EdTech Developments completed projects

Over the last 12 months the TEL team have worked alongside programme teams to help identify the differences between their Canvas courses and bring this information together to deliver a more consistent approach. Findings in a recent report on a student survey of 30 HE UK institutions show that students see a consistent use of the VLE as very important to their digital experience. “As students come to rely more on virtual access to learning, they expect the virtual environment to be designed with their needs in mind. Timely upload of materials, and navigable course structures, are top of their list.”

The Teaching and Learning Academy are currently developing a plan to audit a number of randomly allocated courses to help train, develop, and advise staff on accessibility best practices. The 2022/23 audit found that the following issues needed to be addressed as a priority:

The team have evaluated the course menu, and delivered a consistent approach for both staff and students. High traffic and priority menu items have been placed at the top of the menu, with other items shifted to the bottom of the menu. We encourage staff to leave menu items in the order you find them, or where a different priority is required, you consider implementing accross all courses in the programme. This ensures that students access content in the same way across all their courses, providing a consistent and supportive experience.

The TEL team have undertaken an institution wide evaluation on how the quiz tool in Canvas is being used. Evaluating which quizzes have had the highest engagement with students we followed up with tutors and authors of these quizzes and asked them to share some of their practice. We have used this to develop some approaches and models of good practice that we can share with all staff to either provide some new perspectives for existing quiz users or to encourage other staff to adopt the quiz tool. Some of the approaches covered are

• Diagnostic Assessment. Quizzes taken early on in a students time at LJMU are a helpful way to establish a baseline for newer students and identify where some of their strengths and areas for development may be. This can help to inform early personal tutor sessions
• Formative Assessment. Some courses deploy a series of quizzes throughout the course of a semester. As well as providing indications as to how students are engaging with the course it also allows students to reflect on their learning and address any areas of concern prior to final assessments.
• Summative Assessment. Many staff use online tests as part of summative assessment to count towards the overall grade of a particular course or module.

The TEL team have made some improvements to My Canvas Admin. This space is really useful for managing your course list and exporting grades, but the TEL team in consultation with staff have come together to offer you some new features including:

• Displaying the number of student enrolments for each course.
• Customised course filters, allowing you the ability to group courses by code or year for adding/removing/viewing.
• Quick Unenroll, just click on the x next to the course you'd like to unenroll from.
• Course Groups - You can now export a list of course groups and their enrolments.
• Course Journals - My Canvas Admin now facilitates the option to create private course journal for each student within your course

The TEL team have been investigating the feasibility of releasing a new Turnitin integration which integrates with Canvas more seamlessly. In the new integration students can submit their assignments into the Canvas interface, with TII working invisibly in the background. Tutors can quickly create assignments using the new workflow, which displays both TII and Canvas assignment settings on the same page. For more information please see the New Turnitin Framework Integration blog post.

This project subsequently supported staff and students through the deprecation of two aspects of the Turnitin service.  

• Aspect 1: The removal of a legacy method for tutors to add Turnitin to a Canvas assignment. Please note: that this will not prevent you from using Turnitin for assessment, the Turnitin Framework tool will still be available as a plagiarism detection tool.  

• Aspect 2. The removal of the Turnitin Feedback Studio that allows staff to mark student papers within Turnitin. Moving forward all marking and feedback will be added via Canvas Speedgrader. Staff will continue to be able to use Turnitin for plagiarism detection through the Turnitin Framework Tool.  

Deprecation will be completed in August 2022. 

This project aims to improve the current process of moving Panopto recordings each year. Currently, teaching staff have to request the moving of multiple recordings into the new Canvas course. They also have to re-connect any Canvas pages that have a recording embedded within it once the recordings have moved. Panopto have developed a process to automated this. TLA will be working with Panopto to test and evaluate this process Summer 2022.

The TLA are evaluating a new tool called Buddycheck. This is a simple to use peer evaluation tool within Canvas, which allows students to evaluate each team member’s performance in a group activity, as well as self-assessment. It is an useful tool to helping your students successfully manage group work. The evaluation will focus on the possible benefits it can bring to group formative and summative feedback.

The Zoom Dashboard is the next stage in the ongoing Canvas and Technology Enhanced Learning Analytics offering from the Teaching and Learning Academy It is intended to support teaching and learning by providing insights in to how students engage and interact with your teaching. Zoom has been an important tool in helping to deliver teaching in an online way and understanding how our students are engaging with the online delivery can help us to improve both their engagement and delivery of teaching. Using the dashboard it is possible to filter students by Faculty, School, Programme and Level of study in order to obtain a sense of their overall level of engagement and identify any recent drops inactivity. You can also select an individual student and examine in detail how their activity looks over time and even how much time has been spent in individual sessions. Module tutors can filter by their details to view student session participation relative to their own online classes.

This JISC research project explores opportunities to use extended learning analytics data to make meaningful insights around curriculum analytics and build a new service. This will involve working with IT services and Registry. It will connect with some of the directions in the Mycanvascourse and Feedback project. See this JISC link for more information.

The TEL team have acquired Zoom to assist with Active Blended Learning and Online Teaching. This tool integrates with Canvas, providing a quick route for sharing meetings with students. 

The TEL team examined the possible benefits and issues connected with developing a Canvas blogging tool. Blogging is form of personal publishing distinctive from other forms of online publishing  (such as websites) by its reverse chronological order, which enables the writer and reader to move through previous posts . Blogs are being used within education in a number of ways. Three key pedagogical applications at LJMU are:

• Reflective Learning. Supporting students in examining their own learning process which enables the lecturer to understand students learning journey. For example, a student writing a blog entry each week about their experiences on a field trip.
• Authentic Assessment. Creating assessments that allow students to act as practitioners on the border between education and ‘real world’ practice. Examples would include, arts students promoting their work through a website, or sociology students displaying content that could be useful for a general or local audience.
• Professional-based Portfolio. Supporting students to construct and organise a display of their completed achievements. This is common in professional based courses such as nursing and pharmacy.

This Canvas development is now complete; private course journals can now be added to your course.

Induction in 2020 was very different to any previous year. Most activities were online and this lead to a number of developments. An induction area was created for each programme, providing a space for students and staff to meet and collaborate online during the COVID-19 pandemic. These sites are no longer available.

A small scale pilot of Microsoft miracast dongles was conducted with academic staff.

Miracast allows any staff to use their mobile phone, tablet or laptop and ‘screen cast’ these to a projector. The video signal is sent to the computer so that Panopto can capture it as an additional video device. This will allow staff to present while moving around the room, and record that presentation in Panopto.

Please note: There are currently installed in all rooms in Henry Cotton and Tithebarn street.

This was demoed at the e-learning forum by Jack Mullet from Engineering. He demonstrated how he is using a Microsoft Surface and a Miracast Dongle to display and interact within his presentation and software while moving around the room. Jack demonstrated the issues around connecting a MS surface computer to the projector. Jack prefers the MS miracast dongle for this. Once connected he is fully mobile and can draw on slides. He uses MS OneNote to create a bank of calculations that he can create whilst presenting, edit if required and share with his students.

We wanted to see if other staff could engage with this technology in a similar way. 21 miracasts were purchased and given to academics that had a Microsoft surface.

Guidance in using the Miracast

Android Devices

Miracast technology is built into Android operating system versions 4.2 and higher. Some Android 4.2 and 4.3 devices do not support Miracast.  If your Android device supports Miracast, the Screen Mirroring option will be available in the Settings app or in the pull-down/notification menu. Some Samsung devices running Android versions 4.x do not have this option and must use the AllShareCast app available on the Google Play Store.

The TEL team and Registry have developed a Key Information Area within each course. This area is automatically populated, bringing together information from several sources into one area in a consistent manner between courses for students.

This project will develop in two distinct strands. An area or information site where a number of Professional Service Teams will develop an interactive information Canvas site, giving both enrolled and pre-reg students the chance to explore the full range of vital services they provide, without having to open a separate browser. There will also be the opportunity for students to enrol on an end to end open course, learning new skills and developing their knowledge.

This will be an ongoing project that will demonstrate how the team are improving the accessibility of the content as we move towards compliance in September 2020. Read Blog Post: Changes to Accessibility Regulations for information regarding this project. You can find out more on our Accessibility page for staff and further information about the AiDED project.

This development was requested by a number of programme administrators to enable the mapping of student grades into a SIS compatible export file.