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Sonya's Blog Posts

NELE: June 2025

The final NELE meeting of the year took place at Newcastle University, and we began by looking at Northumbria and Durham’s experience of piloting Turnitin’s new user interface for Feedback Studio. It ‘looks’ good, modern and fresh, and there are some good additional features, such as the ability to link Quick Marks to parts of a rubric, but there are also missing features such as peer marking and audio feedback; features not working quite as they should, such as anonymous marking being rendered somewhat moot by the ‘Reveal Identity’ button; and perennial issues which remain unresolved, such as the infinitely nested scroll bars in the rubric view (first photo).

Next up, the team at Newcastle talked about their ongoing experience of using Inspera to manage digital exams. They shared some good practice of using videos within exams, using an example of giving health students an ultrasound recoding to watch and then asking questions about it. They are also still holding the line on proctoring, citing their testing experience of being able to easily trigger far too many false flags. Good for them.

Rounding off the morning, Adam and I from Sunderland, and Dan from Newcastle led a discussion on VLE standards. I liked the work Newcastle have done on a specimen ‘perfect’ module that meets everything to show academics how it’s done, while our ‘MOT’ service, monitoring processes, and friendly interventions with academics on how they can improve their modules, are completing the circle.

After lunch, and some unscheduled physical activity for me (don’t ask), Newcastle presented on their learning analytics system, NULA, which has been developed in collaboration with Jisc. They had very good things to say about Jisc on this one, that they’ve been very supportive and responsive on building ways of monitoring and reporting on the measures which Newcastle wanted to set.

Next, it was Dan from Newcastle again, who talked about their experience of working with students to develop their new module template which has been designed to be mobile friendly first (second photo). Something many of us claim to do, but which actually seems to be quite rare.

Finally, we were joined by Emily from Newcastle’s library team who presented on the things which keep a librarian up at night. It’s AI. It’s always AI. Specifically, every publisher is experimenting with their own generative AI tools to help people find and analyse the resources in that database. The problems are many. First, these features are coming and changing at the whim of the publisher, without warning or any ability to test and evaluate. One particularly egregious example Emily mentioned was a journal that would provide temporary access to their AI search tool to academics who had attended specific training events, or happened on specific buttons and options on their website. Secondly, Emily was deeply concerned about AI literacy and who is responsible for teaching it. It seems to be falling on interested parties in different departments in different places, when it is really something that needs direction and dedicated roles and senior staff sponsorship. Finally there are the hidden costs. While publishers are marketing these services as free improvements to their search tools, in reality they are raising subscriptions costs on the back end, at a time when the sector is struggling and almost every institution is closing courses and laying off staff.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing the work of real people.
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TEL Researchers Talk

Screenshot of a Miro board with a timeline of technologies on it
Miro Tech Timeline

I don’t know how I found out about this event, but it was very good! It was a talk by Louise Drumm (Edinburgh Napier), facilitated by John Brindle (Lancaster), examining some of the issues that arise in the intersection between digital technology and educational research. Among the points discussed were how the former is a fast moving, external, source of pressure and change, swimming in venture capital cash, while the latter is often slow, ponderous, and impoverished. Louise talked about agency, and how we, as learning technologists and educators, are expected to be users, often knowledgeable and enthusiastic ones, of technologies and practices regardless of how we may feel about them personally.

Louise created a Miro board for the session in which she had created a timeline of digital technology innovations and events which have emerged throughout her career, grouped into different phases. She opened the board up to the group for us to collaboratively edit, move, change, and add new items, which was chaos, but good, creative chaos! Which was a theme of her talk and of her research practice. Creativity that is, not chaos. Just to be clear.

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Collaborative University-Wide Approach to Digital Transformation

Photo of our stakeholder Venn chart
Stakeholder Venn Chart

No sooner had the Old Boss become the New Boss once again, than she pulled one of her classic Boss moves and sent me away to the other side of the country!

Jisc’s Framework for Digital Transformation in Higher Education has been around for a few years now, with the aim of helping HEIs to transform and improve their digital infrastructure and services. Bath Spa University has been one of the 24 universities piloting this with Jisc, and this event was an opportunity for them to share their experiences with other interested institutions. For Bath, this has included a major VLE upgrade, a transition from Google for Education to Microsoft, and the implementation of an AI chatbot powered by LearnWise.

The day began with a keynote session delivered by senior staff at Bath Spa talking about what they have done and learned, and ended with a panel discussion which included staff from Jisc who fielded all of our questions. A key takeaway, reiterated by Jisc at several points, was that the most important factor for success was that the technology doesn’t matter as much as the people, culture, and processes in an institution: people over technology.

In between we had three breakout sessions covering how digital assessments had been implemented in an arts department with great success; an interactive session exploring the competencies of ‘digital fluency’; and the third on the challenges of developing a collaborative culture within your institution. In this one we explored an alternative to stakeholder mapping, using a Venn diagram to reframe the groups as collaborators that can help us to achieve the goal, instead of more passive people who need to be managed. In my group, photo of our chart above, we used an example of building up a satellite campus, as we were all involved in such a project, at different stages.

Written case studies from 12 of the partners Jisc have been working with, including Bath, are available on their Report and Case Studies webpage.

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New Centre for Teaching Excellence

Photo of a cute squirrel
Photo by Jongsun Lee on Unsplash

We are now the Centre for Teaching Excellence, as of May 1st. Squirrel unrelated. The upper echelons of the University have had a jiggle with the departure of our Deputy Vice Chancellor Academic, so we have been split off from the Centre for Graduate Prospects to become our own service again, bringing us into alignment with the new structure. It’s taken a little while to agree on the new name, hence delayed announcement, but I’ve just updated the CPD page and realised I should note the change.

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Should I Be Researching?

An excellent question, posed by the HeLF folks, to which the only possible answer is a resounding ‘yes’. But that would make for a very short webinar, so we discussed the issues around this too. Obviously a very interesting session for me, as I have been trying to push my career in this direction over the past few years, as you can probably tell, and the work I’ve been doing on Studiosity has afforded me an excellent opportunity to do so.

We had a good discussion on the nature of research and the differences between research and evaluation. The latter, generally, being something which is done for internal purposes and audiences only, while research is likely of wider interest and therefore there is value in sharing via relevant publications. Within our community, however, there may be barriers which prevent, or make it difficult for professional services staff to publish. One colleague mentioned a publication, not named to protect the guilty, which charged for publication, but gave steep discounts to academic contracted staff, but none if you happened to have ‘professional services’ on your contract.

We also talked a lot about ethics committees, which again can be hard to access, with another colleague reporting that they weren’t even allowed to submit something to an ethics panel, while at another institution professional service staff were kicked out of their ethics board because it was felt to be having a negative impact on their REF submission.

That all sounds rather bleak, but there are solutions to these problems. Some people reported having nominal 0.2 academic contracts to get over institutional barriers, while others are running their own internal ethics boards. It was a very good discussion this morning, and something which is going to become a series, so I will be learning and writing more on this.

Relevant related reading: Defining the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, by Ann M. Gansemer-Topf, Laila I. McCloud, and John M. Braxton.

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PSP Refurb

Aha! What have we here then? Another entry into the category of ‘not-work-related-retro-handheld-restoration’ posts. It’s an obscure category, but it’s my blog and I do what I want.

I’ve had an inkling to do a PlayStation Portable restoration for a long time, but anytime I looked into it I was put off by the vast number of tiny, tiny, easily breakable ribbon cables holding it all together. For some darned reason I took the plunge in March, buying a beat-up piece of crap on eBay and I’ve been working on it over the past month. It is now at a point where I am declaring it done. I’m not 100% happy with it. The reproduction shell is pretty good, but it’s not up to the same quality as the originals. I cracked it open for one last time tonight to make some tweaks and I’ve noticed that some of the screw holes are starting to come apart, so this time really must be the last time.

In terms of software modding, it’s been updated to the last official firmware version from Sony, 6.61, and I have installed ARK-4 custom firmware on top of it, which allows me to all sorts of interesting things. Not least of which was side loading the 15th anniversary theme which goes with the shell beautifully.

Big thanks to TotalKommando on YouTube who’s take-apart guide is the best (though I also found others helpful), and for all of his other guides on everything PSP related.

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Supporting Staff and Students in Moving from AI Scepticism to AI Exploration

How could I miss the latest HelF staff development session, as an avowed AI sceptic? Today Alice May and Shivani Wilson-Rochford from Birmingham City University talked about their approach to responding to the emergence of generative AI. As can be seen on the ‘roadmap’ above, this has included an AI working group, collaboration with staff and students on producing guidelines on use, sharing those via staff and student workshops, and collating resources on a SharePoint site. All things which mirror our approach at Sunderland.

Something they are doing which I liked was providing template text which academic staff can copy and paste into their assignment briefs on what kind of AI students are permitted to use, at four different levels from fully unrestricted, to fully prohibited. They are also working on an assessment redesign project which takes the risks of GAI into account, based on work from the University of Sydney which analysed all of the different types of assessment they have and put them into two lanes based on how secure they are to GAI plagiarism. It’s Table 2 on the page I’ve linked to, it’s a very good table. I like it a lot.

Briefly mentioned was the fact that Birmingham are one of the few institutions in the UK who have enabled Turnitin’s AI detection tool, and I would have liked to have learned more about this. From a student survey on GAI, the second screenshot above, concerns about the accuracy of AI detection was one of the big things they raised.

Alice and Shivani left us with plans for going forwards, which is to build a six-pillar framework on the different aspects of GAI’s impact on HE (third screenshot). Pillar 5 is ‘Ethical AI and Academic Integrity’. This one stood out as, once again, the ethical issues of the environmental impact and copyright were raised. Briefly. And then we moved on. It consistently bothers me, and I don’t have any brilliant answers, but I will reiterate the very basic one of simply choosing not to use these services unless they are solving a genuine problem.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing the work of real people.
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Studiosity Partner Forum 2025

Today saw me visiting London once again for Studiosity’s fourth annual UK Partner Forum. In the keynote service update from CEO, Mike Larson, it was all AI, all the time. Their pivot to AI powered feedback continues at a rapid pace, and the messaging has changed from personalised feedback provided by actual human beings a few years ago, to, this isn’t fast enough for students who often work in a ‘just in time’ frame, therefore they need feedback in minutes, not hours. They seem to be doing alright from it, as a substantial number of partners have now switched to Studiosity+, and they are working on a new tool for academics to help with course content creation. Previously announced human-powered services, like Study Assist, are still in development, but didn’t warrant a mention in the slides, someone had to ask the question of what was happening with them.

Rebecca Mace, an independent researcher, presented on their work reviewing early real-world usage of Studiosity+, which our pilot on Study Online Canvas has contributed to (I have writing about this forthcoming). Next, Andy Jaffrey from Ulster University presented about their experience in winning the Times Higher University of the Year Award. This was largely tangential, but there was some discussion about values and their emphasis on human-to-human contact, which is why, like Sunderland, they are staying with the Studiosity Classic service.

After lunch we had Sharon Perera and Nathaniel Pickering from the University of Greenwich presenting on their ‘Write With Confidence’ initiative, inspired by our Write it Right. That’s going very well for them, with enough data now to show improved continuation and progression rates, and a 20% uptake across the university. All very similar to our findings. One difference is that they have gone for the AI powered service.

Finally, Nick Hillman from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) gave the afternoon keynote on the state of UK Higher Education. I feel like Studiosity always has someone offering this kind of perspective at these events, and I always find them fascinating. Some highlights I noted included that 90% of students report using generative AI, but believe that if used for direct cheating they would be caught by institutional policies and technology. Shown in the third photo, above, HEPI surveyed students on institutions going bust and found that 31% were quite or very worried about this possibility. Finally, and related to this, Nick offered a prediction that there would be mergers of HEIs in the next few years to prevent worst case scenarios, but that, like the crisis in FE a few years ago, the sector would leave it too late and wait for a precipitating event to happen instead of getting ahead of the situation. I don’t think there was anything in his analysis that I would disagree with.

Slides from the day and other supporting documentation are available on Studiosity’s website, so you don’t have to squint at the scance few photos I took.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing the work of real people.
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Book

Photos of a book, where I have been published!
My name in print. Immortality = assured.

I wrote a thing. But this time, for the first time, it’s been published in a book! My case study on Sunderland’s first year of our partnership with Studiosity has been published as ‘Case Study 3.6: Enabling Students to Evaluate Their Academic Writing’ in ‘Teaching and Learning with Innovative Technologies in Higher Education: Real-World Case Studies‘, edited by Gelareh Roushan, Martyn Polkinghorne and Uma Patel.

That’s a big life goal achieved, but I guess I’m going to have to get my name on the front of a book next!

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NELE: February 2025

It’s the glorious return of NELE! The North East Learning Environments user group. Except, not really, because the first meeting of reformed NELE was in November, and I got a cold the day before and couldn’t go. NELE is the same group of folks as per ALT North East, but we have mutinied and left the umbrella of ALT, to become NELE once again, which it was before we partnered with ALT. Times change, organisations change, logos change, but the people and the purpose remain.

Today we talked a lot about ePortfolio systems, sharing our experiences of Mahara, both hosted and self-administered, PebblePad, and other bespoke solutions such as using OneNote and the NEE Pad solution for healthcare professionals in the region. The one area of consensus was that whatever solution you choose, take-up rates remain modest. At Sunderland, we’re looking at potentially replacing Mahara following disappointment with the Canvas integration, but after hearing what folks are paying for PebblePad, I don’t think we’ll be going down that route. Neither did OneNote come out of the discussion well, with people noting major problems with syncing and complications caused by multiple versions of the app, all looking and working a little differently.

The second topic of conversation was around digital accessibility and VLE threshold standards, and how to maintain a minimum level of quality. It’s interesting to see a few institutions are picking up on the idea of baseline standards of some kind, a topic we’ll come back to in a future meeting, as we’re doing some good work on this at Sunderland. I learned about Global Accessibility Awareness Day which is going to be on May 15th. That’s going to present a good opportunity to do some awareness work leading up to it.

After lunch we had a tour of Teesside’s new BIOS building for health sciences, which is where all of the photos come from today. They have an interactive room powered by Gener8, which is a lot like our Immersive Interactive room, but the technology has come along a bit. Projectors are low profile and flush to the ceiling, very inconspicuous, and there are infrared sensors all along the top of the walls to make the ‘touchscreen’ functionality work. We also had a look in their simulation suite, which includes a whole surgery room, and the microscopy lab was very impressive, with microscopes able to output to screens for everyone to see.

Finally, we had a discussion about note taking applications and approaches, commenting on how these kind of skills are not taught as part of course work, but only, at best, in optional study skills sessions usually run by the library. Some of the software we looked at included Obsidian and Notion.

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