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Tag: Podcast

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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Moodle Munch: Dec. 2020

Published 1st December 2020


Recording of the two case studies from today

My second Moodle Munch featured two presentations today, the first from Lisa Callaghan at Dublin City University Library who have used H5P to develop an interactive library skills tool, and the second from Ciara Reilly at the Marino Institute of Education who talked about their use of podcasting.

I really need to get H5P working in our Canvas. The tutorial Lisa has developed in H5P replaces a 2013 version made in Storyline, which itself replaced an earlier HTML / Flash version. However, the benefits of the new H5P version seem to come through the deployment of it using a Moodle plug-in called Subcourse which allows the library to create and manage the content centrally, and to get stats on it, a problem they had with the previous versions. I think it’s this method of pushing out content that’s really interesting. Within Canvas we could use Commons to similar effect, but this doesn’t automatically update the content, instead each course which has imported it from Commons gets a notification that a new version is available, and then the option to update. I got the impression that Subcourse in Moodle fully updates the content fully automatically. There was a useful discussion about the types of content that can be produced in H5P, and how accessible each tool and option is. Someone posted a link to this support document which breaks it down.

The second talk from Ciara was on various way of using podcasting to engage learners, such as delivering content in different formats to provide a break from screens, using it for audio feedback, and getting students to produce audio content which from their experience has helped students who are less confident writing to “find their voice”. Again, interesting debate on the pros and cons in the comments. It was interesting to note the increased use of podcasts during the pandemic, something I’ve found anecdotally and which colleagues here seemed to agree on. Ciara surveyed their own students and found that 52% reported listening to at least 4 podcasts per week. They also discussed the technology platforms they have experimented with, including Anchor.fm, Audacity, Vocaroo, and the native audio recording tool in Moodle’s Atto text box editor.

Recordings are available in the embedded YouTube above. They got that up quick, before I finished writing this! Makes me feel ashamed of the month-old draft blog post on my desktop about CanvasCon.

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