The University will be running surveys with staff and students on their digital experience using the Jisc Digital Experience Insights survey.

The three surveys, which will run between November 16th and December 7th 2020, are:

• A student survey
• A teaching staff survey
• A professional services staff survey

The surveys will be managed by Education Services with input from other stakeholders, including IT Services.

The Digital Experience Insights survey allows us to collect and analyse data about the digital environment and how digital technologies are used in learning, teaching and support activity.

The surveys capture user expectations and experiences of technology, based on concise question sets which have been intensively trialled within higher education. The surveys will allow us to gather data on the digital experience of staff and students and benchmark our provision with other HEIs. The information generated will inform our decision-making and resource allocation, and demonstrate where we have made improvements.

Please encourage your colleagues and students to complete the survey. As a direct result of last year’s student survey, we have:

• Improved the consistency of Blackboard courses through new templates and core standards
• Developed a new range of direct support for students (including the new digital induction, guides and contextual help)
• Recruited 12 Student Digital Champions to inform the development of the digital environment and improve our support for students
• Introduced new tools to support teaching and learning

More information and project updates will be posted on the DEO website.

After the course ran successfully during the digital induction week, the DEO is updating ‘Digitally Ready’ with new content in November and January.  In this update, we tell you a bit more about what students thought of the course so far and what’s coming up.

‘Digitally Ready’ is available under your list of ‘My Organisations’ on Blackboard. If you can’t access the course, follow this link where you can self-enrol onto Digitally Ready.

The DEO have drafted two new guides to support staff planning teaching and timetables in TB2. The first guide is a summary of options for recording online and face-to-face teaching. This guide also includes options which could be used instead of recording (which might be useful for all students on a unit). The second guide summarises some questions and considerations which might be useful for any staff considering hybrid teaching (teaching online and face-to-face students at the same time) to enable self-isolating students to join on-campus sessions. Hybrid teaching can be complex and difficult to do well, and teaching rooms are not currently designed to support it. This guidance considers some of the areas you may need to address before you choose to adopt it.

Turnitin have advised us that due to an unexpected service degradation users may have experienced slowness when submitting using the service on Thursday 5th November between 17:17  and 19:13.

Submission is now back to normal.

However users may still continue to experience slow similarity report generation.

More information can be found on the Turnitin Status page.

We apologise for any inconvenience.  If you have any questions please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk

We are still running our daily drop-ins (3pm on working days, no need to book, ask us anything).

In addition we have webinars coming up in the next couple of weeks:

• 13 Oct, 11am – Advanced Blackboard course design
• 14 Oct, 11am – Engaging online discussions
• 14 Oct, 3.15pm – Introduction to Blackboard Annotate
• 19 Oct, 1pm – Marking online using Blackboard marks and feedback extension
• 20 Oct, 1pm – Introduction to creating and managing tests in Blackboard
• 21 Oct, 11am – Advanced Blackboard course design
• 21 Oct, 1.30pm – Blackboard basics

Details and booking on the DEO events page

The Digital Education Office is leading work to document learning and teaching activities which are not easy to do, or do well, with our current digital tools. If you have a suggestion for a new tool please let us know by adding it to the software request form. On the DEO website, the form is housed in a web page which highlights tools which are in the process of being purchased. We will also update this page with tools which have received a high number of requests (in case you want to keep abreast of what might be available or upvote something).

If you have already submitted a request to the DEO, BILT or IT Services we will add it into the requirements gathering for you.

This is part of a co-ordinated effort by IT Services and the DEO to collate requirements for software and hardware that will be needed to support teaching next year. There is also a separate form to request access to specialist teaching software – all forms are available from the blended learning Sharepoint site.

Collaborate use in the University has been incredibly successful since the lockdown created the need to teach online. In April Collaborate has facilitated 2.88 million cumulative minutes of online learning and been used by just under 9.5 thousand users.

Staff created 5728 individual sessions. 2468 recordings were made, with over 1253 hours length in total. A total of 8488 individual recordings were viewed.

Blackboard have made some changes to the Collaborate tool to maintain quality and make scheduling large sessions for 250 to 500 users easier for instructors. A new ‘Large scale session (250+)’ option is available in Session Settings. Previously larger sessions would require liaison with the Digital Education Office and would be created on a separate server. To improve performance, they have disabled some functionality for students in large scale sessions, such as sharing audio/video, drawing on whiteboard and Breakout Groups. Chat functionality is also off by default but can be turned back on during a session.