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E-Learning Newsletter – October 2021

12 October 2021 Posted in: News Tagged: , , By: Technology Enhanced Learning Team

A fond farewell and thank you to Stella Ekebuisi after 15 years of working at QMUL in the E-Learning Unit, providing stewardship and strategic direction to the team and the learning technologies employed here. Stella joins LSE as their new Assistant Director of Digital Education – we wish her the very best in her new role.

Surjit Uppal joins us as our new interim Head of E-Learning, bringing extensive experience in providing digital consultancy and strategy across a number of HEIs around the world. We warmly welcome her to QMUL and Surjit looks forward to working with you all!

 

Disruption to Services

We wish to apologise for the recent disruption to our normal QMplus serviceYou may be aware that we migrated QMplus to a new host in August, and we have been resolving post migration issues – there are new processes in place with our new host and we experienced some unexpected ‘teething problems. We apologise for any additional stress this may have caused during an already busy start of termWe have worked closely with colleagues in IT Services and our new host as a priority to resolve issues as quickly as possibleUpdates were available on the IT Status page.

A Major Incident was declared on Monday, 4th October, for the outage experienced at 1pm and a full report is being written accordingly. Technicians worked hard to restore services and continue to monitor the service for spikes in demand. 

Q-Review considerations at the start of term

We recognise that there are now a number of virtual classroom solutions through which teaching content can be recorded, however through retaining the timetabling system interface so that lectures are recorded automatically, we have provided a great safety net to ensure all lecture-type timetabled activities are recorded. Q-Review also offers rich analytics for student engagement with recordings, offering stats for viewing rates, polling responses and Q&A, so should you wish to look closely at how your students are using the recordings, Q-Review does this the fullest out of all of the tools available.

Should Q-Review be required to record content taught in a mixed-mode format, there are a number of things to consider. Please take a look at this article to find out more.

 

ALT Conference 2021: The Panoptic Gaze and the Discourse of Academic Integrity

William Goodyear from the ELU attended the ALT Conference this year, in order to: gain insight from other institutions and their academics,  reflect on the changes which have taken place over the past 18+ months and to share experiences. One of the talks which William found most interesting, which he’s written about in this article, was about critical digital pedagogy in Higher Education, presented by Chris Rowell and Matt Acevedo. Please take a look find out more, or to watch the presentation please click here.

 

A focus on Digital Accessibility

Do you use the following in your teaching?

  • QMplus
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
  • Videos/images/audio

If yes, then you should be aware of digital accessibility principles. We have created a QMplus area that helps you understand the wider benefits of considering accessibility when creating digital materials, provides hands-on experience of identifying some of the challenges and gives you a basic toolkit to help you make your digital content more accessible. Watch this video to get started.

 

Mixed Mode Education and Online Learning in Practice

Our lecture capture vendor, Echo360, shall be hosting a webinar series over the next couple of months, with speakers from Kings College London, the University of Sheffield, University of Edinburgh, University of Warwick and many more, providing insight into how their educators and support teams use video technology, interactive student engagement tools, and student assessments in mixed-mode and online learning environments to maximise student learning.

To find out more about dates and specific webinar topics and to register your attendance, please read more, here.

 

Upcoming staff development opportunities

Please register via the CPD website for any of the courses below:  

Please see the schedule for the next few weeks, below:

ELUCV04 – Assessing, marking and giving feedback for QMplus Assignments

  • Wednesday 20 October – 2-3pm

ELUCV07 – Recording Yourself

  • Thursday 14 October – 11-12 noon

ELUCV013 – An Overview of Zoom

  • Monday 25 October – 3-4pm

ELUCV014 – An Overview of MS Teams

  • Thursday 28 October – 11-12 noon

ELUCV015 – A comparison of Zoom, MS Teams and Collaborate functionality

  • Tuesday 19 October – 10-11am
  • Thursday 4 November – 2-3pm

 

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

 

Drop-in Sessions and Book a Learning Technologist

Drop-in sessions are online every Tuesday and Thursday, from 1-2pm. There’s no need to tell us you’re coming; just drop-in via the Blackboard Collaborate webinar link on our E-Learning Online Support area on 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.

 

What are you asking the Helpdesk?

The top queries in September were related to enrolments, archive access and providing access to QMplus module areas.  …Read more in our common support questions article.

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