 and welcome to this session on building excellence into the VLE, what makes a VLE. And we're joined today delivering this session is Leanne Simpson, Stuart Nicholl and Tracy Madden from the University of Edinburgh. So it's my pleasure to hand you over to them. Thanks very much and thanks for coming along to the session today. My name is Stuart Nicholl, I'm the head of educational design and engagement at the University of Edinburgh. And today we'd like to spend some time reflecting on our VLE excellence program of work. It's something that we've spoken about all before, well spoken about elements of it before. And we'd like to take this time to reflect on that program and just to think about what makes a good for a good virtual learning environment from from our experience anyway. And we'll hopefully have a bit of time at the end for some discussion and to hear from you your opinions about what makes a good virtual learning environment. I'm going to be joined today by two colleagues. So Tracy Madden, who's one of our learning technology advisors and Leanne Simpson, who project manages these large scale pieces of work and Leanne doesn't often get a chance to speak at these conferences. She's kind of making sure that the work all gets done. So virtual learning environments, they're not particularly new technology and on their own they can be perceived as quite a kind of dull administrative tool in many countries are known as learning management systems or LMSs. So the workhouse, the workhorse that houses the course materials for learning. But that said, with caring attention to teaching and the right sprinkling of interaction andcillary tools and engagement with students, the VLE can and does come to life. So it's through good course design, engaging teaching and working together as a team to deliver of all to deliver all this that we can make a VLE into that effective space for teaching and to become immersive and dynamic and engaging. And during the pandemic, when all teaching was moved online, the VLE had a bit of a moment in the spotlight, especially for the on campus courses that had to be moved online. And it wasn't that the number of courses using the VLE increased for us anyway, they already had a presence there. It was more about the importance of how we use it as a tool for teacher and student engagement that was thrust into the limelight. So in today's session, we'll talk about some of those things that we do in and around the VLE. And also that we're Ed and Brian away, we're a kind of a bit of a transition point where in terms of projects, service improvement projects with our virtual learning environment. Yesterday, we just closed a three year project and learn foundations, which was about introducing a consistent structure course structure to all our VLE courses across the institution. And we're looking forward at the moment into further improvements and potentially upgrading our VLE into over the next three years. Also, I think we spoke at the all winter conference last year, we spoke about our emergency response to the pandemic. And I think now we're kind of that that's kind of it's kind of background noise, quite loud background noise, but but it's just there. The emergency is kind of shifting into the norm and in some sense. And we like to think about all of this through the lens of like, say, learning design, project design and teaching practice. Just quickly, more broadly about our VLE excellence program of work that we've been doing at Edinburgh, we've been involved in this since 2016. And there's been four while three main components that have happened already. The first one was to consolidate our VLEs. In 2016, we had around 15 VLEs here. Many of them were bespoke platforms, they were kind of aging platforms. And we undertook a piece of work to consolidate them into mainly one VLE, which is Blackboard Learn. We still have a couple of programs, fully online programs that run on Moodle, but the vast majority of our courses and programs are on Blackboard Learn. In 2019, we moved Learn into the cloud, we used to host it locally. And we did that just before the pandemic hit, which was which was quite good. So it means that our VLE is more robust and secure. And then over the past three years, we've been like, say, we've been involved in this piece of work, Learn Foundations, which is about consistent course structures, and looking forward to the next three years to further improvements. And like, say, all of our courses already had a presence in the VLE, but many on campus courses were only scratching the surface. So just want to think a little bit more about how the pandemic changed things. This idea that, you know, those courses weren't taking full advantage of the online space, that really had to change last year with the pandemic and the move to online. One of the things that gave us was the opportunity to reach many more staff with our learning technology training. So in the first week of the pandemic last year, last March, or the lockdown anyway, when the teaching moved online, we reached almost 1000 staff in terms of our training for our core tool set, which was Blackboard Learn, Collaborate and Cultura. And then over the summer, we engaged with about 600 teaching staff in a seven week staff development course about online teaching. We were also able to leverage our VLE minimum standards projects, the Learn Foundations part of our pandemic response. So that really increased the reach of that project. We employed loads of students last summer to help the lift and shift online. But there were also some downsides that the pandemic brought and some issues that kind of raised around the use of the VLE and the online space. It was almost impossible to keep to the core tool set, to keep that message of the core tool set. And I think we kind of lost control a little bit of that. So tools like Zoom, Collaborate, Meadow, Gather Town, Padlet, Teams, Gradescope, all of them suddenly reared their heads. And I don't think, you know, with the best will in the world, we didn't really get the time to do due diligence in all of those platforms. I mean, don't really know what the long term consequences of that platform proliferation will be. There were also very, very useful conversations about accessibility that gained momentum, especially over the past year, a couple of years, also partly down to the change in regulations. But at times this has become quite focused, a quite focused conversation on accessibility becoming synonymous with captioning. And that thorny issue of 100% accuracy in the captioning. So we've worked with more colleagues from across the institution on more projects and new partnerships are formed. And we're just going to talk a bit more about three of these activities that came out of the pandemic and how that related to improving the work that we do within the VLE. So I'm going to hand over to Tracy to talk about learning, design and accessibility. Thank you. So Edinburgh's Learning Design Service supports learning design for all manner of programs and courses undergraduate, postgraduate MOOCs, on campus, online, blended, hybrid, full and part time, credit bearing and not credit bearing. We support program and course design in three ways. Firstly, there's elder values based workshop putting students at the heart of the design with the program team as the designers. Secondly, ABC, the rapid course design workshop based on learning activities. And thirdly, consultation on individual aspects of learning design, for instance, accessibility, student persona. So ABC, before the pandemic, we were already working with the school learning technologist to support the school's ability to facilitate their own ABC workshops through creating and sharing online toolkits. At the start of the pandemic itself, we were readying ourselves to support academic and professional staff moving to hybrid. To do this, we formed a working group with learning technologists right across the schools of the university. Together, we set about looking at how the traditional paper based ABC workshop could be moved online. Firstly, of course, we looked at how other people were already doing this, opting for the teams based approach being developed by our own medical school. We knew from colleagues at many other universities that the important factor was to choose technology that was familiar and simple to use as possible. The workshop is rapid and attendees need to start working confidently quickly. We also made a point of using centrally supported technology. So no one needed to buy licenses and help was at hand if needed. We then created a generic workshop on teams for sharing, along with advice on how to build your own and ran train the trainer sessions attended by over 100 of our own staff. Our accompanying 30 ABC resource has been accessed over 500 times so far. We also created what we call macro and micro patterns, which I'll explain a little bit more detail. So we started to investigate any common patterns of activity in courses at Edinburgh right across the disciplines. And we found some and these returned macro patterns. We saw these as a bridge to guide the redesign of courses for hybrid by academic teams. We also created what we called micro patterns, sequences of learning activities from ABC that could be used to inspire academics to find ways to redesign existing on campus activity for the move to online. The micro patterns we created were generic. And though they could be used as written, we were delighted to find that schools took them up and created their own core specific patterns. For instance, micro patterns for moving chemistry laboratories online. A blackboard learn course was created specifically to demonstrate how different micro and macro patterns could be realised within learn using centrally supported learning technology. The 30 online resource that we created to accompany this work has been accessed almost 5000 times to date. The other issue is accessibility. The move to hybrid has opened up opportunities to talk about accessibility of teaching, technology, and so on. In fact, staff demonstrated they were very keen to talk about accessibility. The work of Land Foundations has directly brought about an increase in awareness of accessibility in learning environments and resources across the university and also in practice. Learn Foundations resulted in the first real opportunity for schools to appreciate the accessibility of their courses overall. To see better practice, but also see where things might be improved. Learn Foundations use that information to create training and resources to help support increasing accessibility. A key example of the actual practical increase in accessibility that Learn Foundation has brought about has been in the improvement in consistency of layout and terminology within blackboard learning courses. And you'll hear more about that from Leanne. Another important change, though sometimes forgotten, is in terms of the personnel involved. There's been an increase in knowledge and experience of accessibility of the student interns and furloughed staff who were involved in this work. And hopefully they'll have taken this forward into their future roles. Thanks, Tracy. So yeah, just picking up on where kind of Stuart and Tracy have kind of taken us to date. So we're just finishing up, or we've just finished up a three-year programme of work called Learn Foundations. And Learn Foundations was initially started pre the pandemic, and it was started in response to a variety of different pieces of feedback from both staff and students around the perceived lack of consistency, the struggles that they had whilst using the VLE. And we initiated Learn Foundations back in 2019 to help address some of those concerns and to help moving forward and kind of implement some minimum standards to the VLE. But the creative approach that was bigger than the VLE that we use, it was agnostic, it was something that we could apply to any kind of VLE that we use moving forward. And what we recognised at the time was there was a variety of different terms that were being used across the university to describe very similar items. There was a variety of different approaches to how courses were designed and how courses were built. And all of that together was something that really kind of struggled, kind of, with students or students who really struggled with them, because they were having to relearn how to use the VLE every time they went and accessed a new course. And that was something that we really, you know, took some time to think about and think about the best kind of way to move forward with that. And I started off the Learn Foundations project to address, as I would mention, address those concerns. But then the pandemic hit. And what we recognised really quickly was the approach that we had began to develop with some of our partner schools and some of the schools that we were working with was kind of front and foremost in terms of the kind of minimum standards that kind of were going to help our kind of colleagues move from what they were doing just now to the on-campus to the online hybrid approach. And what we kind of found was, as a result of the pandemic, we found a lot more schools were coming and speaking to us and saying, well, we've been sitting back over the last year and we've been watching what you've been doing with some of our kind of colleagues. And we realised that there is, there's a need for us and there's a want for us to be able to kind of move forward really quickly and kind of at ease. And Learn Foundations is the approach that we want to take because we recognise the benefit in it. And what we kind of found when we were working with our kind of colleagues over the course and the reflections that we've kind of taken from it is, in the first year when we were working on Learn Foundations, we spoke to all of our colleagues, we spoke to all of the various schools. And there was a few tentative schools that wanted to come on board as early adopters. So we had a handful of schools, kind of five schools and denies who wanted to work with us. And we got really good insights and we got really good learnings from them. But once the pandemic hit, almost three quarters of the schools and denies out there approached us and said, well, we know that there's this kind of more work that we need to do and we recognise the benefits that you only bring to us. So we want to kind of work together and we want to kind of use your standardised terminology. We want to use your consistent approach to the course build. We also really like the support resources that you've been created that can help us, that we can share with our colleagues internally within the schools. But the big thing for them was the recruitment that Stuart mentioned earlier. We recruited a handful of students every year. So the original plan was we had a tent in terms of what we were working in partnership with. When the pandemic hit, we realised that we were going to need some more support or we're going to need additional support. So throughout the duration of the project, we employed over 60 interns. With some of the interns actually coming back on more than one occasion each year, some interns that can recognise what we were doing and wanted to be a part of that journey. So we had interns that were coming back that were building relationships with us and then we're going forward and being advocates for the approach, not just with their students but with their academics, with people within their schools. We saw a lot of traction using our students and it was fantastic to see the opportunities that they created. The work that the student did over that period and Tracy touched on it earlier was absolutely phenomenal in the sense that we had a handful of student interns work with us for over three months over the summer. And during that time for each year that we've kind of worked with them, they were able to migrate over four and a half thousand courses. So they took the approach that we developed and we developed in kind of conjunction with students and colleagues and we'll talk about this a little bit more. They were able to map out courses. So we had one student who designed an approach that allowed us to map out courses more automatically that allowed us to see how they were designed and allowed us to look at in conjunction with the work that Tracy and her colleagues have been doing in terms of the elder within the ABC. It allowed us to gather data that we've never had before and it allowed us to look in conversations with colleagues across the university to help understand where we can make improvements or where we can support improvements in the design of courses. And we also undertook accessibility reviews with the college with the schools and the denities that we were working with and we were able to review a variety of different courses using accessibility reviews that Tracy helped to develop in response to the changing of the regulations over the last few years and we were able to then take that forward with our kind of partner schools and denities and look at how we can work together to support colleagues in improving the accessibility of the courses within the VLE. Now all of that was underpinned by our programme of communications and engagement and it's something that we recognised really quickly at the beginning of the project was in order for this project to be a success and then with the pandemic coming along it just kind of made it even more vital but in order for the project to be a success we recognised that we need to work in partnership with our colleagues. It can't be a centrally driven project. It needs to be something that is organic and that we work together and we understand the needs and the requirements of our colleagues. We can offer reassurances so we can listen to where they think concerns but sit for those particular schools and denities. We can offer reassurances we can work in partnership with them to understand the best way to approach this with colleagues and that was down to things like how best can we deliver communications or how best can we engage with your colleagues within your school. How best can we offer training to support your colleagues within the schools. What's the best way to come and share knowledge what's the best way to come and share best practice and it's something that we as a project refines and develop throughout the duration of the project and it's something that we have had feedback and recognised that the approach that we've developed in terms of kind of comms and engagement is something that we want to take forward into future projects when we're out working with our colleagues within the schools and denities and we work really closely with a variety of different colleague groups within each of the schools and denities that covered academics it covered teaching office it covered learning technology colleagues so we got a really good mix and we got a really good sense of the requirements that we needed to ensure that we were taking forward and some of the work that we did kind of focus on the programme of user experience the next slide that we've got and at the beginning of the project we understood that there was changes that needed to be made in order to kind of drive forward the feedback that we had from both staff and students but we wanted to do this in a more clinical way to try and understand what needed to happen what is what we're trying to deliver the right thing for our staff and our students or is it the right thing based on what our experience would be and what we decided to do is we decided to undertake a programme of user experience and what that kind of entailed in the very first year was a variety of different surveys a variety of different quantitative measures so top task surveys, card sorts free tests first class so all of that together we engaged with over 4000 students we engaged with almost 300 members of staff and that helped us define some of the decisions that we needed to make but we also did that in conjunction with a lot of the qualitative measures that we had so we undertook semi-structured interviews we had staff and student user groups we had a variety of usability sessions that gave a lot of usability needs which we were able to go away and review and understand what was required in terms of the solutions moving forward but something that we hadn't anticipated at the beginning in the first year of the project was we were focusing on undergraduates on campus courses and then the pandemic hit and we weren't comfortable we weren't sure whether we could absolutely move all of this thinking to a hybrid or online course so we redid over the course of the pandemic some of this work so we undertook some of the top tasks surveys where we undertook redid the card sorts and what we were able to identify is regardless of the delivery of the course the student needs don't change students are still looking for consistency they are still looking for something that is easy to use they are still looking for the same requirements as they did during the pandemic but what was interesting is staff needs have changed and out of the top tasks that we did with staff for the top eight top tasks for pre-pandemic and post-pandemic around 60% of them were still the same but what had changed was the priority that was given to things like announcements and things like collaboration whereas previously a lot of this work was done face to face in the classroom whereas now teachers had to rethink the delivery mechanisms had to rethink how they were going to engage and how they were going to create a community with their students and that priority shifted for staff and that was something that we really seen when we were looking at the use of the VLE we saw that there was an increased uptake or an increased quarantine requirement for those tools or those ways to collaborate as part of the user experience work that we did we were also able to create a semester in the life of both a staff member and a student and this is something that we we've kind of fell back on countless times and it's been really interesting because it's helped us define some conversations and it's helped us look at other aspects that originally weren't considered as part of the project but we've recognised there are things for example in assessment processes that we could help work with our colleagues to be able to kind of understand and kind of move forward and see if there's ways that we can help support them through this so there's a variety of definite things that have fallen out of the programme of user experience and it's something that we're taking forward into future projects similar to the comms in engagement that we want to take forward because upon reflection we've recognised the value of having kind of data driven decisions and user experience so I'll just pass over to Stuart now. Yep sorry to interrupt you Leanne yeah no sorry we're just about at a time actually so I'm just going to shift on to um so we're at like I said at the start we're at that juncture between between projects we've done that excellent work on the unlearned foundations and we're looking ahead to the next step in our learn our VLE excellence programme just a few things we'll continue to listen to colleagues and students to enhance the VLE experience and we'll look to provide a more inclusive and accessible approach delivering courses on the VLE taking into account the accessibility work that Tracy was talking about it's an opportunity to have a more dynamic tool set and more dynamic content delivered on the course somehow take hold of that platform proliferation that we talked about earlier integrating the powerful tools making the right choices around those tools it's something that we'll need to unpick into the future I think that also means we'll need to be aware of a lot of the ethical issues what are the new risks for students and teachers around the data that's gathering on the VLE as more people have been using it in more different ways making sure we keep on top of regulations the data protection accessibility so lots of opportunities for the future but also I think the pandemic has caused a lot of naughty issues that will take a bit of unpick into the future as well I think the key takeaway message for us and hopefully the key takeaway message for this session is that the partnership approach that we've taken as part of this program has really been the thing that's helped move us forward and improve the use of the VLE and make the VLE what it is at Edinburgh anyway I'll finish up there to leave some time for questions I'm sorry we've overrun just a little bit so thanks very much Thank you so much to all of you for that really really interesting talk it was so interesting as well to hear how you've got students involved in your project and that prompted a lot of conversations around kind of digital leadership in the comments we had a lot of questions from our delegates particularly from some in Scotland you've got a lot of fans coming from there so I'll start with one of the questions from Custi which is did you have any issues where people didn't want to engage with the consistent approach Yes It's a short answer to that it's been a long hard slog actually over the three years and Leanne's kind of worked tirelessly over that time to try and engage people a lot of people were already doing consistent things but within their own silos, within their own schools I think what we were trying to do was to try and get that consistency across the whole institution and it really kind of boiled down to some basic things around basic terminology and a basic kind of left hand menu and I don't think we've reached 22 of the 24 schools in denieries across the university I think that was supercharged by the pandemic and the need for people to engage with it but we didn't reach there's two that we haven't reached so we didn't win the argument with a couple of the schools but we've got to most of it so yeah it was challenging to try to try and reach that even that level of consistency Well we need some challenge don't we I have a question from William was this core structure adaptable or set in stone and did you find that any staff took the structure and then changed it to suit their needs anyway So I guess there's two answers to that one was we built a level of flexibility into the template so for example our left hand menu had seven basic items but there was opportunity to add another two that were school specific but they had to be agreed by the school and it had to be consistent within the school so there was a level of flexibility built in I think the other thing is that you know especially I don't know how many people use Blackboard Learn but we're on Learn 9.1 not Learn Ultra so it's possible to change that left hand menu and what we found is that when we go back the following year or even a few months in you can't lock down that menu and people have changed things so it is this issue will never go away will never completely win it with this version of Learn anyway and it's going to be a constant cycle of refresh and trying to bring people back to that consistency but yeah people will always veer off and do their own thing so it's just trying to keep hold of that and win the argument I think it was built with schools not for schools so we'd already reached a kind of consensus anyway yeah great okay thank you unfortunately we're out of time but if there are any further comments or if you want to carry on this conversation then you can go over to Discord to continue that and I'm sure you'll share your slides as well in the resources in Discord and I just want to thank all three of you Tracee, Leanne and Stuart very much for your time and thanks everybody for coming and enjoy the rest of the conference thanks for having us, thank you thanks