E-Learning Newsletter – March 2022 | Technology Enhanced Learning Team

Welcome to our newest Learning Technologists

On 21st February the Technology Enhanced Learning Team welcomed Steve Evans to the team. Steve joins us as a Learning Technologist in the Service strand. Steve lived in Madrid for 30 years where he recently worked as an instructional designer. For the vast majority of his time in Spain (27 yrs), he worked for the British Council as the Senior Teacher for Learning Technologies in the Madrid Language Teaching Centre, where he established, developed, and managed their LMS for over 35,000 users across Spain.

We also welcomed Dawn Buzzard to the team on 14th March. Dawn is a Learning Technologist and Educationalist who has been working as an independent consultant, largely in the further education sector. Recent projects include upskilling teaching practitioners to deliver essential digital skills for life and work and developing online learning content for school leadership courses. Dawn joins us as a Learning Technologist in the Enhancement strand and will be with us for around 6 months, working on Blackboard Ally, Caption.ed and other aspects of accessibility.

Meet the rest of the team.

Let’s meet…

Last month we introduced our new regular feature where we meet a member of staff who supports the use of technology in teaching and learning. This month, we meet Chelsea Zhang-Anegbeh who is the Joint Education Institute Administrator in the School of Engineering and Materials Science (SEMS).

Festival of Education: Student Reflections on Peer Feedback

During the recent Festival of Education there was an interesting presentation about Student Reflections on Peer Feedback. This presentation reported on a student-staff co-evaluation of a peer feedback activity embedded in a professional development Dentistry module. It provided an approach for using structured peer feedback to increase student confidence in their self-evaluation skills and the grading process as a whole. Read more about this project.

QMplus Hub upgrade

QMplus Hub will be upgraded from version 18.04 to 21.10 on Tuesday 26th April at 9pm and the site will be unavailable while the upgrade takes place. Find out more about some of the new features that the upgrade will bring.

Are your course materials accessible to students with special needs?

To help you understand what digital accessibility means and to make your teaching materials fully accessible, QMUL has procured a service called Blackboard Ally. Blackboard Ally has been integrated with QMplus and scanned over 1.3 million pieces of content with an aim to identify any accessibility issues and to provide suggestions to make them more accessible.

Currently, this tool is only available to a small group of users but we will be scheduling training sessions and rolling it out to all academic colleagues in coming months. However, if you are interested and would like to know more then please get in touch with your school E-Learning contact or read more on our website.

Upcoming staff development opportunities

You can book us for a bespoke session (for a minimum of 4 people) or Book A Learning Technologist (BALT) for a 1-hour one-on-one E-Learning session. For support queries, apart from raising a ticket on ITS Helpdesk, you can also drop-in to see us (no booking needed). See details below.

Drop-in Sessions and Book a Learning Technologist

Have a quick query about any of our technologies? Why not drop in online to speak to someone from the TEL team…

** We have moved our online drop-in sessions from Blackboard Collaborate to Zoom **

Drop-in sessions are still available online (in Zoom) every Tuesday and Thursday, from 1-2pm. There’s no need to tell us you’re coming; just drop-in via the Zoom link located on our Online Support area on QMplus.

Please watch our short 1 minute video on how to log into Zoom via QMplus.

Should your inquiry require more discussion, please access the BALT QMplus page to book a session of up to an hour to discuss your e-learning ideas and issues with one of our learning technologists.

We have a number of self-directed training areas online, for staff to proceed through at their own pace:

What are you asking the Helpdesk?

The top queries in March were related to accessing Q-Review, creating video assignments and adding RSS feeds. …Read more in our common support questions article.