture Cloud system worldwide, with over 100,000 lectures recorded since the system was introduced in 2011. With over 5 million student views recorded and the majority of lecture theatres now equipped with Panopto recording hardware, revising lecture recordings has become an established part of the learning experience for many Imperial students.

This volume and breadth of Panopto coverage entails significant administrative work behind the scenes, the majority of which is carried out by faculty learning technologists who liaise with their departmental teams to schedule upcoming recordings, set up folders linked to the correct courses and grant access permissions through the Panopto user interface.

Blackboard Teaching & Learning Conference 2018

This spring, the E-learning Team let Lee and Dev jet off to sunny Manchester to attend the TFL Europe 2018 Blackboard Conference.

Hosted at the prestigious Manchester University, the conference kicked off with the 2 day DevCon on Monday 9th April with the 3 day event starting on the Tuesday. Over the  the five days, a busy schedule of talks, workshops and events was arranged for the avid attendees from across the globe.

The city of Manchester itself was a joy to visit and a great place to host the conference. Manchester University was a short walk from the city centre and the conference was well facilitated thanks to TLC and the use of the extremely useful AttendeeHub App, which let you organise your schedule really easily.

Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference 2018

In January I attended the Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference. This was the 18th running of the event by Durham University and the first I have attended. Each conference has a unique theme and this years was based on the classic Spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and The Ugly. The two day conference featured a number of talks, demos and presentations highlighting what is good bad and ugly with Blackboard.

Before I cover some of the sessions, I have to say it was an exceptionally well run conference.  The team at Durham have put a great deal of work into not only the event, but the social aspect following the conference. 

Turnitin User Summit Review – 6/10/16

On Thursday 6th October, I attended the Turnitin User Summit in Newcastle.  The one day event consisted of short presentations from Turnitin representatives, guest speakers from UK HE institutions, a group workshop and a ‘knowledge bar’ which provided an opportunity to speak to a variety of people working at Turnitin. Before I discuss the event, here are some pictures from my time in Newcastle.

Newcastle, for those who have not been, is a Northern city (closer to Edinburgh than London) dominated by a number of bridges over the Tyne, a plethora of bars and clubs, an average football club and two very central universities (Newcastle and Northumbria). 

M25 Learning Technology Meeting, 20th July 2016

By Mimi Weiss Johnson

On the 20th July I attended the M25 Learning Technology meeting at the University of Westminster.  As always, it was a lovely event attended by representatives from Universities in and around the M25 area.   I wanted to highlight three of the presentations that I enjoyed.

Presenter:Janina Dewitz from UCL Topic: Hackathon

Janina has been involved in organising Hackathons for UCL.  These are friendly, competitive events for UCL staff and students that usually take place over a whole weekend at venues like the O2.  Attendees are divided into groups where they are asked to raise a challenge or a problem to solve.