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Tag: NELE

NELE: June 2026

Published 5th June 2026

We had a good turnout for the final NELE of the year at Northumbria. They got the ball rolling by sharing their experience of using Claude AI. While most of us are sticking to CoPilot because access is being included in our Microsoft site licenses, Northumbria have rolled out the Enterprise Pro version of Claude for all staff and students, only the 4th HEI to do so globally, and 2nd in the UK. This has been rolled out in a way that is “aligned to the university’s ethical values”, meaning that there is no training on user data, their data is isolated from the wider Claude AI, and they have integrated ‘abuse detection’ designed to stop students from asking it to write their work for them, with the big caveat that such measures can typically be circumvented by astute students (maybe they should get extra credit…).

Usage has been good, with 8,000 active users at any given time, though Andrew noted that some students are reluctant to use it because they think the university is monitoring them. Spoiler, they are, but only for safeguarding and this is made clear in their AI policy. Northumbria are also one of the few UK HEIs using Turnitin’s AI detection, with their academic community split on whether or not this is good or useful.

Next, Jean from their Library talked about assistive technology for neurodivergent students and the DSA audit which the government is currently conducting. Matching the experience of the sector, Northumbria are noting a big increase in the number of students declaring a specific learning disability, of which 44% are related to neurodivergence, and 29% to mental health. This isn’t a bad thing though. UCAS have changed how they ask students to report SpLD, moving from a medical to a social model of disability. Alas that the government hasn’t gotten that message though, and still ask students to submit multiple forms of evidence in order to be awarded DSA. Jean had a couple of students presenting with her to talk about their experience, and they spoke about how useful some of the specialist software has been for them, and how worried they are about the government’s review.

Leading on from this, Ross from Durham led our next discussion on digital accessibility. He talked about the new European Accessibility Act which, though it won’t directly apply in the UK, will still benefit us all as it applies to software vendors who are going to have to comply with these new standards. At first glance, this looks like the EU doing everyone a solid again, like forcing a charging standard and removable batteries. (Imperfect those these interventions may be, the intentions are good and generally beneficial.)

After lunch I led a discussion on Instructure’s recent Minor Security Incident and talked about how we responded at Sunderland. Newcastle’s response was broadly similar to ours, and most of us have contingency plans of some kind in place. Teesside, interestingly, have banned the use of IT related apps like Teams and Outlook on personal devices, a policy that was put in place around 18 months ago. I also know that at Durham if you want to install Outlook / Teams you have to agree to give them permission to remotely wipe your device – on Android at least, I don’t know if this is possible on iOS, outside of a fully managed device.

Next we had a demo of a virtual reality simulation Northumbria created for students to experience a police interrogation. At their Coach Lane Campus they have set up a house which can be configured to simulate different scenarios which are recorded with 360° cameras and which students can then experience in full VR using HTC Vive Focus 3 headsets. They used to do this kind of thing in a real environment, but that limits the amount of students who can be there at any one time, and requires a lot more effort to set-up and set-down. I came away from this one with a lot of ideas and new software to go and have a look at.

Finally, the day ended with a showcase of digital content created by Newcastle’s Digital Content team, which was good for me to compare with our own Showcase Module in Canvas, and gave me some ideas on how we could revamp that and make it a bit snazzier.

One last thing… like the Apple keynotes of old, I’ve saved the best news for last – NELE is getting its own website. This came out of a suggestion by one of our members who was looking for a central space for upcoming meeting dates and locations. This may also help us to reach out to FE Colleges where we have tried, but failed to get much engagement, either as NELE or ALT North East. I offered to set this up as I have the headroom to do so, and so I’ll be moving these write-ups to the new site from next year.

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NELE: March 2026

Published 20th March 2026

Back down to Middlesborough today for a packed agenda. James got the ball rolling with a discussion of Middlesborough College’s experience as a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert, and using badges – both digital and physical – to motivate staff to engage with their CPD offering. I think we got some good ideas from this one. They were using leaderboards, but with only the top three visible so as to reduce the risk of demotivating people.

Next, Malcolm led a discussion about modern alternatives to vivas which is an approach Durham is evaluating. This led on naturally to a wider discussion on the validity of assessments in the Gen AI age. There feels like a growing consensus on the need for vivas of some kind, whether digital or a sample of students, but practical and ethical issues abound. If it works as intended, I think Studiosity could be on to something with Validate.

We of course talked about Einstein, and though this particular service was shut down quickly enough (thanks to Einstein’s estate), the service was build on open technology and is relatively easy to recreate. In what I can only describe as ‘a bit of gossip’, we speculated on whether or not the whole service was a scam designed to entrap students, as there have been some reports of students who signed up for the service receiving blackmail style emails. It’s wild out there.

Other topics of conversation included Newcastle’s move to all 20 credit modules, amusing as at Sunderland we’re in the process of doing the opposite, moving everything to 30 or 60 credits; we talked software and processes for maintaining an internal knowledgeable; peer learning as an approach to alleviating imposter syndrome; had a look at Blackboard’s alternative to Canvas Catalog; and discussed access to premium Gen AI tools. On that topic, we’re all using CoPilot because it’s being bundled with our Microsoft site licenses, but on cost grounds only Northumbria are offering anything in addition – Claude.ai which, from my experience, I suspect is much appreciated by their school of Computing and Information Sciences in particular.

Rounding off the day, Bob from Middlesborough College demonstrated their in-house Inspire AI tool, which is a series of Gen AI ‘widgets’ designed to produce specific types of content based on a simple form, no prompt engineering required. It reminded me of TeacherMatic which we have experimented with, but Inspire was completely tailored to Middlesborough’s needs and requirements. On the back-end it’s using GPT 4.1-mini, but it can be updated with other models, and staff reported that the tool was very easy to use, and has been saving them time as they outsource low cognitive capacity tasks to it such as generating individual lesson plans or bespoke case studies.

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NELE: November 2025

Published 21st November 2025

I was on hosting duty for the first NELE of the year, and something I wanted to achieve with this one was to reach out to our academic community and get them involved and talking about how they are using technology and our services down t’ pit. To which end, I wrangled our Dan and Kim to talk about how we have been using podcasts, both as a team to disseminate our news and events, and as a revision tool on our PG Cert HE. I also asked Dan to record a live podcast of the event, with willing speakers talking about the issues which they are facing at their institutions. Next up I got Mark from our Paramedic Programmes to talk about how they have been using video feedback in their programmes in an attempt to make feedback more efficient, better, and friendlier for students.

Next up was Kimberley from Newcastle talking about an outreach event their team hosted, a Digital Education Technologies Showcase Day, which they ran in collaboration with their Library team and other adjacent services. It went well, and I thought it was a good idea that we could try.

After lunch we had some discussions about generative AI, first as a tool to create teaching materials, and then about what we are all doing to educate students on the pros and cons, the do’s and do not’s. James from Middlesbrough talked about their policies and showed us the ‘Acceptable-Unacceptable’ scale graphic that they have been widely publicising. Something else I really liked the idea of.

Finally, we had a roundtable discussion on the state of the VLE as a concept, stimulated by Anthology’s financial woes. Those in the know were very confident that Blackboard isn’t going anywhere, and will be spun off as it’s own thing again. I asked a question about market disruptors, to see if anyone knew of any providers stepping into the market and trying to shake things up a little, the way Instructure did a decade ago. Not a lot there, but I did learn about a new Moodle development specifically aimed at the HE sector which aims to streamline the app and make it more relevant for our community specifically. I had a DuckDuckGo for this, and found this presentation about the project from the Moodle Moot in September which may be of interest to some folks.

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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NELE: June 2025

Published 6th 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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NELE: February 2025

Published 28th 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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