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Tag: Webinar

Institutional Experiences of Microsoft Copilot

Published 6th August 2024
Diagram of MS Copilot architecture
Diagram of Microsoft Copilot Architecture

November 2023, I wrote a rambling post about my thoughts on generative AI and where it was going to go for the ALT Blog. I made a prediction there that someone was going to buy a site license for ChatGPT, and lo! This HeLF discussion was about exactly that. Sort of. It’s Microsoft’s Copilot tool that the majority of people are going for, because we are all, or mostly, existing Microsoft customers and they are baking it into their Office 365 offering. Though there are a couple of institutions looking at ChatGPT as an alternative.

Costs and practically was a big issue under discussion. Microsoft are only giving us the very basic service for free, and if you want full Copilot Premium that it’s an additional cost of around £30 a month per individual. Pricey, but it gets worse. They have tiers upon tiers, and if you want to do more advanced things like having your own Copilot chatbot available in your VLE for example, then you’re into another level of premium which goes up to hundreds a month.

We also discussed concerns about privacy and data security. If Copilot is given access to your OneDrive and SharePoint files for example, then you need to make sure that everything has correct data labels, or else you run the risk of the chatbot surfacing confidential information to users.

At Sunderland we have no plans for any premium generative AI tools at present, the costs are just prohibitive. And it’s not just at this level, the entire field of generative AI is hugely expensive and completely unsustainable. So I’ll end as I began, with prognostications: OpenAI is haemorrhaging money, they lost over half a billion dollars last year. They are living on investment capital, and unless the finance bods start seeing a serious return, they are going to pull the plug. Sooner rather than later I reckon. I don’t think OpenAI will go under exactly, but I do think they are going to get eaten by one of the big players, Microsoft most likely. A lot of headlines were made last year about Microsoft’s $10 billion investment, but people haven’t read the fine print – that $10 billion was in the form of server credits, so Microsoft is going to get that back one way or another. I’m going to give the AI bubble another six to eighteen months.

What will come after that? Generative AI isn’t going to go away of course, it’s a great technological achievement, but I think we will see a shift towards smaller models being run locally on our personal devices. It will be interesting to see how Apple Intelligence will pan out, they aren’t putting all of their eggs into the ChatGPT basket. And as for the tech and finance industries? They’ll just move onto the next bubble. Quantum computing anyone?

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To Infinity and B-yound!

Published 29th May 2024

This webinar was presented as part of the ongoing HeLF development series, and this time around we had Stephanie DeMarco and Alex Rey from Birmingham City University leading a discussion on the Office for Students Conditions of Registration, specifically the ‘B’ metrics on quality, standards, and outcomes.

Even more specifically, we were looking at B3 which is about delivering positive outcomes for students, and is the metric most directly under our sphere of influence as learning technologists and academic developers.

B3 has three measures underneath it, related to continuation, completion and progression, which here means that students have gone into graduate level employment. These measures are not open to any kind of interpretation, and HEIs must meet the set targets of 80% continuation, 75% completion and 60% progression.

B3 also contains within if four aims, which are open to some level of interpretation and debate. These are participation, experience, outcomes, and value for money. The last being particularly contentious in the climate surrounding HE in the United Kingdom of late. (Has my undergraduate degree in philosophy provided value for money? Absolutely.)

Stephanie and Alex then presented a case study of activity which they had undertaken to help academics better meet these outcomes, concentrating on areas such as authentic assessment, project-based learning, how to write programme validation documentation, etc.

And finally, there was a shared Padlet board in which we could all share thoughts and best practice. From this I have picked up the Curriculum Scan model, development by Alexandra Mihai, which can be used for auditing modules. This reminded me of storyboarding process done as part of instructional design before a module goes live, but for auditing and checking a module which is ongoing.

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ALT Winter Conference 2019

Published 12th December 2019

Request Map for this blog homepage showing the links out

Participated in ALT’s online winter conference this year, joining five sessions over the two days:

  • Embodying Leadership as a Learning Technologist, Evan Dickerson
  • Allowing Art and Design students to choose their type of session, Jennifer Dettmer
  • MoodleNet: Federated, resource-centric social networking for educators, Doug Belshaw
  • A Review of Privacy and Edtech Tools, Gavin Henrick
  • Learning Design Bootcamp, Catherine Turton

The introduction and preview of MoodleNet was very informative and quite exciting. I was expecting a Mastodon clone, but instead it looks like it’s going to be more of a next generation open education repository. It looked very similar to Canvas Commons, but of course Moodle based and will be able to plug in to other LMSs, including Canvas. Using ActivityPub, it should also be possible to talk to and share resources with other ActivityPub based federated networks such as Mastodon and PeerTube.

I also very much enjoyed the talk with Gavin Henrick about the ethics of having students use freemium online learning tools that, like almost everything on the web now, gather personal data to be sold directly or indirectly to advertisers. One of the tools he introduced us to was Request Map Generator, which will test any website you throw at it and produce a map showing the outgoing connections from that site. Out of curiosity and in the interests of fairness I ran my blog through it and you can see the results above. I use the Shareaholic plugin to add the social media sharing buttons to my content, so I was expecting a lot of connections going out to them, and having embedded a few YouTube videos into some posts there is also a connection out to many, many Google sites, including a huge blob to their DoubleClick ad network.

The web has for a long time now been a compromise between freedom of access, quality, convenience and privacy, driven by the advertising business model. Do I get the balance right on my sites? You’ll never see an ad on here – I run WordPress on my own server – but I do include the sharing buttons because I want people to be able to easily share out my content. I stripped Google analytics off the site a couple of years ago, it didn’t add any great value, but I have taken to embedding videos from YouTube for educational and entertainment value because I as conscious of my blog being very text heavy.

Recordings of all session webinars are available on the conference programme page on ALT’s website.

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Instructure Accessibility Webinar

Published 3rd December 2019

U Do It Logo

Joined Instructure’s accessibility webinar this afternoon to learn more about what they are doing on the accessibility of Canvas. With regards to the product itself, quality assurance developers assess the accessibility of new features throughout development, then they work with an external agency, WebAIM, to complete their VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) to comply with US legislation.

With regards to content, they provide an accessibility checker tool which I learned today wasn’t their own thing, but UDOIT, an open source tool developed by the University of Central Florida. This can check web content, but not files like PowerPoint and Word documents like Blackboard Ally can. Instructure have also recently added Microsoft’s Immersive Reader as a beta feature, which will hopefully become a permanent addition.

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How to Design and Deliver Successful Webinars, Part 2

Published 18th April 2019

As I suspected, this follow-up and primary session on webinars made frequent reference to part 1 which had been designed and delivered to serve as an exemplar of best practice, as identified by Emailogic from their experience in the field. It was a good session, very worthwhile, and I took a lot away from it.

On preparing for and starting a webinar, an idea I really liked was having an activity or exercise that you could pre-populate for people who join the webinar early, such as a simple word search with terms related to your content. It was recommended to start the webinar around 20-30 minutes before the official start time in order to prepare for early arrivals, test audio and video as required, ideally on a different computer, and to welcome people joining early. However, it was recommended that you don’t start for 2 or 3 minutes after the start time to account for people who may be having problems joining.

Once people are in, get them to engage early by checking-in using some of the available tools, such as putting a hand up or using the chat tool. There was a claim that research has shown that 92% of people multitask, by, for example, checking email or replying to texts during a webinar. This wasn’t cited, but it feels credible from my experience. To keep people’s attention it was recommended that you need to speak at a faster pace than you would use in a classroom setting, that you eliminate pauses and gaps as much as possible, use text reveals so that people only see what is immediately relevant in slides, and to persistently make people interact by asking questions via polls or using the chat. On the non-technical side, repeating good points and participant’s names was recommended, along with using personal disclosure and humour to create bonds.

Regarding the inevitable technical problems, they recommended having two people on a webinar, one actively leading it and the other person picking up any technical problems raised by participants, something which I have seen many times. To mitigate bandwidth problems they recommended using only slides, not live technical demos, and sending these out prior to the webinar so that in extreme cases participants can still join in via telephone.

We completed a number of exercises throughout the day also, including ones on how to design open and closed questions, and constructing a simple webinar based on a topic we currently teach face-to-face. Finally, we were given some good handouts for future reference – a standard opening script that’s content neutral, and a detailed checklist for preparing sessions.

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How to Design and Deliver Successful Webinars, Part 1

Published 10th April 2019

Attended a one hour webinar which was meant to be about, as per title, how to design and deliver successful webinars. What was actually delivered was a session on how to get the most out of meetings, covering topics such as providing a detailed agenda, setting expectations prior to meetings, and getting minutes and actions out promptly.

Of course, that was the explicit content. I have a lot of thoughts about this and how it was delivered – it was a little bizarre – and I expect it is all going to be deconstructed at part 2 of this thing next Thursday.

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ALT Accessibility Webinar

Published 8th March 2018

Joined the ALT South webinar on online learning materials and accessibility, in which Tharindu Liyanagunawardena, Chair of the Online Learning Research Centre​ at the University College of Estate Management, presented a case study of their experience in adapting online learning materials to improve accessibility for students. This was initially in response to students who were having difficulty with particular items within a MOOC, but the lessons learned were adapted and implemented in new templates which were subsequently shared across the institution.

There was some discussion about Blackboard Ally, a tool, or ‘revolutionary product’ according to Blackboard, which can validate the accessibility of learning materials and in many instances convert them into alternative formats such as audio, electronic Braille, and ePub. Ally is available for multiple VLEs, not just Blackboard Learn.

The webinar was also my first experience of Blackboard Collaborate Ultra. Well, it’s certainly an improvement as it no longer uses Java, unfortunately is uses Flash instead. I would hope that that is a stopgap measure in the transition to HTML5, but with Blackboard who knows. In keeping with the theme of the webinar, there was mention of a feature in Collaborate Ultra which allows an individual to enter live closed captions. That is a nice feature.

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Analytics 2 Webinar and Consultation

Published 7th December 2017

Attended a webinar for a demonstration of the new version of Analytics currently being developed for Canvas. The new version will bring a new look and make it easier for staff to get an overview of student performance in their modules and how it compares with other students. This is still in the early stages of development and the webinar was also to gain my feedback. What I think is missing from the demonstrated design is the ability to view and compare a student’s performance across different assignments in the same module, which was noted and should be fairly easy to implement, and across different modules in the same programme, much more difficult due to the way different institutions manage the relationship between programme and module spaces. With that in mind I have a follow up call next week to discuss how we would like to see this work, which is part of a broader consultation Instructure is having with the UK HE sector to better meet our needs in this area.

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Blueprint Courses Webinar

Published 20th November 2017

Watched a webinar recording explaining how the new(ish) Blueprint Courses tool works in Canvas. This is the tool that allows a kind of parent – child relationship between courses which gives you the ability to add and update content in the parent course and push it into any children. Potentially very useful to us here as Sunderland has multiple instances of courses for our various campuses and partner institutes.

Blueprint Courses was released just before we went live with Canvas in June, but not in time for us to test and integrate into our deployment plans. Instead, we created a ‘Master’ occurrence of every module with no student enrolments which gave staff a space to create the generic content which can then be copied into each live occurrence, but it’s a manual process. Blueprint Courses could give us a more elegant solution, or it could be used by us to control and deploy the university module template. Can it be used for both though, a Blueprint course deployed into another Blueprint course? That would allow us to use the tool for both purposes. Something to experiment with.

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CMALT Webinar for New Assessors

Published 9th November 2017

cmalt_badge

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have experienced the pleasure of my little rant as technology utterly failed me for this webinar, but I was at least able to get the recording working a little while later. (I will not be defeated by Java!) It was a very enlightening session on the process and practicalities of assessing the portfolios of CMALT candidates. I’ve actually already done my first one for a portfolio review a few weeks ago, so this was timely, and I have as a result of this webinar now signed up to become an assessor of regular portfolios too.

Unrelated, but ALT have also recently released digital badges for use in portfolios, email signatures, etc. Not actual accredited digital badges with metadata, just nice image files.

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