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Tag: PPD

Celebrating and Sharing ePortfolio Practice

Published 1st October 2026

I attended Dublin City University’s retrospective on 10 years of Mahara use as I believe in the value of reflection as a learning tool, and I’m always looking for ways to drive use of Mahara which remains patchy at Sunderland. DCU, however, report that this has gone from strength to strength. A key difference there is undoubtedly the close integration of Mahara and Moodle, their VLE, while we are using Canvas and have found the Mahara integration to be quite poor.

The session began with a series of case studies highlighting good practice. A former student returned to talk about how using Mahara had encouraged reflection and self-awareness, and allowed her to take ownership of her own learning, which gets to the heart of the pedagogical differences between a student-owned system and the centrally controlled VLE.

In the next case study an academic from DCU’s Business School reported on her use of Mahara to facilitate group projects. While the project was completed in Mahara, the end point assessment was an individual piece of work to relieve student anxieties over group working. On the nature of reflective assignments she noted that students tended to be very good at reflecting on what they had done in the project, but less so in how they will apply what they learned in the future. I didn’t note the level or age group of the students here, I suspect that makes a difference.

The final case study was an external speaker who talked about how they are using Mahara to help people who are out of work build customised resumes for use in job applications.

DCU have collated many such case studies in a series of eBooks which have been openly published. The first book, Eportfolio Based Assessment, covers the first early years of their Mahara use. The second book Exemplars of best practice… followed in 2021 and covers case studies from those difficult pandemic years, and the third volume, Case studies of eportfolio assessment practices, has just been published to coincide with the 10 year anniversary.

Finally, Rob Lowney from DCU presented on a student and staff feedback exercise on their use of Mahara. He noted some complaints about the ‘clunkiness’ of the system and user interface, which can be seen in the fact that only 49% of students agree, or strongly agree with the statement ‘I find it east to create e-portfolios…’. On the staff side, 71% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘It is easy to access and navigate students’ submitted Loop Reflect portfolio assessments’. I wonder if this is indicative of staff receiving more training and guidance on how to use Mahara. Despite some big improvements over the past couple of years, I still don’t think the system is particularly intuitive and requires some training for both staff and students to use well. This is maybe echoed in Rob’s statement that the key to driving adoption is to provide a guided learning activity on Mahara.

Update, 05/10/2026: A recording of the session is now available on YouTube, and the slides are on DCU’s website here (PDF).

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EmpowerED: Season 4, Webinar 5

Published 31st July 2026

I attended today’s EmpowerED session when I saw a colleague from our London Campus, Viji Jayasundara, was presenting on the ‘Science of Compassion in the Age of AI’. It was a good talk on the nature of that part of the work of an educator in which humans excel, and Generative AI is unlikely to be able to replace. Namely, the skills related to compassion and empathy. Definitely some things I can take away and add into my own sessions on instructional design, accessibility, etc. The screenshot above is from Viji’s presentation, a checklist of verbal and non-verbal signals for effective communication such as using “inclusive eye-contact to include everyone to the group task”.

The first talk was from Gil Dekel at Southampton, “AI is Not a Football Team”, and argued that AI technology isn’t something to be supported or decried, but that we needed to be able to understand the benefits while managing the risks. I wasn’t entirely convinced by Gil’s argument, as there was no consideration to the damage being done by GenAI technology, both to the environment and to the human creators who are being disempowered by the very technology that has been built upon their stolen work.

Following Viji was Adele Cushing from Birkbeck was presented on their experience of using Teachermatic to assist with assessment and feedback. Adele acknowledged the controversy of using AI in this area, but reported that staff said it helped them to cope with marking fatigue and to ensure consistency. Some of their staff were doing their feedback ‘the old-fashioned way’, and then comparing their work with Teachermatic’s feedback.

Finally, Stuart Parkin from Manchester Metropolitan University talked about “Tackling Barriers to Active Learning with the Active Learning Spectrum”. This was a really interesting talk, about how students learn better when actively engaged in the process, rather than simply watching or listening to a lecture. Stuart and colleagues have created a tool, an Active Learning Spectrum, plotting different types of learning activity to how simple or complex they are, with examples and research on the benefits of each.

You know I attended this one because I got a certificate. (Never mind that I missed the first session due to an overlapping meeting, and waited for it to be available on their YouTube later.)

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ENAI Wellbeing Series: Closing Roundtable

Published 2nd July 2026
Slide showing the trust gap in use of AI
The Trust Gap

ENAI are the European Network for Academic Integrity and they ran this webinar series on student wellbeing in collaboration with Studiosity. Unfortunately the series didn’t come to my attention until this closing roundtable, which is a real shame as it sounds like it has been very interesting. Hopefully it will run again next year and I can fully attend and participate.

Much of the discussion was on the impact of Generative AI on students and teachers, with the slide I took a screenshot of (above) showing the outcomes of a survey on student wellbeing and AI use (~10,000 students across 9 countries). 81% of students reported using AI to help with their learning, while 44% report that they are worried that the tools are reducing their critical thinking or communication skills. The anonymous quote, “Teachers doubt that students are producing authentic work – while students think the same about their teachers” shows the gap in trust that has developed between staff and students.

Frustrations abounded in the chat, where someone said that “if you’re good at writing, people assume it’s AI now” and another person commented that they are seeing staff putting student work into ChatGPT for feedback without the consent or knowledge of their students, or any consideration for GDPR or security I would add.

Recordings of the sessions are going to be published on the Wellbeing Series page of ENAI’s website, so time permitting I will go back and watch those when they become available.

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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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Studiosity Partner Forum 2026

Published 18th March 2026

It must be that time of year again! Except that ‘that time of year’ gets earlier and earlier. I liked it better when Studiosity timed their forum to coincide with Star Wars day, but that might just be me.

Nick Hillman from the Higher Education Policy Institute must have been a hit last year, because he was first up this year with a new ‘State of the Nation’ report which was, once again, excellent. Some highlights:

  • The 2026 HEPI Generative AI Survey (my first photo), shows near universal use of Gen AI tools among students at 95%, with 94% using it in some capacity related to completing their assessments. And yet, only 48% reported that staff were supporting their development of AI skills. Also of concern is the stat that 15% of students are using AI for companionship.
  • The slide on relative earnings by education level (second photo) clearly shows that there is still a great deal of value in getting a tertiary education, but that little red dot showing the relative earnings level for people without upper secondary level of education is terrifying in its implications, and demonstrates the massive problems we have with inequality in the UK.
  • The net benefit of international students on the UK economy is huge, and has grown to £37.4 billion.
  • The public massively overestimates rates of student regret – they guess 40%, when in reality it is 8%.
  • And to end on a positive note, everyone across the political spectrum (yes, even Reform voters), feel more generally positive towards universities than negative.

Next, Vivienne Stern from Universities UK gave a talk on the immediate issues facing the sector, cautioning that we are in danger of getting caught up in near-term issues and debates, instead of looking at the wider systemic issues, which ultimately all go back to chronic underfunding. She shared the fact that 24 universities in England were currently in ‘intensive care’, meaning they are close to insolvency, and expects this to double in the next 2-3 years.

That was a lot on the sector in general, but the morning was capped off with Studiosity’s main briefing which was delivered by Garnet Berry who presented on Validate and where Studiosity are taking the company next. I won’t say too much about this, having had a preview of the service a few weeks ago, but I did get to see more detail and screenshots of the Validate interface working inside Studiosity.

After we reconvened after lunch, the afternoon was handed over to a series of presentations and talks from Studiosity’s UK partners. I was struck by how similar the experiences of UWE Bristol and Greenwich University were to Sunderland’s. UWE reported the same issues with an attainment gap between white and BAME students that we have, and their high levels of uptake in Health matches our own experience. Similarly, Greenwich reported that they have found getting their Business School onboard has also been a challenge. On Studiosity+, UWE reported that since switching over to Studiosity’s AI powered service they have seen 4 times as much usage, though noted a slightly lower student level of satisfaction. However, coinciding with this was the inclusion of Studiosity in their new module templates, which will inevitably have helped drive use.

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Studiosity Validate Preview

Published 13th February 2026
Scrabble tiles spelling out 'Adapt or Fail'
Adapt or Fail: Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

So Studiosity have bought out a wee Nordic company called Norvalid and are planning to integrate it into their service, and I was lucky enough to be given a sneak preview today. I think I need to be a little careful about what I say for the time being, but as Norvalid has been around for a while, I feel like it’s okay to talk about what they do.

Norvalid sprang up in response to the need to ensure academic integrity in the GenAI age, but are taking a different approach from the constant monitoring / police and punish model that we’ve seen to date from the likes of Turnitin (via Clarity) and Grammarly. Instead, Norvalid looks to do two things. First, it examines the ‘perplexity’ of a piece of writing, looking for the qualities it has of being human authored – so the opposite of trying to check for machine authored text. Secondly, it can then generate two different types of quiz based on that specific piece of writing which students have to answer as a check of their knowledge. The idea being that if they have indeed written the piece submitted, this should be quite straightforward. Kind of like a machine-generated mini viva.

Now under the umbrella of Studiosity, Norvalid will be integrated into their AI powered Writing Feedback service, and it will be offered to partners as an optional extra. Details and pricing to follow, after a trial with a small number of institutions over the summer.

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Vibecoding: The Future of Learning Technology?

Published 17th December 2025
Still from the movie 2001 with HAL:9000 in the backgrounf
I’m sorry, Dave. I appear “to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part.”

No.

Of course that’s just my opinion, but there were some very enthusiastic people on this ad-hoc ALT webinar who believe it will take over everything, and finally kill the VLE! But I saw nothing here and heard no arguments on this session that convinced me. That doesn’t mean that vibe coding platforms like Lovable and Antigravity aren’t going to become useful additions to our toolbox, but I’ve been through more than one technology hype cycle that was going to revolutionise education and put us all out of jobs only for them to underwhelm.

Broadly speaking there were two camps of speakers here, the evangelists who seem to be blind to problems and criticism, and washed it all away with promises of future improvements, and the more wary. From this latter camp we got stories of someone with no coding experience who developed an app, then shared it with a colleague who promptly got a Windows security warning which they didn’t understand and couldn’t fix. And an experienced developer who has used vibe coding tools and, with that expertise, was able to see where the apps produced were going wrong, and identity problems such as the tools hallucinating errors where there were none.

This is the way. And with all GenAI tools, not just vide coding. You cannot trust what they create and must apply a level of critical analysis or expertise when evaluating the outputs. Unless of course you don’t care about making things which are good and useful, which I would hope is not the case in our community. I was therefore deeply disappointed in a horrible, anti-human comment in the chat about human developers which I’m not going to repeat.

To whit, I will leave you with two links. For the AI evangelists, a cautionary tale on Tom’s Hardware from someone who trusted Google’s Antigravity a little too much and was rewarded with a wiped hard drive. And a tool I found, Slop Evader, which is a plugin for Chrome and Firefox which lets you search the internet like it was 2022, before the launch of ChatGPT, if you absolutely must be sure that something you are looking for wasn’t made by AI. (Well… almost sure. Generative AI tools and content existed before ChatGPT after all, they just weren’t mainstream.)

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: 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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Sunderland Education Conference 2025

Published 8th October 2025
Photo of the conference venue state
Education Conference 2025

We’ve had a rebrand. Now that we have a new Deputy Vice Chancellor who has changed the title to DVC Education, our annual Teaching and Learning Conference has been renamed to the Education Conference to match.

The day began with welcome messages from the DVC, and our VC, David Bell, who talked about the challenges of identifying truths and falsehoods in our increasingly siloed and partisan culture, and the importance of ensuring students develop critical thinking skills to cope in both education and employment.

The keynote talk was delivered by James Coe, Associate Editor (Research & Innovation), at WonkHE, and a local lad from the North East. The key message of his talk was about the challenges and pressures students now face as a result of cultural changes since his own time at university, back in ye olden days of 2011, before the start of £9k student fees and a time when he received a £4k bursary. Now that students face far harsher financial challenges and graduating into a stagnant labour market, James talked about how pressures have flipped, with students now having to fit in lectures and study around work, rather than the other way round as it was in the recent past and, I would argue, how it should be. This leaves them a lack of space and time to study and benefit from the formative experience of being a student.

The name of the day may have changed, but something that stayed the same was the always excellent student panel discussion. I have always found this very useful and insightful. This year a lot of the discussion was about the real world use of generative AI tools, as might be expected. The panel talked about how they are using these tools to help structure their work and adjust their writing voice, and were well aware of the dangers of overuse and offloading their thinking to these tools. Specifically, they commented about a fear that they would reduce their writing skills. I was also pleased, if that’s the right word, that the panel echoed my concern that the University does not provide sufficient and clear guidance for students on what they are and aren’t allowed to use exactly, and how they are allowed to use them.

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