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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.

Panopto's early Silverlight based player
Panopto’s early Silverlight based player

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. 

The Shift from hardware to software 

The rapid increases in technological advancement and corresponding increase in affordability of hardware required for effective lecture capture has resulted in the majority of innovation arising from software, rather than hardware, in recent years. Eric highlighted the introduction of HD video cameras and the affordability of digital recorders, giving the example of a MAgewell USB capture card which cost $25,000 ten years ago, but only $300 today – as examples. The removal of hardware barriers has helped video progress from a purely technical domain to one that can be used by anyone. 

Cultural normalisation of video in Academia 

These technological changes have fostered a corresponding cultural change, normalising the use of video in academia, which is now seen as an essential component for  students’ learning.  

Eric shared some statistics on the state of lecture capture in High Education, highlighting a 22% increase in views of Panopto videos internationally over the past year, with customers streaming a mind boggling 3 million hours of video content each month with a total of nearly 11 million videos hosted on the platform. Of all the EMEA clients, Imperial had the highest number of videos viewed over the past year, with over 665,080 hours of video watched.

Panopto EMEA clients with the most hours of videos viewed in 2019
Panopto EMEA clients with the most hours of videos viewed in 2019

Early concerns about the detrimental effect of lecture capture on students attendance have proved unfounded, with 85% of respondents to a 2019 report stating that the use of lecture capture had ‘No Impact’ on attendance.

Most studies show that the availability of lecture captures have no impact on students attendance at lectures
Most studies show that the availability of lecture captures have no impact on students attendance at lectures

The keynote moved on to focus on students’ opinions on both lecture capture and video content in general, emphasising students’ preference for authentic video content, regardless of production values. The lesson for Higher Education being to focus more on the content of the video and building a rapport with the audience, rather than dense slides, stilted delivery and an information dump approach. 

“Students want authentic content, not the facade with lecture capture” – Eric Burns, Panopto CEO 

This has lead to the one-take-workflow where content creators turn on the camera and start recording without the need to be concerned about bandwidth, studio time, storage etc… Creators can take multiple takes, cut out whatever they want and choose only their best content. This is possible as video is, for all intent and purposes, free. It’s not something you have to worry about ‘wasting’.

Rise of multi stream 

 Next, Eric discussed the rise of multi stream recordings which allow multiple participants, screensharing, slides and visualisers, moving on from the single camera setups of earlier lecture capture systems. Multi-streaming has gained prominence in part due to the rise of online meeting tools such as Skype, Microsoft teams etc… where these features have become commonplace. Describing the relationship between technology and pedagogy, Eric emphasised the importance of having pedagogy first in mind when adding new features –  ‘if an instruction cannot be captured correctly, the technology subverts rather than supports the pedagogy‘.

Consumerisation of technology 

Another contributing factor to Panopto’s success is the increasing consumerisation of technology, in particular the rise in mobile devices, which dwarfy the adoption of desktops in terms by a scale of nearly ten to one. 

Adoption of mobile devices compared to desktop
Adoption of mobile devices compared to desktop

This has resulted in many institutions adopting a policy of BYOD (bring your own device) rather than supplying students with hardware.  Mobile devices have given students the ability to access lecture recordings ‘anytime, anywhere’ which has played a major role in the increased acceptance of lecture capture in educational institutions. 

79% of US institutions now have a BYOD policy
79% of US institutions now have a BYOD policy

Death of the client 

Eric continued with a discussion of trends in the technical administration of lecture capture systems, highlighting a noticeable shift towards HE institutions locking down admin access on individuals PCs, which, in combination with the ubiquity of mobile devices, has resulted in a decline in the use of client applications in favour of web based applications that do not require installation. In tandem with this trend, user interfaces have moved from favouring functional, dense, complex icon-heavy design to a more streamlined user-centered design. Eric used the analogy of water flowing downhill – users will favour designs that offer the path of least resistance. 

User Interfaces have traditionally been cluttered and information dense
User Interfaces have traditionally been cluttered and information dense

Panopto’s next update 

Having discussed the technological and social changes that have driven Panopto in the past, Eric looked to the future in the final segment of the keynote. Whipping the cover off a nearby table in a Steve Jobsian flourish, Eric revealed the next generation Panopto experience underneath – an all-in-one browser-based video capture system which removes the need for client software entirely. The soon to be Beta upgrade allows direct capture from the browser with multi-stream recording (up to 4 streams) plus a “confidence view” showing you what your video looks like. This will unify the experience across web and mobile with a streamlined ‘1-button record’ user interface for both. 

The Beta build of Panopto's next generation user interface
The Beta build of Panopto’s next generation user interface

 

The impact of video on student attendance and results

Presenters:

  • Dries Vanacker, Educational Developer, Arteveldehogeschool
  • Olaf Spittaels, Educational Developer, Arteveldehogeschool

The presentation started with an overview of their previous generation of LMS, they have now moved towards a new LMS based on canvas that reduces clicks and has customised integrations with other tools.

New technology was brought in to facilitate uptake of the new learning technologies, for example Pixio the robot cameraman!

This resulted in wider uptake of not only use of the LMS but lecture recording too, however there were still concerns from some staff that students would not attend lectures if their lectures were all provided as recordings.

 

To answer these concerns, they looked at multiple studies and found conflicting results on whether attendance is affected or not so they decided to embark upon a study of their own.

They set out to answer three questions:

What is the impact of the availability of enriched lecture recordings on the students' study results? What are the main reasons for students to use the enriched lecture recordings? What is the correlation between the availability of enriched lecture recordings and absentheism?

 

Their study ran over two academic years and looked at the same programme, the first year without lecture recording and the second year with lectures recorded.  The impact of the recordings was assessed by looking at how much of the recordings the students were watching.

16% Not, 33% Partly, 51% Entire

To look at the reasons the students were using the recordings they surveyed the programmes of students they were monitoring:

The attendance of lectures was also monitored, the results below are from the lectures that were recorded however, a similar trend of absenteeism was observed in the previous year of students that did not have lecture recordings available.

To address lecture attendance in general they sought student feedback on why they do or do not choose to attend lectures

The full results from the study were reviewed along with the exam results of the students from both years.  An increase in exam performance was observed for the students with access to recorded lectures. The overall data led to the conclusion below:

Conclusion, there is a positive effect from lecture recordings on study results. the lecture recordings are viewed more by students who also attended the lectures. The availability of lesson recordings has not significantly affected the lecture attendance. Most students use the lesson recordings to prepare for the exam.

The study is to be continued with the addition of “bite sized” videos introduced to course content with more interactive elements.

 

The full presentation is available via http://bit.ly/Panopto_AHS

 

 

Closing Morning Keynote: What if Education 4.0 became ‘video-first’? 

Professor Gilly Salmon, Online Education Services 

 

‘Education 4.0’ is coming declared Gilly Salmon! And it’s up to us to shape it. 

Video learning, with Panopto riding at the forefront, could encounter a similar development trajectory that Gutenberg’s printing press did almost 600 years ago. Where Gutenberg unlocked the accessibility of books and therefore mass education, video could do this again for a modern audience, therefore heralding a new golden age – ‘Education 4.0’ 

In her fascinating keynote speech, Professor Salmon explained that soon, higher education learning environments are going to experience a seismic shift in order to inspire new generations of digital native learners and to prepare them for the rapidly changing world of work. She went on to explore what ‘Education 4.0’ might look like and the importance of universities to rethink their teaching a learning strategy with a ‘video-first’ mindset. Technology is changing and so teaching and learning techniques must develop with it. An important point to consider, when introducing more video into learning experiences, is that individuals respond and learn in different ways – some binge watch, some don’t for example. 

Professor Salmon went on to investigate the future of Work Skills in detail, identifying key drivers, such as global connectivity and increased use of smart machines, that will shape the landscape of skills needed. To meet these challenges Professor Salmon introduced some ‘Education 4.0’  threshold concepts for us to consider, with a focus on bringing the human capabilities to the forefront of learning, utilising skills such as creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking.  

 

New features and how they can help your institution

The first technical breakout session was hosted by Meghal Patel, Panopto’s head of product. Meghal gave an overview of the Panopto changes that have been implemented over the past 12 months and gave examples of how these features can enhance the learning experience for students and staff. Details of these improvements are categorised below:

Mobile and embed experiences

Previously, viewers of Panopto content have had less functionality when viewing on mobile or embedded players, compared to viewers using the Panopto web UI. Since June 2019, the options available for the Panopto player when viewing content embedded in a VLE or on a mobile device has been greatly improved, and now includes commenting on videos, participating in quizzes, bookmarking content and taking notes.

OCR improvements

The optical character recognition system which detects the words written on presentation slides has been significantly improved, with better relevance and faster search performance. In addition, the search tool now brings up matched OCR text in context, so the search term is shown along with the rest of the text it appears with. For example, if you search for the word ‘project’, the search tool would find the occurrences of the word ‘project’ in a slide together with some of the preceding, and following text.

OCR now returns the context a word or phrase is used in
OCR now returns the context a word or phrase is used in

Smart Search 

In response to community suggestions, Panopto have optimised their search algorithm towards a higher relevancy for fresh content, so newer content appears higher in the results list. The smart search tool now includes support for Swedish, Hungarian, Danish and Norwegian languages.

Personal recorder

The maximum secondary screen resolution on personal recorders has been increased to 1920 x 1080px and 30 fps. In addition, Panopto have added the capability to capture the computer audio for Mac versions of the personal recorder, bringing parity with the windows version. The personal recorder is now compatible with busy light also.

Editor improvements

The pointer and cut tool have been streamlined into one tool, with a single click now representing a seek and a drag representing a cut. In addition, cuts can now be previewed before they are applied. These improvements are aimed at making editing more intuitive and minimizing clutter in the UI.

The improved editor interface
The improved editor interface

Quizzes

Fill in the blanks questions are now available. These include live previews so the answers are displayed in the question editor alongside the blanks to be filled in. 

Embedding content 

A new search interface has been developed which allows videos to be searched for before selecting them for embedding.   

Publishing

A new ‘publish now’ button has been introduced to facilitate one click, immediate publishing.  

Captioning 

Many new Caption providers are now available, such as AI Media. A new option has been added to request captioning for only a small portion of the video, rather than the entire video.

For Administrators  

Panopto received feedback from the administrators that managing the large volume of content present on Panopto environments with several years worth of video was a significant challenge. In response to this, Panopto have developed a content retention system, which comes prebuilt with several presents that determine when content should be deleted in relation to the creation date, modification date, availability date or the videos last view. In addition to these presets, custom retention rules can also be created. Content can be placed into the recycle bin, hidden or permanently deleted from the system.

Analytics

Analytic dashboards are now available for Admin, department admin and creator roles.

Screenshot of the Panopto Admins Analytics dashboard
Screenshot of the Panopto Admins Analytics dashboard

The admin dashboard displays video views over time, details on the folders viewed videos reside in and usage per subfolder.

The video usage dashboard also displays the videos viewed and downloaded by day, together with an engagement chart showing how many people have watched each different video segment, including how many have added comments for each section. This helps admins identify which segments of a video are of the most interest to viewers.

The creator dashboard displays usage for all content the user has created. This data can be drilled down to view videos by users, who has watched it and how much has been watched (in terms of completion percentage). Statistics per user can also be viewed to analyze which users are engaging with the content.

Admin presents 

The final set of new features discussed focused on the admin presets for the personal recorder. These can now be set to predefined settings such as video source, audio source and video quality by administrators. These presets can be saved as default, ensuring future users of the personal recorder containing these defaults are using a uniform set of settings.  

 

Teaching and Learning Breakout 1: Beyond Lecture Capture: Part One

In the first teaching breakout session of the Panopto conference in November, Adam Harvey and Andrew Reid from the University of Plymouth gave a presentation on the way they have used Panopto to increase the access to simulation learning. Plymouth originally ran an opt in pilot for Panopto in 2015, and as of 2016/17 they have moved to a campus wide supported system.

What was particularly interesting about the way in which the University of Plymouth was using Panopto to capture learning scenarios that previously couldn’t be done without video. For example, Doctor and Patient consultations were captured, and then streamed via Panopto which allowed for a greater number of students to have access to real life scenarios. Panopto was also used for filming surgeries. Reid explained that as an AV Technician they installed cameras in the ceiling of training rooms, able to capture surgeries from a bird’s eye view, so even for students who were present, they were able to go back to the Panopto recording and see what was going on from a clearer angle.

Harvey and Reid spoke a lot about how Panopto had aided the revolutionisation of simulation learning and has allowed a greater number of students to view simulation exercises, traditionally held in small setting. This has allowed for teaching hours to be maximised and creates a more inclusive environment, offering the same content to all students.

 

How to improve your use of video using the Panopto API

The second technical breakout session was presented by Josha Chande, (Panopto support manager) and focused on leveraging the capabilities of the Panopto API. After outlining how the API could help institutions customise and support the Panopto experience, Josha gave some specific examples of applications developed using the API. These included:

Google calendar integrations with the Panopto API
Example of a Google calendar integration with the Panopto API
  • Calendar integrations: Using Google calendar to schedule recordings at a particular date and time, with room data pulled from the Panopto API RemoteRecorderManagement service. 
  • Custom folder hierarchy: When existing LMS systems don’t format the folder hierarchy in the way required by the institution, the API can be used to reorder and reword the hierarchy accordingly – for example, placing the date at the beginning of the folder rather than the end. 
  • Per course feedback folders: When video feedback needs to be provided to students, the Panopto API can be used to create a folder accessible to only that student for the academic to place their feedback in. 
  • Drag and drop Panopto video into textbox : For an enhanced user experience, the API can be used to enable drag and dropping Panopto videos directly into a text box. This is achieved using a number of API services, including AccessManager to ensure the user has correct permissions for the video, and SessionManager to embed the video code into the text box. 
  • Remote recorder folder selector: A drop down that appears on login to a Panopto enabled PC which prompts the user to select which folder their recordings should be stored in. This is achieved by accessing the username and using the Panopto API to assess which folders that user has access to 
  • Batch scheduling: A number of institutions have developed their own scheduling tools which take input from a text file to generate Panopto schedules. These are similar to the batch tool we have developed at Imperial. 

Josha explained that the REST API is under active development and is forecast to achieve parity with the features available in the older SOAP API at some point in the future. However, at present the REST API is not as fully featured as the SOAP API.

The presentation then moved on to discuss the community that has grown up around the API, citing the growing number of integrations hosted on the official Panopto Github repository. Community member Graham Robinson was singled out for his contribution to helping others get to grips with the Panopto API through his blog, which include many useful guides and tutorials on how to get started.

Next, Josha was joined onstage by Richard Goodman, Learning Technology manager at Loughborough University who talked about how his institution scaled up to an automated capture system using the Panopto API. Richard presented Review, Loughborough’s online tool for recording sessions via Panopto and making them available via LEARN, their branded Moodle instance.

The review system automatically schedules Panopto recordings from their CMIS timetabling system – similar to the Celcat / Panopto integration we have developed at Imperial. Sessions can be opted out of recording and/or publishing through the interface and delays can be set for publishing the recording. The automation has been a success and has resulted in a stable, reliable system that is well received by students and staff. Richard emphasized the importance of high quality timetable data and the collaboration of IT services, teaching support and academic practice departments in ensuring successful development.

 

Panel discussion: The role of video in creating accessible and inclusive learning experiences

The conference was wrapped up with a discussion on one of the current hot topics of Higher Education, accessibility.

The panel were led by Alistair McNaught, a specialist in Accessibility and inclusion and included Rachael Hayes from the ICT Digital Education Team who has been working with the Imperial Disability Advisory Service to pilot Captioned Panopto videos with students.

 

Alistair started by introducing the topic and highlighting common stumbling blocks of getting tied up with “Pedagogical paralysis” where in trying to work out how to make content accessible to all, nothing gets done while how to provide 100% accessible resources is worked out and “Dangerous dismissiveness” where it is assumed there aren’t many people who would need the resource to be accessible so no changes are made.

He went on to highlight that there are three aspects of accessibility that need to be covered to make reviewing accessibility of materials successful, technical, human and digital competence.

Alistair went on to highlight that we should look to minimise the barriers to using accessible content, not only by providing it, but making sure there is clear signposting of how students can consume accessible features.

After highlighting feedback from students on why they found studying with a disability difficult and how accessible content can help; he put this in to context by highlighting the report from the Office for Students on “Are universities and colleges doing enough for disabled students”

The panel were then introduced and discussed questions that had been submitted by the conference attendees in advance of the conference.

 

 

 

This post was contributed to by: @Nick_Collis, @Rachael_Hayes, @Lee_Greatorex & @Jonathan_Blatchford

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.

Focusing on delivering 99.9% non-degraded service and uptime, they are continuing to improve text similarity by adding citations, mosaic plagiarism, formative solutions and image support. By adopting a colour code red: exact match, amber: synonym replacement and green for unique or no matches. Turnitin are continuing to infuse our academic integrity solutions for text similarity, authorship, code similarity, grading and the feedback AI.

Turnitin aim to improve their customer service by, developing a tech support portal for administrators, this will allow administrators to monitor their cases raised with Turnitin. They hope to introduce an area for self-service, a place where users can find their own solutions.

They aim to frequently update their status page to announce system maintenance and are planning to provide an RSS feed for the latest release notes.

Gradescope is aimed at STEM subjects, subjects where the marking workflows are based around short-answer exams and in-class assessments, for maths, physics and computing.

How does Gradescope work? Each question has its own rubric, the rubric stays the same for each student answer so you can mark each student quickly and fairly. Incorrect answers can be deducted points and explained where marks where lost. The key attribute with Gradescope is the rubric evolves while marking a range of correct and incorrect answers for one question. Therefore, every grader uses the same rubric and every grader can change or add to the rubric.

The grader can update the rubric, by adding or removing rubric items which contribute to the answers. Whenever you make changes to the rubric it automatically applies the changes to the answers you have already created.

This allows for a consistent and flexible grading workflow. Along with Gradescope you can see the common mistakes made by students on every question, grades can be downloaded and placed into the Grade Centre and grades can be easily sent to each student via email.

The Gradescope tool offers a lot of promise, for STEM based courses it provides clearer feedback to each student, for the instructor it provides a seamless path to grade and work with an evolving rubric, to ease modifying the grading process. “Turning grading into Learning”.

Authorship Tool

“Contract cheating represents a clear threat to providers’ ability to assure the standards of their qualifications, and as such to the reputation of UK HE as a whole. Although student plagiarism and ghost writing have been longstanding aspects of academic misconduct, the recent growth of third parties offering to help students to cheat has raised serious concerns in the sector”

Contract cheating, the use of a third party to help complete an assignment.

  • 16% of students admit to paying a third party to complete their work
  • 67% of instructors say they may not ac on suspicions of contract cheating due to insufficient evidence to support their claims.
  • 10% decline in number of university applications an institution receives following a scandal.

Turnitin’s new Authorship tool analyses submissions to help validate suspicions of contract cheating and allows investigators to gather facts, collect information and make impartial judgements.

  1. Allows you to see the data to evaluate suspicions: View document forensics and metadata that might signal contract cheating, turning gut instincts into actionable insights.
  2. Save time on investigations: Collect a complete history of students past assignments and identify outliers in minutes, not hours. Eg comparing the students writing style.
  3. User forensic linguistic analysis and Natural Language Processing to determine whether a student has submitted someone else’s work as their own.
  4. Surface deep insights and data points to support investigation processes and uphold your institutions quality standards when potential contract cheating occurs.

Turnitin combines this data and then allows the instructor to evaluate any concern and to decide on whether to conduct a further investigation. While the Authorship tool in Turnitin identifies the need for investigation, its the instructor that makes the final decision.

Overall, I found the Turnitin User Summit a useful conference to attend. They are making good progress in trying to improve their customer support and are listening to some of the feedback provided by the community. They are taking into consideration the student and instructor workflows to help provide useful feedback, while continually providing new and innovative ways in detecting similarities in papers and improving the depth of feedback.

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.

They discuss the growth of the developer community and mention how the number of members has doubled twice over in 2 years from 810 to 3507. This also reflects why there has been an increase of REST API calls, reaching up to 1.2 billion.

  • The REST API section in the developer portal has been improved to handle more user subscription. Improving the API documentation by filtering on each Blackboard version
  • Correcting typos to prevent incorrect API Calls

Best practice techniques were discussed, to enhance calls made to the API, for instance caching reusable data such as tokens and only caching data that changes infrequently.

Token Caching: Example One of the techniques to enhance calls made to the API
Cache your REST OAuth token

Introduction to Blackboard Data: The Next Generation Data Analytics Platform

Introduced by Rachael Scherer begins with the focus on “What reasons are we usually requesting data?”. Most responses are centred around tracking and measuring success, which is useful to the session as Blackboard Data provides reports and direct data access (a feature available for SaaS) across the learning ecosystem, by bringing data together we can predict the needs of students.

We continue work with Blackboard Data and we are given a preview to the Blackboard Data User Interface. All the features are not yet available, but we are given an insight into the; data dictionary which details the contents, formats and structure of a database and the relationships between tables used to query the databases.

We can see here the term definitions and relationships to other tables, certain terms have been assigned privacy notes, these privacy notes give the user an indication of which information should be treated with care. In the Blackboard Data user interface, you can also access the reports. These reports are generated, once you have executed the queries using Snowflake. An analysis platform we begin to use. Blackboard provide a quick training session on their two partner products partners Snowflake and Pyramid Analytics, as we are challenged to use these tools to create a report.

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse, focused on collecting data from multiple sources, used to collect all data for analysis. Access to a demonstration site using Snowflake to query Blackboard database was set up for us to execute queries and create reports.

In the afternoon we were given a demonstration of the Pyramid analytics platform, which provides reporting and direct data access from our learning ecosystem, (available as a feature on SaaS platform). The benefit is that it can live alongside and extend our analytic tools.

Developer Roadmap: Highlights the API and Future Enhancements

Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference

Some of Europe’s leading universities were presenting at the event. The main focus this year seemed to be divided between developments in SaaS, Ultra and Ally and how they have been adopted in different institutions.  During the welcome from the CEO Bill Ballhaus, he mentioned that 534 clients have moved to SaaS, 134 are now on Ultra and 548 institutions have adopted Ally.  It was clear throughout the event that Blackboard are looking to increase on these numbers and were keen to showcase examples throughout the TLC.  The welcome presentation also highlighted how Blackboard have simplified the business over the last year to focus more on teaching and learning to help increase innovation.  The company is trying to move away from a single product approach to design a more holositic EdTech platform  that will help deliver better learner engagement for all its customers.  For Blackboard, Ultra and Ally are key to this.

Moving to Ultra: Northumbria

Northumbria University gave an interesting presentation on their journey towards adopting Blackboard Ultra for 2019/20.  Interestingly they noted that Blackboard Learn 9.1 was not meeting the strategic aims of the University or achieving requirements for staff or students.  In short, they felt they had a great modern campus but not a VLE worthy of it.  The Northumbria journey started in 2016/17 when they moved to managed hosting.  Their overall objectives were to move to SaaS, enable Ultra base navigation in Ultra courses, implement new module and programme standards, adopt Ally and undertake staff training. They came up with the following options and have decided to go with option B highlighted in the below image.

Moving to Ultra was not without challenges.  Firstly, they found the core functionality was limited when compared with the tools available in Learn 9.1.  They also had the added challenge of dealing with continuous delivery, a different way of working for the TEL team. Moving away from a yearly upgrade to updates every 4 weeks was not something they were initially prepared for and lead to a reaevaluation of testing.  Finally, the challenge of training all staff in using Ultra and helping staff rebuild content from scratch. To deal with this, the team of 4 are now rolling out 256 training sessions for 4000 members of staff. They also have drop-in sessions 5 days a week for one-to-one support.  This is all incredibly labour-intensive and in addition to this, they are continuing to train and support staff in using Learn 9.1 as this system is still active (for the time being).

Has the move to Ultra been worthwhile for Northumbria? So far, they say it is a resounding yes.  It has been an opportunity for them to redesign courses and students who have moved to it have been positive in feedback.  A trial with MSc students who used 9.1 for their first module then transitioned to Ultra gave the following positive feedback.

So for Northumbria, they still have a bit of work to do before the start of the 2019/20 academic year, particularly in terms of training.  The summed up that if your organisation is planning on moving to Ultra then it is important to know your objectives, have a robust raining plan, have a solid communication and engagement strategy then go for it.

Aberdeen’s Journey to SaaS and Ultra

Aberdeen provided an interesting presentation focusing on the good, bad and unexpected on their journey to SaaS, Ally and Ultra. The ultimate goal is to move all courses into the Ultra view by August 2020. First steps for Aberdeen in this journey was to move to SaaS from managed hosting which they did in January 2018.  This process took 3 months and they felt it was the next logical step from managed hosting (also crucial if you want to move to Ultra).   In March 2019 they started to pilot Ultra courses.  For Aberdeen, one of the main benefits of this journey to Ultra was that it would allow them to re-engage with the different faculties and opportunity to re-develop courses.  One of the main negatives has been preparing for update on SaaS due to the constant nature of Blackboard’s continuous delivery model.  Keeping on top of all developments and system updates can be a challenge.  One of the main and unexpected outcomes for Aberdeen is that users were taken by surprise with the changes and developments in the move away from 9.1 Learn.  This was despite all the effort the TEL team had put in to prepare staff and students via workshops, online guidance, drop-in sessions, focus groups, course design guidelines and templates etc.  So to sum up, Aberdeen are on their way to their 2020 target but it hasn’t been without challenges, mainly getting the message out to the masses.

Comparisons of Ally

Reading, Northumbria, Derby and Edge Hill conducted a joint session comparing how they have implemented Blackboard Ally in their respective institutions.  Ally is Blackboard’s content accessibility solution that uses machine learning to create alternative accessible formats (https://www.blackboard.com/accessibility/blackboard-ally.html). It was interesting to see some key differences in how it has been implemented.  Northumbria and Edge Hill went for the ‘big bang’ approach and as they wanted all their courses to have access to it.  Reading in comparison have introduced it via a 2 year pilot and focused on more of a ‘soft’ launch.  Furthermore, although it is available on all courses, as it is a pilot, they decided not to advertise it as a service.  One area all the speakers were in agreement over was on the approach to communication, support and training.  Northumbria ran a number of roadshows and drop in sessions for staff.  Edge Hill started by training Learning Technologists so they were fully aware of the capabilities and manage any potential fears they had before they went on to train academics.  User feedback on Ally has been positive for all the institutions.  Staff were initially cautious due to potential changes to their courses but running training and 1-1s with disability officers, academics and students has helped.  Reading reported that the students who know it is available are using the audio alternative format for revision purposes.  However, as they have gone or the soft launch approach, a lot of their students are still not aware it is available.  The presentation was wrapped up with the goals for the future.  Main things to consider for anyone considering adopting Ally is to have a strong communication strategy, arrange ‘a lot’ of training, engage with students and add Ally into any VLE baseline.

In addition to the joint session, Blackboard have shared the following video featuring a number of other institutions from around the globe talking about their experiences of Ally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha8B1L6WCh0

That’s all from this years conference.  It will be interesting to see how Blackboard continue to evolve their EdTech platform over the next year.  The Ultra platform, although its had a number of developments and improvements over the last year, still needs a lot of work until it is a viable alternative to Learn 9.1.  Speaking of Learn, what is the road map for this product going forward?  Will Blackboard be focusing solely on Ultra by the time of the next conference?  We will find out at the 2020 TLC.

 

 

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. In her invigorating talk she placed an emphasis on play, a matter that was obviously close to her heart, as within five minutes we were all busy drawing pig diagrams(!?). She explained that we should all be allowed the freedom to fail, as this is where you learn the best experiences and encourages creativity & innovation. She explained that a major culture shift needed to take place with regards to how look at the world of e-learning and using systems in pioneering ways to continually adapt to a changing technology environment and to also meets the needs and desires of the students and staff.

Below are some of my highlights of the conference and for each one, we were asked to rate them as Fail, Fad or Future. In my opinion, they all made the Future category, but that isn’t to say that ones that didn’t were Fails!

 

“MBA in Your Pocket” – Mobile social learning for work-based learners

John Brindle – University of Liverpool

Liverpool described how in the future they are looking to adopt a “mobile first” learning approach. They have recently introduced their “mobile-first platform” (Blackboard Ultra – SaaS), with the aim of creating a blended learning module for post-experience learners and garnering 100% online engagement. They used the reasoning that the uptake should be high and overall successful as users don’t need an incentive to go on phone. This bore out specifically in the increased use of the Discussion Forums via Mobile phone.
John made a strong case for mobile-first learning as a go-to tool for busy work-based students. He noted that it was important to consider pedagogical decisions carefully to ensure a smooth transition of the new technology on a course that was previously face-to-face only and that training for Academics to interact with Blackboard more is essential for an endeavour such as this.

This might seam like a Fad but it is definitely the FUTURE!

 

It’s All About the Base (Navigation) -Northumbria University’s Move to Blackboard Ultra

Kristen McCartney-Bulmer, Lee Hall & Harriet Walshaw -Northumbria University

Northumbria shared some of their experiences from their recent move to Blackboard Ultra. The brave souls have taken the plunge, with the battle cry “Change is the only constant these days” and made the switch to Ultra. They explained that the scale and scope of change required to move to a new VLE means that getting it right at the beginning avoids difficulty further down the road. Rolling out a new VLE, especially one that nobody else is using has an appeal but also can be a scary prospect! As with any large scale change, managing expectation, training, and communication is key to successful to implementation and adoption of the service by staff and students.

Whilst Durham were more than happy to point out the Fails they encountered, overall they believe that Ultra is the FUTURE!

 

An Allied comparison of Ally

Claire Gardener (Derby), Kristen McCartney-Bulmer (Northumbria), Maria Papaefthimiou (Reading) & Susi Peacock (Queen Margaret)

A master-class in presenting here – four “Allied” universities discussed their their plans for implementing the much talked about Blackboard Ally. Over the past year many universities have started to implement Blackboard Ally: a tool that looks at the content in a course and considers the accessibility of that content. Engaging with the Ally European User Group has shown that there are many pathways to implementation and this collaborative presentation from Universities who have all recently implemented Ally shared their approaches, challenges, opportunities and goals.

As I cannot replicate the entire presentation here I would recommend anyone who is looking down the BB Ally route to get in touch with the individuals named above concerning subject ranging from creating a business case; BB Ally implementation strategy; communication, support and training methods; engaging and acting upon user feedback and how to take the project forward in the future.

This feature makes content better for the end user, so no doubt its the FUTURE!

 

The future starts today, not tomorrow

Neil Cocklin –Aston University

Neil Cocklin gave an engaging talk in which he looked at the issue behind Universities spending heavily on technology but investing significantly less on training and support. The education sector is slowly running the risk of running into a lack of digitally skilled workers in the near future.
As a reaction to this, the Technology Enhanced Learning team at Aston University, embarked on a series of initiatives to provide deeper, broader and more flexible teaching and learning support for their digital learning platforms.

Neil guided us through formal and informal approaches, exploring various techniques such as guided and self service, online and face to face. His team tried their hardest to adopt a multifaceted approach that was designed to fill in the gaps, re-invigorate and demonstrate the commitment of the academics and support staff.

His presentation was very insightful, especially from a support perspective, and explored a range of approaches that Aston has developed for supporting staff in technology enhanced learning development. Particular emphasis was placed on the drop-in sessions that were arranged for staff.

Hopefully elements of this are already in place, but if not then support and training should be something to look to in the FUTURE!

 

Thanks to Durham for an excellent user group (and of course for the three course gala dinner in Durham castle) and hope to see you again next year.

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. For example, in flight safety videos are usually well produced, high budget and give basic evacuation information.

In contrast, the plane exits are always displayed in person by the cabin crew – because these vary in different aircrafts and require prior knowledge from the crew. Cormier states that this can translate to an education environment by using videos to peak student interest – learning basic tasks can be monotonous and sometimes seem unnecessary to the learner. Video allows for these tasks to be immersive, interactive and interesting. It also negates the risk of human error – you can be certain that the same information is being delivered to everyone, every time.

The second portion of the morning concerned active learning. Each of the attendees was given an envelope containing a volvelle (see photo below) – not only did this encourage active learning but it also introduced an element of gamification to the talks that followed. Guest speakers spoke about how they’d used active learning in their own courses, and how this was boosted by Panopto. Topics ranged from Geology to Ethics but all followed a common theme, that active learning supported by video input allows education professionals to move away from a ‘chalk and talk’ approach and towards real world examples.

A commonality of these talks was that we’re entering an era of teaching digital literacy to a generation who’ve grown up with the internet. Inés Dawson and Simon Clark, both who had recently completed their PhDs in Biology and Maths respectively, talked about the use of video and the internet to engage a younger audience.

Inés had found success with her YouTube channel Draw Curiosity on which she uploaded playful videos which explored different aspects of science she found interesting. YouTube allows for a mash-up of social media and education. It’s taken off hugely in the last decade – turning bedroom vloggers into celebrities. Simon Clark wanted to take his vlogging a step further. Discussing popular videogame streaming site, Twitch, he talked about how he livestreams himself taking practice GCSE and A-level exam papers and giving advice for Oxbridge interviews.

 

 

There are drawbacks for this approach of course – whilst Twitch might be incredibly popular for live streaming video games – a Mathematical Doctor filling out an A-level exam in real time just might not hold the same kind of excitement for viewers. Equally, whilst Inés is a Doctor of Biology – her YouTube channel could be leading viewers down a less than factual rabbit hole.

In his closing talk, Eric Burns – the CEO of Panopto – addressed the drawbacks of using YouTube for sharing educational materials. Whilst creators like Inés and Simon may be able to monetise their videos through adverts, they also relinquish ownership of everything they create allowing YouTube to do with it as they see fit. For Example, an education video on the Mars Rover could be followed on auto-play by a conspiracy theory video about alien life on Mars. In an age of ever emerging ‘fake news’ these sorts of features are becoming a cause for concern. Luckily, Eric handily points out, this is avoided by buying into Panopto.

 

After lunch, (I had an absolutely huge serving of lamb, broccoli gratin, and a pear salad which was lovely but I did feel massively bloated after and couldn’t fit in any dessert) there were two break out sessions; Teaching and Learning, and Technical.

The Teaching and Learning session allowed for attendees to hear from staff at different institutions talk about how they’d utilised Panopto. First up was two members of staff from Wolverhampton University – who discussed the move from their inhouse VLE, Wolverhampton Online Learning Forum (WOLF), to Canvas brining in Panopto in the process. Following on from the morning’s talks, two of the Education Developers at the University of Wolverhampton had incorporated gamification into their teaching and learning strategy in the form of a ‘flexigon’.

Paul Towers and Gemma Witton explained that active learning was an important step in getting staff onboard with big technological changes across the university.

This presentation was followed by Imperial’s own Moira Sarsfield – the principal Learning Technologist for FoNS. Moira explained that FoNS had introduced active learning through hosting a ‘Summer Challenge’ for teaching fellows – asking them to identify and upload a clip of themselves displaying active learning techniques in one of their lectures. Not only did this help teaching fellows identify their strengths and weakness where teaching techniques were concerned but showcased the skills of the Learning Technology and AV Teams (aided, obviously by the support of the E-learning team).

The day culminated in the Jim, one of the Panopto engineers based in Seattle outlining what’s to come in the roadmap. But this is all very secret, and I can never talk about it.

Of course the canapes and free bar was enjoyed by all – and if you want to know more about what others took away from the day, #Panopto18 on Twitter makes for an interesting read.

 

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.

Graph showing the increase in Panopto usage at Imperial since January 2014
Graph showing the increase in Panopto usage at Imperial since January 2014

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.

A significant obstruction to carrying out this work efficiently has been that the Panopto interface restricts administrators to setting up recording schedules, folders and user permissions one at a time. There has been no way to create multiple schedules, folders or permissions at once. Feedback from faculty learning technologists has been that this one-at-a-time method is time consuming and prone to human error.

We (the ICT Digital Education team) have developed a Panopto Batch Actions tool, written in Java using the Panopto API, which allows multiple schedules, folders and permissions to be created at once from a csv file supplied by faculty Learning Technologists via a dedicated ASK form.

The Panopto Batch Actions tool allows multiple schedules, folders and permissions to be created at once via csv upload

The tool has been in Beta since September 2017 and was released as a production system in September 2018 after extensive testing from Imperial staff. Since the beta release we have had over 200 batch file submissions through the ASK form, comprising over 100,000 schedules creations, folder creations, permission assignments and RSS feed activations. This represents a significant time saving as previously each item for each action would have been processed individually.

Feedback from customers has been positive:

“The new Panopto batch processes have dramatically improved our workflow within the Edtech Lab. It has enabled us to replace a considerable amount of manual data entry with a few clicks of a button.”

– Phil Tulip, Edtech Lab project Manager, Business School

Looking to the future, ICT are piloting an integration between Panopto and the Celcat timetabling system which will automatically schedule Panopto recordings once the lecture has been timetabled, removing the need for faculty Learning Technologists to set up schedules by sending csv files, further improving the efficiency of the process. The pilot for this project is currently underway with the Engineering faculty and early feedback has been positive. The Batch Tool will still remain in use once the Panopto Celcat timetable integration is released for all faculties as there will still be a need to set up folders, permissions and RSS settings based on csv files.

More details of the Batch Tool are available on our website. We are continuing to develop additional self service tools to help streamline e-learning processes, improving autonomy and efficiency for Imperial staff, details of which will be posted on this blog when they become available. Please contact us for more information.

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.

In addition to the conference, Imperial’s representatives  also intended to visit as many Manchester pubs as possible that were listed in the Good Beer Guide and naturally sample the products that they had to offer. Cheers!

Welcome to DevCon

Manchester UniFirst up DevCon, the morning introduction discussed the development of the Developer Portal for Blackboard and the progress that it has made with the interest accumulating.

In 2017 there have been 1323 new developers registered for the developer community, of a grand total of 2133.

55 Production groups have delivered 62 application, 50% are in Education, 26% in Businesses and 24% in Open Innovation Initiative.

In 2017, the community was receiving requests for up to 10 new developers registering a day.

The Blackboard REST and LTI Developer Amazon Machine Image (“AMI”) is an image of a Blackboard Learn server available in the Amazon Marketplace.

Allowing users to create a standalone copy of Blackboard, to build applications using REST APIs/LTI’s to integrate with different versions of their standalone BB Learn.

REST+LTI 101

It was only a week or two ago that I was registered to the Developer Portal to gain access to REST API, this session explores the Blackboard Developer Portal in more depth, giving a brief overview of the REST API integrations that can be used. Information on how to register users, manage applications, managing groups and an understanding Rate Limits is discussed.

This session on the REST API offers the opportunity to discover how to make requests to obtain a range of information. Eg. Course/user/roles/content all readily available. This could be used to create a web application offering a solution to some of the requests we receive via ServiceNow. An option would be to create an application that would allow users to create thier own courses.

LTI Advantage

As the Building Blocks have been the primary integration framework for learn, they are not best suited for SaaS and Ultra. SOAP Web Services have provided a limited set of integration points for Learn Hosted environments or SaaS and are not suitable for Ultra.

In 2016 Blackboard Learn moved to REST APi’s for integrating with all products, Learn Collaborate etc. This has been beneficial when working with IMS LTI specification, which when used in conjunction with REST API provides a deeper experience than LTI alone

Integration Migration

There are 3 integration frameworks for Blackboard, SaaS, Ultra and Learn. These can be delivered in a Self-Hosted environment or a Managed-Hosted environment.

For optimal integration of Building Blocks, SOAP Web Services and REST API all must be considered.

  • Building Blocks : no longer supported on Ultra / Saas
  • Web Services SOAP no longer supported on
  • REST API : Suitable for both delivery models and UX

REST+LTI In-Depth

Building Blocks are problematic, as they require a server restart when installing or updating, which can impact system downtime. They require a controlled technique for improving the existing code to run on Saas and are not client installable on Sass, they also require Java programming expertise and are not compatible with Ultra.

SOAP is dead to Blackboard, they currently present performance issues in large scale applications and often suffer from ‘session sickness’. SOAP is not compatible with Ultra and at some time later this year will start to be decommissioned.

REST is now and the future…
REST is the integration model for all BB products from now on, applications run externally to LEARN. The application may be developed in any language supporting HTTPS (PHP, NodeJS, Java, JavaScript), using the same system resources as HTTPS requests via the browser and it is compatible across all Learn platforms.

LTI plus REST enables access to data not supported by LTI, it enables a deeper integration without the need for supporting SSO in your application and is compatible across all Learn platforms and user experiences.

How to Work Best with Blackboard Support

Presented by Andy Hulme.

Andy informed the group what the best steps to take are, when dealing with a Blackboard issue. He provides an example and takes us through each step that is necessary to resolve the issue quickly.

Logging Support Tickets

Example 1. We have an error in assignments. Please access and fix

Do not just provide user admin and password.

Timeline the problem and provide threaddumps while the problem is occurring if possible.

Take SQL Performance reports

Install new relic

Try and replicate the erorr so we can instruct BB support

Clear and easy to follow steps with a screen capture where possible

  • include the setup as well as the action that causes an error or question
  • include the full stack trace from the error
  • check the bb-servies.log or stdout-log file
  • check the app server you are using with /webapps/portal/healthCheck

Functioning as Designed

If support says a function is (Function as Design) FAD and you disagree.

Re-open the case

Escalate via the support channels

Help us understand this more so we can push for this is to be redesigned

Got the ideas exchange and post your view. Tag Andy within the ticket, or email him directly.

Collaborate API

Grade Traffic Controller is a middleware tool that sits between the Student Record System and Blackboard Learn.

Efficiency Gains Improve Quality Academic Staff

 
Reduced admin workload

 

 Better Reporting

 

 Powerful workflow

 
Duplication of effort

 

 Marks handled securely

 

 Improve Quality

 
Time Saving Reduced error rate

 

 Clarity of marking

 
Secure transfer of grades

 

 Work Backed up

 

 

Developer Roadmap

To end the DevCon 2018, Mark O’Neil (Senior Product Manager) highlights the API and future enhancements. As we start to create more self- service applications at Imperial College London, it has an interesting end to the conference.

2018 (by the end of the year)

 

 2019
Content Download

 

 User Calendar

 
Memberships with optional User Data

 

 Course Copy with Ignore Membership option

 
Course Calendar

 

 Observer Management

 
Original Assignments and Attempts

 

 Discussions

 
Rubrics

 

 Search Object Modified

 
Grade Weight Formulas

 

 Batch Requests

 
Course announcements

 

 Hierarchy/Activity Stream/Notifications/Logs

 
Institution Calendar Localization and accessibility data

SaaS

Much of the conference was understandably dedicated to SaaS, with a lot of Blackboard customers considering moving over to the SaaS service in the future. SaaS offers Blackboard Learn delivered via the cloud, with the option to enable the new features that Blackboard Ultra boasts, as well as many improvements to maintenance, updates and service.

With SaaS, Ultra can be used for either navigation (with courses staying as they are in BB Learn) or changing completely and using Ultra for both navigation and courses. The Activity Stream is a major selling point and does indeed look impressive:Activity Stream

The system hasn’t been without its teething problems however, with the functionality of the building blocks quoted as being “not quite there yet”. We shall watch this space.

 

Gamification

Gamification

Malcolm Murray from Durham University gave an excellent and insightful presentation on using Gamification in Blackboard.

He presented many innovative ideas that he had incorporated into his courses, including:

  • Padlocks – Used to tease users to progress through the course and “un-lock” content
  • Progress bars – Users can gauge how far they are into the course and how long completion will take
  • Scoreboard – Display grades and attainments in the course visibly so that users can reflect on their achievements

The presentation went on to highlight the benefits of individual targeting, which helps with retention. Techniques included mentioning them by name and awarding badges. These helped to show a clear representation of how the user is progressing in the course.

More information can be found here: Tinyurl.com/bbtlcgamification

How do students use BB

Imperial’s very own star Learning Technologist, Katie Stripe, gave an excellent presentation about measuring engagement with students at the National Heart and Lung Institute.

The key topics she discussed included:

  • How the different approaches to building content have an impact on student outcome and that these are varied as people learn in different ways.
  • That students know what they want in terms of course design but they do not know what is good for them. Students will take the path of least resistance.
  • Course creators should explain their decisions around why the course is structured in a specific way, to the student taking the course. The use of signposting and transparency is important.

And finally:

  • That students are entitled to the best content! Raising the concept that “If you put garbage in – you get garbage out!”

Best Pub Award

Of the pubs visited, the most highly recommend is the City Arms with The Briton’s Protection coming a close second. Both are lively pubs with well-kept beer. The City Arms served an excellent pint of mild, which turned out to be the perfect aperitif to pie, chips and gravy.

City Arms Food

In The Briton’s Protection, Lee met a man whose aim was to visit every Weatherspoons pub in existence. He was fairly drunk and quite close to completion of his epic task.

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.  A highlight was a private tour followed by dinner in the rather glorious surroundings of Durham Castle.

Durham Castle

 

Conference dinner

 

Alternative to Turnitin?

Moving onto the programme, the Durham team managed to arrange a number of interesting and varied Blackboard sessions over the course of the two days.    One of the first sessions I attended was by URKUND, one of the conference sponsors.  URKUND, which has a large presence in Europe, offer a plagiarism detection service that compares submitted documents against around 11 million student papers, journals, periodicals and books all over the web.  Click on the video below for an overview of URKUND:

URKUND have been working with Blackboard to create a building block that uses Blackboard’s Mashup tool so that assignments are sent directly to URKUND for checking.  From the demo, it looks like there are a few key differences from Turnitin.  Firstly, URKUND doesn’t have the option to remove bibliography from similarity report which is something you can easily do in Turnitin.  It also creates two columns per assignment in the grade centre.  One column for the assignment and one for the similarity report.  Are there advantages of using URKURD over Turnitin?  Well, it is difficult to say at the moment.  For long term users of Turnitin, would they allow you to take your institution repository and place it in a rival system or would you have to start again from scratch? Another consideration is the user experience and whether it offers the same functionality as Turnitin.  At the moment that remains to be seen.

 

Self-directed Blackboard Course

As a Blackboard training provider, it is always interesting to see what services other institutions are offering.  Candace Nolan-Grant from Durham University gave an interesting presentation on a self-directed Blackboard course that introduced new staff to their Blackboard platform (duo).  The course, available to all new staff and anyone on request, was designed for those unable to attend face to face training or preferred online learning.

Self-directed course

The course aim was to help staff with the basics of Blackboard to ensure they meet university minimum standards and crucially, understand Blackboard from a student and staff perspective.  The initial idea was to create a sandbox for all staff.  However, Candace commented that this ‘clogged’ up the system so they limited to new staff. Durham produced some stats after rolling out this introduction course.  They had 79 unique visitors.  62 visited more than the first page.  However, they only had 18 return visitors, possibly due to the staff completing the course after one visit.  Interestingly they had zero posts in the blog they created highlighting a challenge most institutions have getting staff and students to engage with interactive tools.  Overall, it is a good first attempt at developing self-directed training.

 

Upgrading to the latest release of Blackboard Learn

There was an interesting presentation by Jonathan Knight from the University of Keele discussing how they have radically changed their process for dealing with upgrades to the latest versions of Blackboard Learn.  Historically Keele, like most institutions, are a version or two behind the current Blackboard release, preferring to wait for others to test new releases and explore features before making them available to staff.  Jonathan used the analogy of the canary down a mine to demonstrate this point.

Canary

Over the last few years they have changed that policy and now prefer to run the latest release with all the features turned on.  Jonathan argued that introduction of SAAS Ultra and updates every two to four weeks makes Blackboard the ‘canaries’ finding all the bugs and doing all the testing in their latest version. For Jonathan, he found that with Blackboard backfilling bug fixes into a version a year old can sometimes lead to side effects and in turn impact functionality in the older version of Learn. Jonathan also suggested that not having to spend time doing rigorous testing has freed up their teams time to focus on new developments.  Personally, I feel it a bit of a brave move going to the latest release as you never know what might work or more importantly not work.  Interestingly when questioned on change management procedures, Jonathan mentioned it is not something they deal with.  Jokingly (or rather ominously), Jonathan ended his presentation saying if he is not around at next year’s conference then you know that this method has not worked.  Maybe best not to rush to the latest version yet.

 

Moving to Managed Hosting – A review

One of the final presentations of the conference was by Chris Boon from City College Norwich on their move to a managed hosted solution.  There were a couple of key drivers for Chris.  Firstly, the increased number of services that have moved to the cloud meant it was a good time to review the hosting option.  Secondly, it would hopefully resolve what he described as ‘Thursday slowdown’ problem where the system would be temperamental for no obvious reason. Chris spoke about the on boarding process which you can see in the image below before moving onto disadvantages and advantages.

On boarding process

 

The main issue they have had was losing access to the database.  Previously they were able to fix things via database queries or run simple reports on database.  However, on the flipside they no longer have same the performance issues they had before.  Furthermore, upgrades have become significantly easier and less labour intensive. This has also had the knock on effect of freeing up more time for other developments.  It was a somewhat positive end to the conference knowing that the move to managed hosted can bring a number of potential benefits.

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.

tyne-bridge
Tyne Bridge

 

Chinatoon
The view from Chinatoon – St James Park

 

Alan Shearer
Alan Shearer

 

Night-time by the Tyne
Night-time by the Tyne

 

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).  Incidentally, my trip coincided with freshers’ week so I spent most of Wednesday evening dodging drunk students dressed as gladiators, knights and Harry Potter.

 

Hello from the CEO

The user summit took place in the rather nice surroundings of the Crowne Plaza in Newcastle. After the customary coffee, pastries and meet and greet, the event kicked off with a video from the CEO Chris Caren, who discussed recent successes and outlined his vision for Turnitin.  Future aims include increasing the number of submissions to one billion (currently at 636 million), tripling the number of unique users to reach 100 million learners and improve the ‘journey’ for students submitting drafts.  For instance, students submitting formative drafts with have full online feedback and not just an originality report. Turnitin are also working on a ‘ghost writing’ build to recognise if someone else is writing your essay.

Recent successes for Turnitin include doubling the customer support staff and introducing the ‘wizard’ support feature.  Moreover, the introduction of the wizard has seen a vast reduction in support queries (specifically related to forgetten passwords).  With the increase in support staff, Turnitin hope to have an SLA of 24 hours by next year.  However, with the goal of having 100 million learners and a billion submissions, I am little sceptical if they can realistically achieve this target.  In terms of hosting, another success has been the move to Amazon Web Service (AWS). According to Caren, the move has helped improve up-time and greatly improved security and flexibility.  Finally, the welcome ended with a note on how important the UK market is for Turnitin.  He used the example of multiple markers being a huge requirement in UK and so far they have failed to deliver on this.  The company hope to tailor the product more to the needs of regions once they role out Feedback Studio next year.

 

Customer-Centric Vision

Following the CEO was a presentation by Claudia Dowell from Turnitin on the ‘customer-centric vision’ of the company.  After looking back at the successes over an 18 year period and comparsions against rivals (see image below), Claudia noted that communication between Turnitin and users is not great and needs to be improved.  One of the methods suggested to improve communication is to build a user community.  I suggested to the VP of Turnitin that they should look at Behind the Blackboard as a template for how it could be set out.  It seems that there was a big demand from those who attended the summit for the development of a community.

Comparisons with rivals
Comparisons with rivals

 

Technology Keynote

Ron Park, CTO of Turnitin, began his presentation by noting that the company had over promised and under delivered in the past.  He argued the key for the future success of Turnitin is to improve speed, power, flexibility, accessibility and security.  To help reach these five goals, the company have made many improvements, including investing in a new $5 million Data Centre.  Ron used the analogy of an iceberg to demonstrate some of the other big changes happening within the company (see image below).

Iceberg ahead! - Recent changes at Turnitin
Iceberg ahead! – Recent changes at Turnitin

 

Feedback Studio

One of the main reasons for attending this summit was the opportunity to view Feedback Studio in action.  Mark Rickson, one of the chief designers of Feedback Studio, was on hand to demo the system and run through some of the main features.

One of the new features has been the development of a web crawler called ‘Walker’ (Turnitin trying to be funny with the name…).  A web crawler is what Turnitin use to scan and index new and existing content from the web in the Turnitin database. The problem with the previous crawler was it did not go deep into web content and struggled with java script content. Furthermore, it previously could not crawl SSL secured pages.  Walker on the other hand can crawl SSL pages and is also significantly quicker.  For example, previously it would take 17 days to crawl through the whole of Wikipedia.  The same process can now take place in 5 hours.

The main goal for the designers of Feedback Studio has been to make it easier to use (for both staff and students) than previous versions of Turnitin.  In particular, they have put a lot of effort into re-jigging the interface when providing student feedback.  In Turnitin Classic, you have different feedback options in every corner of the page. Feedback Studio on the other hand consolidates all the options into one tool bar at the side of the page.  You can view this and other changes in the demo video below;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIKjBzJIe2g

Edinburgh University gave a short presentation discussing their findings on using Feedback Studio.  Edinburgh have been involved in the beta testing and have been using the system for the last four months.  To date, there have been 5952 submissions using Feedback Studio.  User consultation has proved positive and despite having the option to revert back to Turnitin Classic, Edinburgh have found that users are sticking with Feedback Studio. In addition, 85/90% of their users use Feedback Studio with the Blackboard Learn integration.  Rather positively, they haven’t reported any issues with this.

Nevertheless, despite the positivity surrounding Feedback Studio, Turnitin still have not addressed some key requirements that users would like to see in the new system.  There still appears to be no delegated grading or option for double and blind marking. This seemed to be a concern for most users at the summit.   On a positive note, they have recognised this is an important issue and are in the process of developing a solution to support multiple and blind marking.  Turnitin are currently looking for beta testers for this.  Information on this can be found here – https://guides.turnitin.com/01_Manuals_and_Guides/Feedback_Studio_Success_Kit/Multiple_Markers_(Beta).  Realistically, it will probably be a couple of years before these features are included in Feedback Studio.

 

Feedback Studio – Launch Timeline

In August 2017, Feedback studio will become the default service, as Turnitin classic is fully deprecated.  To help users with the transition to Feedback Studio, Turnitin have created a Success Kit (https://guides.turnitin.com/01_Manuals_and_Guides/Feedback_Studio_Success_Kit) which contains resources needed to get started with the new system.  This includes a section on how to trial Feedback Studio with a subset of users and email templates to send to staff.

 

All in all, it was a useful conference to attend.  Turnitin seem keen to keep their UK customers happy and they hope the introduction of the Feedback Studio and a potential user community will help them achieve this.  However, it was also somewhat dissappointing that they have not addressed the issue of delegated, multiple or blind marking.  There is clearly is a huge demand for these features so hopefully they will appear at some point in Feedback Studio.  If they don’t, I’m sure any new community of users will have a lot to say on the matter.

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.  The groups brainstorm and exchange ideas on how to solve the problem and in some sessions they will actually develop a solution prototype.  Prizes are awarded for the best solutions.

This sounded like a really interesting and collaborative event.  The challenges were wide ranging and focused on getting people work together to find solutions.  Janina described the event as ‘competitive but supportive’.  People are given the opportunity to show creativity in a hands–on environment and they forge connections with those who they meet and collaborate with at the event.  It is truly a unique learning environment and UCL plan on running these events again in the future.

 

Presenter: Yanna Nedelcheva, University of Westminster
Topic: Open Badges

The University of Westminster has decided to provide open badges for their students.  Open badges are a type of online certification that can represent a student’s non-accredited achievements and it is a unique way of displaying skills.

Badges can demonstrate lifelong learning as students can collect badges from different courses or institutions over time.  Badges are collected and stored in an online passport that can be opened up for anyone to view, including potential employers.  The badges that are provided are inter-operable so they can be transferred to other systems.

Yanna provided some examples of when the University of Westminster might use these badges.  They are:

  • In modules using gamification
  • Recognising extra-curricular activity
  • Demonstrating subject specific skills
  • External short courses
  • Internal staff development workshops

The University of Westminster elected to use a cloud based system called Open Badge Factory.  The plan is to integrate this into their Blackboard system using API.

 

Presenter: Kris Roger, LSE
Topic: Learning Spaces at LSE

LSE are looking at alternative ways of teaching that include using flipped lectures.  In order to accomplish, this they feel that they may need to change the room layouts that they have as their current rooms are geared towards traditional lecturing.    Many of the new modes of teaching that are being explored involve group work and with this in mind they are looking at room layouts that involve cluster desks.

They plan to evaluate 7 teaching spaces and to make a recommendation regarding potential layouts.  They are looking at research that supports alternative modes of teaching and talking to external consultants.  They are also engaging with lecturers and students to get their views.

Some of the constraints that they face are:

  • Budget
  • Conservative approaches to teaching still prevalent
  • Timetabling
  • Capacity
  • Different opinions on use of space

It will be interesting to see what they adopt and how it is received.