Category: Digital Education

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.

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). 

Incorporating Virtual Reality (VR) into Online Courses

This is a short blog post on the potential of using virtual reality (VR) content in e-learning courses. I recently attended the Learning Technologies Summer Forum at Olympia in London. This was the second Learning Technologies event that I have attended this year, following the conference & exhibition that took place in January.   Although I found the event slightly disappointing due to the lack of seminars, one area that stood out was the growing number of exhibitors demonstrating e-learning content through virtual reality headsets.  Furthermore, the exhibitors from Kallidus managed to win over the crowd by giving away free Google Cardboard before their seminar entitled ‘Getting started with VR: myths, realities and practicalities’ which you can download from this page.

Blackboard Learning & Teaching Conference 2016 Review

Groningen in the Netherlands recently hosted the 2016 Blackboard EMEA conference.  The three day conference was the biggest that Blackboard have held in Europe and featured over 420 delegates from 19 different countries.  Before discussing the conference, I must say that Groningen was a great location to hold the event.  It is a small picturesque town dominated by University of Groningen and surrounded by canals and ‘car free’ streets full of cyclists.  Furthermore, the town also hosted the fantastic ‘David Bowie Is’ exhibition and Blackboard delegates were given free access to this after hours.

I’ll now focus on some of the key events from the conference.

Learning Technologies 2016: Authoring Tools Review 4/2/16

by John Ramsay

On Thursday 4th February, I attended the Learning Technologies event at Olympia in London.  Learning Technologies is a showcase for organisations to demonstrate the latest advances in workplace learning and learning technology.  With over 140 free seminars over two days, I decided to focus my attention on the latest e-learning authoring tools to see if they offered a viable alternative to established products such as Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline.

The three main seminars that I attended were;

  • WMB: E-Learning is Dead!
  • eLB: Become an E-Learning Rockstar
  • Appitierre Ltd: Enabling Everyone to Create Multi-device E-Learning Content

You can find a short summary of each presentations below.

Panopto Conference 2015: The future of video for learning – 21/10/15

Amidst a slew of Back to the Future quotes, images and analogies the Panopto 2015 conference looked to focus on “The future of video for learning”

If it did manage to pass you by 21st October 2015 was the day Marty and the Doc travelled to in Back to the Future II… See Wikipedia for more details if you are interested!

(Photo: Universal Pictures)

The conference this year was held at the America Square Conference Centre, an interesting feature of the conference centre is that it is built over part of the original London Wall (one of the largest construction projects carried out in Roman Britain) and this has been exposed and displayed in the refreshment area.

London Blackboard User Group Meeting Review – 31/07/15

Review by John Ramsay.

I recently attended the summer 2015 London BUG meeting at Regent’s University. The theme for the event was ‘Enhancing Blackboard with Plugins and Building Blocks’ and below are some of the key points that emerged from the meeting;

  • BbStudent app – coming soon
  • Blackboard Collaborate – Ultra Roadmap released
  • Turnitin: Next – new look for Turnitin
  • Bb roadshows in November 2015
  • 2015 Bb World slides- now available

I will now look at some of the key points from BUG in more detail.

Blackboard World and Ultra Updates

Ashley Wright from Blackboard started his presentation by speaking briefly about the recent BbWorld conference from Washington DC.