• NMC Horizon Report – 2016 Higher Education Edition

    The NMC’s Horizon Report Higher Education Edition aims to identify emerging technologies that a panel of experts think will impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in Higher Education over the next five years, along with key trends accelerating adoption, and challenges impeding that. There is a project wiki which allows exploration the creation of…

  • Record and Share TV and Radio Programmes Online with Box of Broadcasts

    Box of Broadcasts (BoB) is an online service which makes it easy for you to legally record programmes from the TV and Radio, and to make them available to your students online. Not only that, but you can access the recordings others have made, and students have access to record and share programmes themselves. You…

  • ALT-C Conference 2015: Some things to consider

    ALT-C is the main annual conference for the Association for Learning Technology. It is a great environment in which to see what others are doing, and to think about some of the big ideas that affect education. In this post I’ll share some of the messages from the conference that I personally would like to…

  • Your Digital Tattoo: What the web says about you! – For Staff

    Is how you present yourselves online important? When people search for information about you what might they find, and how does that affect your reputation and employability? How can you take control of what people can find about you online? Over the last few years we’ve spoken with hundreds of Edge Hill students about issues…

  • What Does Your Blackboard Course Look Like to Students?

    Academics sometimes want to check what students can see and do within their Blackboard Courses. One way to see a student view is to select the ‘Enter Student Preview’ button at the top right of the screen. An alternative is to set up a student account for long term use. This can be done using…

  • Using Classroom Voting Systems

    Learning Services have been supporting the use of the Optivote and TurningPoint classroom voting systems over the last eight years. Recently the sets have been moved from the Learning Technology Development offices in the LINC to the University Library. This change means that the systems can now be booked via the Loaning Equipment page on…

  • Using Optivote in Large Lectures for Student Engagement and Enhancing Learning

    In this post Elaine Hughes, Senior Lecturer in Adult Nursing and a SOLSTICE Fellow, tells us about her experience using an Optivote voting system. If you are inspired to think about using this type of system in your own teaching, there is plenty of support and information available to help you get started. Could you…

  • Getting Started with Virtual Reality

    We have a weekly meeting in Learning Technology Development where we get together to talk about things that have interested or inspired us. Recently I brought along my Google Cardboard so that the team could try out some Virtual Reality experiences. There is a lot of interest in Virtual Reality at the moment with Facebook’s…

  • Blackboard Profile Tool

    Many people have uploaded profile pictures to Blackboard. When they post messages on Blackboard Tools such as the Discussion Board their photos now appear next to the messages, and simple personal profile pages are available. Research by Kear et al (2014) found that some learners in online courses felt personal profile pages helped provide social…

  • Games for Health UK Conference at Coventry – 14th May 2014

    On Wednesday 14th May I attended the Games for Health UK conference, held at Coventry University’s Simulation Centre. This was a satellite event linked to Games for Health Europe, which is an organisation based in Amsterdam. Jurriaan van Rijswijk spoke first, talking about Games for Health’s vision of using games as a way to change…