Tag: ALTNE

ALT NE User Group: June 2024

Published 14th June 2024

Northumbria Uni library ceiling with power 'blocks' from the ceiling, and a humours 8-bit Mario hitting one of them — I’m not the only one who sees this, right?

Northumbria’s turn to do hosting honours this time around. It’s been a while since I was on my old campus, and I was shocked to see that the Library refurb ran out of money to finish the ceiling. I did like the ceiling mounted power extensions that look like Mario coin blocks though. Solves the problem of tripping over or accessing floor panel extensions, but introduces new problems for the vertically challenged. Julie said she couldn’t reach them to pull them down, while I, on the other end of the spectrum, had to duck and weave to avoid bonking my head on them at times. I wouldn’t mind if they actually dispensed gold coins, but no such luck.

Anyway, that’s enough shade thrown at my previous employer, time to be serious. Generative AI once again dominated our morning discussions, with a presentation by Tadhg, an academic at Northumbria, who has revamped their Business module with content related to Generative AI, teaching students how to use it to help write research proposals. This was followed by Ralph in their learning technologies team who has been using D-ID and Elevenlabs to create animated videos to supplement written case studies for students in Nursing. Dawn from Northumbria’s Library service then gave us a talk on their experience of Adobe Creative Campus, and reported a much more positive experience than Teesside.

After lunch we had some open discussions on digital exams. Newcastle are using Inspera to facilitate a proportion of their exams, and have mixed feelings about it. I was pleased to note that they have strongly pushed back on using online proctoring on ethical grounds. Emma from Teesside led a discussion on WCAG changes which prompted us to discuss getting the balance right between supporting all students along the principles of UDL, while being practical and having to work within the technical and cultural limits of the systems we have to use and processes we have to follow. Student record systems only allowing one assignment per module, for example.

Finally, Craig from Northumbria gave us a demo of some interactive 360 degree content they have created, including surgical simulations, nursing scenarios, and examining crime scenes. They are producing this content such that the scenarios can be accessed via any web browser, at the expenses of immersion, but they are also exported into a format that can be used with their bank of Vive VR headsets for students to get the full experience.

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ALT NE User Group: March 2024

Published 8th March 2024

Now this is the kind of AI I was promised as a kid

The latest ALT North East User Group was hosted at Middlesbrough College, and had a very generative AI heavy agenda. But first, Tamara at Middlesbrough presented on ‘ED Tech and Pedagogy’ which was quite similar to a TEL and pedagogy session I do on our PG Cert, and I picked up a few points that I can integrate into future presentations. Including the argument that it is really Gen Z who are the first true digital natives which will be useful as I still use Prensky’s original talk to explore the idea that different generations approach technology differently.

Next we had a round robin session on how we are approaching AI at our respective institutions. I talked about the in-year changes we made to student regulations in response to the release of ChatGPT, something Middlesbrough College have also done, and Northumbria are using a cover sheet template for student assignments for them to delicate if and how they have used AI to help with their work. Quite a few of us are pressing forwards with Microsoft Co-Pilot now that it is available.

Ross from Durham then presented on an AI chatbot they have created using Cody AI to assist students on a large module where, for various reasons, information is located in different places, including Blackboard and SharePoint. Cody looks interesting. It’s using various models under the hood, I’m sure Ross said models from multiple provides were available, but I only saw OpenAI based ones in their demo. You train the chatbot on your own data which you upload to Cody, and sharing that data and use of the model back with OpenAI is allegedly opt-in. (Perhaps I’m being overly cynical, but I wouldn’t OpenAI on this.)

Finally, after lunch, I presented on something not AI, but EDI – the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Portal which I have created at Sunderland in partnership with our EDI team in an effort to widen access to our various EDI educational resources.

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ALT NE User Group: November 2023

Published 17th November 2023

Slide showing position on AI - use with caution — Slide on AI Policy

Slide showing Anthology Framework — Slide on Anthology Framework

Photo of Anatomage table — Photo of Anatomage Table

My turn to do the hosting honours today, for the first time since before we had that pesky pandemic. My carefully planned agenda went completely out the window during the first item, but everything still managed to run pretty smoothly, and splurging the boss’s cash on the catering after getting the venue for free was a result, as the food was roundly praised.

We began with institutional updates from attendees. I thought as it was the first meeting of the year a quick round of updates would be good to have. I asked for one slide or five minutes each, got something like 17 slides from one bod, and this half hour item ran to well over an hour. But it was good, and I learned that we are all dealing with the problem of digital skills of staff and trying to make improvements there, and what the Blackboard and Anthology merger has done for AI in Blackboard. Staff now have access to an AI Design Assistant which will create entire course outlines and structures which serves as a great starting point. Middlesbrough College are trialing Microsoft’s Copilot tool in Bing, and have made it available to all staff and students, and Newcastle have seen a big increase in digital exams which are now at 40%.

After the roundup, I had one of my team do a demo of the Clevertouch boards we rolled out last year, then a learning design / content development showcase which provided an opportunity to share examples of best practice. In the afternoon we had a discussion on the role of ALT and where we sit within it, and a tour of Sunderland’s new anatomy suite. We have a new Anatomage table with a number of additional models, including some fine detail scans which have digitised certain features down to 0.1mm.

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ALT NE User Group: June 2023

Published 9th June 2023

Durham University’s Lightboard, a very cool (but smudgy) piece of tech

Hosted by my lovely colleagues at Durham, this ALT North East meeting began with a discussion of the practice of video assessment. I talked through what we do at Sunderland using Canvas and Panopto, covering our best practice advice and talking through the things which can go wrong. The problem of a VLE having multiple tools for recording / storing video was one such headache shared by all of us, no matter what systems we are using.

We then moved on to a discussion about Turnitin, ChatGPT and AI detection, pretty much a standing item now. Dan shared with us a new tool he has come across, which I’m not going to name or share, which uses AI to autocomplete MCQs. A new front has emerged. Some bravery from Northumbria who must be one of the few HEIs to have opted in to Turnitin’s beta checker, and New College Durham are going all in on the benefits of generative writing to help staff manage their workload by, for example, creating lesson plans for them. A couple of interesting experiments to keep an eye on there.

After lunch we had demonstrations of various tools and toys in Durham’s Digital Playground Lab. This included a Lightboard. This is a really cool and simple piece of tech that lets presenters write on a transparent board between them and the camera using UV pens. I came across this a few years ago, before the pandemic I think, but it’s a strange beast. It’s not a commercial system, but open hardware, so anyone can build one for themselves at little cost. Unfortunately at Sunderland, and I suspect at many bureaucracies, this actually makes it a lot harder to get one than just being able to go to a supplier. So it never happened, but at least today I got to see one live.

Another bespoke system demonstrated was a strip of LED lights around the whiteboard controlled through a web app which allows students to discretely indicate their level of comprehension. We had a short tour of the Playground’s media recording room, watched some video recordings of content created in VR to, for example, show the interaction of the magnetic fields of objects, a demonstration of Visual PDE which is an open source web tool for demonstrating differential equations, and Kaptivo, a system for capturing the content of a whiteboard but not the presenter. You can see the Kaptivo camera in the background of my photo, behind the Lightboard.

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ALT North East User Group: March 2023

Published 24th March 2023

A screenshot from Padlet showing our thoughts on generative AI. It’s a tad negative.

We’re getting back into a stride now, with the second meeting of the academic year at Teesside. After introductions and updates from each of the core university groups, Malcolm from Durham kicked us off with a conversation about Turnitin and how we all feel about it. From a survey of the room, most of us seem to be using it rather apathetically, or begrudgingly, with a few haters who would love to be able to do away with it, and no-one saying they actively like the service. Very revealing. So why do we all keep on using it? Because we all keep on using it. Turnitin’s database of student papers pulls like a black hole, and it will take a brave institution to quit the service now. Of note was that no-one really objected to the technology itself, especially originality reporting, but rather their corporate disposition and hegemonic business model.

Emma from Teesside then talked about their experience of being an Adobe Creative Campus, which involves making Adobe software available to all staff and students, and embedding it into the curriculum. Unfortunately, Emma and other Teesside colleagues noted the steep learning curve which was a barrier to use, and the fact that content had to sit on Adobe servers and was therefore under their control.

Next up was my partner in crime, Dan, reporting on Sunderland’s various efforts over the years to effectively gather student module feedback. This was a short presentation to stimulate a discussion and share practice. At Newcastle they have stopped all module evaluation, citing research on, for example, how female academics are rated lower than male. This has been replaced with an ‘informal check’ by lectures asking students how the module is going, are you happy, etc. They are being pushed to bring a formal system back due to NSS pressures, but are so far resisting. At Durham they are almost doing the opposite, with a dedicated team in their academic office who administer the process, check impact, and make sure that feedback is followed up on.

Finally after lunch, we had a big chat about that hot-button issue that has taken over our lives, the AI revolution! It was interesting for me to learn how Turnitin became so dominant back in the day (making it available to everyone as a trial, and getting us hooked…), and the parallels which can be drawn with their plans to roll out AI detection in the near future. Unlike their originality product which allows us to see the matches and present this to students as evidence of alleged plagiarism, we were concerned that their AI detection tool would be a black box, leaving wide open the possibility of false accusations of cheating with students having no recourse or defence. I don’t think I can share where I saw this exactly, but apparently Turnitin are saying that the tool has a false positive rate of around 1 in 100. That’s shocking, unbelievable.

No-one in the North East seems to be looking at trying to do silly things like ‘ban’ it, but some people at Durham, a somewhat conservation institution, are using it as a lever to regress to in-person, closed-book examination. Newcastle are implementing declarations in the form of cover sheets, asking students to self-certify if / how they have used AI writing.

There were good observations from colleagues that a) students are consistently way ahead of us, and are already sharing ways of avoiding possible detection on TikTok; and b) that whatever we do in higher education will ultimately be redundant, for as soon as students enter the real world they will use whatever tools are available in industry. Better that we teach students how to use such tools effectively and ethically in a safe environment. As you can see from the Padlet screenshot above, our sentiments on AI and ChatGPT were a tad negative.

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ALT NE User Group: November 2022

Published 18th November 2022

Stock photo of the Owl mic

And lo! November 2022 did bring forth the first, proper, ALT North East User Group since The Before Times. Though we did have a catch-up meeting in January to check-in and talk about how the pandemic has affected us all.

I was unable to make any of the management meetings to help organise and set the agenda, and so was duly punished by being putting up first to give me now almost routine talk about how our pilot year with Studiosity has gone.

Next up was Newcastle University and how they have rolled out digital assessment. Interestingly, they made a decision not to implement any kind of online proctoring software over the pandemic, a decision I very much support. They have been using, and are now scaling up, the use of Inspera for in-person exams. This was chosen over others for its ability to save local copies of exams – which it does every 6 seconds – as a contingency against network outage, and which in extreme cases can be retrieved from the computer as an encrypted file and uploaded on the students’ behalf. They are using a bring-your-own-device model, with power supply available for around 10% of the exam room capacity, and a laptop loan scheme available for 5%, which have been sufficient to cover them. For improved convenience, they are now looking at providing portable power banks rather than running extension cables around the room.

Next, my old muckers from Northumbria talked about their digital literacy scheme which sees TEL colleagues mentoring staff on digital technologies, and an expanded IT Place which now features TEL as well as IT staff, supported by a range of asynchronous content with certificates for staff who complete set courses. They are looking at digital badges to replace / complement this moving forwards.

After lunch, Durham talked about their experience of dual-mode teaching, including the use of Owl telepresence devices, as featured in the pic above which I gratuitously pinched from their website (please don’t sue, I have no money). It was an interesting experience, mixed. A conclusion from the learning technologies team was that they were great for meetings and small rooms, but the mics and cameras weren’t up to the job in larger teaching spaces. That didn’t stop their IT department from purchasing them en masse and kitting out every room though! Ah, classic IT.

Finally, we ended with a roundtable discussion on the use of student data. Again, Newcastle I feel are ahead of the curve here in banning the use of predictive analytics outright. Durham talked about their experience of the Blackboard feature which allows automated messages to be sent to students based on performance – they turned it off. They felt it was problematic for student motivation as the messages didn’t provide sufficient (any?) contextual information for students.

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ALT NE User Group – November 2019

Published 15th November 2019

Photo of an IBM System 360 outside our room

Attended the ALT North East User Group today at Newcastle University. This meeting was themed around accessibility which was suggested after Jisc’s talk at our last meeting and the dawning realisation about how much work this could have on learning technology departments.

All attending institutions gave an update on what we are doing to ensure that we meet our obligations, ranging from panicked nothing to creating fully custom eLearning packages for delivering maths learning resources digitally and online – that from Newcastle University who have developed a solution using a combination of open source packages including MathJax and Pandoc. East Durham College’s virtual reality sensory rooms to support students on the autistic spectrum with overstimulation was really impressive. One of the things they’re using is SafeSpace Easy Access, a freemium Cardboard compatible virtual reality app.

Another highlight of the day came from an external guest from Blackboard who demonstrated Ally working in Canvas. Ally is a tool that can not only check course content for accessibility issues – not just web content, but materials including Word, PDF and PowerPoint files – but automatically convert that content into a range of different formats to meet different access needs. For example, it can perform optical character recognition (OCR) on PDF files which are scanned images, turning them into text, and convert text to speech.

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ALT North East User Group – 2019

Published 12th April 2019

In a first, I didn’t just attend the meeting this time round, I hosted it at one of the University’s nicer enterprise suites at Hope Street Xchange. Working with Graeme and Julie who are the North East’s key contacts with ALT, I took care of the practicalities – venue, IT, parking, lunch – while they organised the agenda and speakers.

In the morning we had presentations from our regional Turnitin account manager who presented on their new Authorship Investigate tool which is designed to help detect instances of contract cheating, followed by a presentation and discussion from Jisc on changes to the EU’s Accessibility Regulations which we as an institution will need to respond to over the next year.

In the afternoon representatives from each institution attending gave a short presentation or talk about what interesting projects we have going on. I talked about using Trello with the team to better organise our workload, and the rollout of Panopto across the University which is now in full swing.

I’m pleased to be able to say it all went very well, with only one minor lunch hiccup which was quickly resolved. Hopefully this will be something we can do on a regular basis going forward.

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ALT North East User Group

Published 15th November 2018

Attended the ALT North East user group today at Durham Castle* to network and share practice with learning technologists from universities and colleges across the region.

A representative from Jisc was there to provide us with an update on their Learning Analytics project, which continues to look ever more impressive every time I see it. This was followed by a demonstration and talk about Special iApps which have been created to help children with special educational needs. Then we had two sessions on the use and value of Microsoft Teams in education, one from a Microsoft representative and one from a colleague at Teesside who have been using it in the wild with good results. Finally there was a demonstration of the survey tool BluePulse via webinar.

* The castle was nice. Really nice.

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