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#LearnHack 7 reflections

By Geraldine Foley, on 8 February 2024

On the weekend 26 – 28 January I helped to facilitate and took part in the seventh iteration of #LearnHack.

#LearnHack is a community hackathon organised by an interdisciplinary UCL team. The original event was held in November 2015 in collaboration with UCL Innovation and Enterprise at IDEALondon. The 2024 version was the first time it has been run as a hybrid event. It was held over the weekend of 26-28 January in the School of Management department at Canary Wharf in collaboration with the Faculty of Engineering, Digital Education and UCL Changemakers. Participants came from 12 different UCL departments, alumni, and external guests from Jisc. Everyone was invited to submit project proposals for how to improve UCL based on pre-agreed themes. The themes this year were AI and Assessment with overlap between the two.

Being fairly new to UCL I had not come across this event before, but when I was told about the ethos behind it which is to empower a community of staff, students, researchers and alumni to tackle challenges collaboratively and creatively, it sounded right up my street. I am a big advocate of playful learning and creating a safe space for experimentation and failure. I also liked the interdisciplinary approach which encourages people from all backgrounds to work together and learn from each other.  Anyone with a valid UCL email address can submit a project proposal to be worked on over the weekend and anyone can run a learning session to share their skills or ideas with participants. Everyone is encouraged to attend welcome talks on the Friday evening to hear about the different projects and get to know each other and form teams. Participants have the weekend to work on their chosen project and also take part in learning sessions.

I’m always up for a challenge, so I not only put forward a project proposal and ran a learning session, but I also helped to facilitate the online attendees on the Friday evening and Saturday morning. This meant it was a packed weekend and I got to experience all the different elements of #LearnHack, including joining online on the second day. 

View from UCL School of Management at Canary Wharf.

View from UCL School of Management at Canary Wharf.

The venue was amazing, with great views of London, and the School of Management spaces were perfect for collaboration and hybrid events. The learning sessions were great, I particularly enjoyed learning how to use Lumi and GitHub to create and host H5P activities outside of Moodle so that they can be shared externally. I also found out about the game that ARC had devised for engineers and developers to learn about the issues associated with generative AI where players can help prevent or create an AI Fiasco.

My own session on making a playful AI chatbot was run online but many people joined from the room. The session encouraged people to experiment with different types of chat bots and have a go at creating their own. We managed to create some interesting applications in the short time we had including a bot that accurately answered questions on using Moodle, Zoom and Turnitin. We also explored how a bot’s personality can impact a user’s interactions and perceptions on the accuracy of its responses and had some interesting discussions on some of the ethical issues involved with users uploading material to datasets.

In-between games, food and learning sessions, teams worked on five different projects. I was impressed with all the project teams and the work they managed to produce in such a short space of time. The winning team stood out in particular, as they created a working prototype using ChatGPT. Their project aims to reduce the time that medical science students spend manually searching through articles looking for replicable research. This team now have Student ChangeMaker funding to create an optimiser to filter through biomedical research papers and extract quality quantitative methods. It is hoped that the ‘protocol optimiser’ will streamline workflows for researchers and students to find suitable lab work. I am looking forward to following the development of their project and hopefully they will report back at a changemaker event later in the year.

#LearnHack 7 Feedback on participants ‘best bits’ of the event.

Despite smaller numbers of attendees than hoped, feedback from participants was positive with calls to raise awareness amongst the student population with promotion in freshers’ week and from careers to encourage students to join. Personally, I had a great time, although next time I wouldn’t try to do quite so much and would either stick to being involved in a project or helping to facilitate and run sessions. The Faculty of Engineering has already given the go ahead for #LearnHack8 and we are currently exploring possibilities with running some mini #LearnHack events before then, so watch this space for more details and if you have an idea for a project then get in touch.

The Lecturecast Clinic: Appointments now open

By Katy O Foster, on 6 February 2024

As part of the suite of support for users of Lecturecast available for UCL staff, colleagues from the Educational Media team will now be offering one-to-one consultations via The Lecturecast Clinic.

These one-on-one online appointments can be used to address any queries or topics related to Lecturecast, aiming to assist staff with their teaching needs.

Before booking an appointment, staff are also advised to complete the short online course Getting started with Lecturecast (Moodle) to gain a foundational understanding of Lecturecast.

To book, visit the booking page. New available sessions will be continually added.

Other Lecturecast support resources available:

Moodle Boards Update

By Kerry, on 17 January 2024

Just a quick update for Moodle Board users or former or future users! The issues with staff and students not being able to move posts between Board columns have been resolved in the latest version which is available on Moodle 4.3. A few other improvements have also been made.

If you are not aware, the Board module for Moodle is a plugin that enables a post-it or sticky note type of activity for students (think Padlet but with restricted access on Moodle). This is a collaborative activity where tutors set out a number of columns with optional headings and then students add contributions to the columns. Students do not see who has posted what.

Screenshot of an example Moodle Board

Screenshot of an example Moodle Board

There are several useful pedagogic applications of Moodle Boards including:

  • Icebreakers, introductions
  • Exit tickets – e.g. posting something that is still not clear (“muddy”) or providing general feedback
  • Collaboratively sharing content, resources or links
  • Students’ reflections during group breakouts
  • SWOC analysis for group projects

To see a guide for Moodle Boards, please view our updated mini guide.

Changes to the LTI External Tool Activity Type in Moodle 4.3

By Jason R Norton, on 8 January 2024

Add/Configure LTI External Tool

In Moodle 4.3 the add/configure “LTI External Tool” function is no longer accessed by opening the add Activity/Resource button.

The add/configure option is now located by going to Course navigation > More > LTI External tools.

 

image showing drop down menus in Moodle.

Moodle 4.3 LTI category Level Restrictions

Moodle 4.3 brings the ability to restrict the visibility of LTI tools to any category within Moodle. This enables LTI tools that are faculty or departmentally licensed to be made visible to those specific categories in Moodle. Previously, LTI’s were restricted to either site wide or to specific courses. This could cause frustration in multiple configuration setups across many individual departmental courses. To make use of this function, please contact the Digital Education Support Team via digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk as restrictions are only available to site administrators.

 

Full Details of Moodle 4.3 changes to LTI External Tools can be found on Moodle Docs at the following URL https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/LTI_External_tools  a video covering these changes can also be viewed below.

 

 

 

Upgrade to Moodle 4.3

By Eliot Hoving, on 20 December 2023

UCL Moodle is being updated from Moodle 4.2 to Moodle 4.3 on Thursday January 4th 2024. The Digital Learning Environment team expects minimal disruption. 

Moodle is expected to be unavailable between midnight and 04:00am on Thursday January 4th 2024. 

The upgrade to Moodle 4.3 will bring several benefits including: 

  • streamlined display of course activities including smaller icons, less white space, and a drop down menu for activity completion which should save screen space and improve the user experience on course pages, 
  • the ability to add titles to text and media areas or “labels”, 
  • quicker to access editing menus for visibility and completion criteria to make editing content easier for staff, 
  • and a number of bug fixes and security updates. 

For a quick summary of the changes see Moodle’s new features page. Please note that UCL Moodle doesn’t use Matrix communication or MoodleNet. 

If you have any feedback or questions about the upgrade, please get in touch with the Digital Learning Environment team. 

‘Advanced Moodle Quiz and Question Bank’ self-paced course

By i.niculescu, on 14 December 2023

We are pleased to introduce the ‘Advanced Moodle Quiz and Question Bank’ self-paced course which is now available at https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=40483 

This course is aimed at academics and professional services staff who want to deepen their use of Moodle to create and manage quizzes.

The estimated completion time is 2 to 3 hours. We’ve designed it with flexibility in mind, allowing you to progress through the material in smaller, digestible chunks that fit into your busy schedule.

This is an exciting opportunity to learn how to:

  • Confidently manage the Moodle question bank interface.
  • Organise question banks clearly with categories and tags.
  • Use Moodle’s advanced quiz settings to make your tests more engaging.
  • Analyse quiz results to improve your questions and teaching methods.
  • Build a Moodle quiz that uses advanced features effectively.

The course includes step-by-step guides, links to further resources and knowledge-check quizzes. You also have the option to receive a certificate at the end of the course.

After completing the course, staff can get further support by getting in touch by email via digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

This version of the course will be further developed during term 2 as we receive feedback and input from the UCL community. We will make sure that everyone will be notified when new materials will be added to the course.

P.S: A workshop version of this course will also become available from January 2024. More info to follow!