Further Digital Skills Development dates now available this term

By Jasmin E Mullings, on 15 February 2021

How to book

Please ensure you are using Desktop@UCL or the UCL VPN when booking.

What’s on offer

ISD Digital Skills Development has released new dates for the second half of Term 2 to be offered online via Blackboard Collaborate and Microsoft Teams.

We are offering a wide range of courses covering R, Stata, Microsoft Tools (including Forms, OneNote and Sway) and much more. Highlights this term include:

• Introduction to Teams & Prerequisite course for Advanced workshops;
• Excel Essential Skills programme – Orientation session;
• XMind mind mapping tool – workshop.

This term we are bringing back our popular Software for success and In a Nutshell sessions.

Software for Success sessions are aimed at those starting a new research project, thesis or dissertation and unsure what tools to use for writing up, citation, data analysis etc. These short, lunchtime sessions will help you answer these questions and determine the best way to get up and running.

In a Nutshell sessions highlight a single task in a particular application, such as starting a project in NVivo for example.

We have also adapted our introductory series of Excel Essential Skills Workshops to a self-paced programme with some interactive sessions. Learn more on the Excel Essential Skills Workshops blog post about the new format.

We are also hosting our usual weekly drop-in sessions remotely via Blackboard Collaborate for those who would like individual support on a specific issue. The dates and times of the sessions, along with the direct Blackboard Collaborate link, are available in our ISD Digital Skills Development Moodle course.

Joining a course

Please view the current schedule of courses and workshops below. Once you’ve looked at the schedule and chosen the course(s) you want to book, follow the instructions on the How to enrol on courses blog post to book. Please also view the course description carefully to ensure you have all the information, check for any pre-learning (if applicable) and know how to join the live session(s).

As we will use Blackboard Collaborate for many of our sessions, please watch the 10-minute Participant video guide which explains how to use and what to expect from the BB Collaborate platform.

Once you’ve booked on a course, please visit our Digital Skills Development Moodle course to find any course materials and pre-learning (if applicable). As some courses have pre-learning, please ensure you allow yourself enough time to complete this. Please also download any available course materials in advance of the live session.

We will send out the link to join the session the day before (or Friday if it’s a Monday course) but you can also join directly from MyLearning (see blog post for instructions on how to do this).

Also note that we have added an extra 15 minutes to the start time of our courses to allow participants to test out their audio/connection. The actual course will start promptly on the hour (15 minutes after the advertised time).

More digital skills development opportunities…

Learn online with a vast range of high-quality video-based courses from LinkedIn Learning.  These cover technical skills but also business, personal and creative skills as well.  Visit the UCL LinkedIn Learning page to find out more.

DigiLearn Online is a new library of online videos which covers UCL IT essentials. Topics include remote connectivity, data storage essentials, Microsoft Office 365 applications, and much more. Visit the DigiLearn Online webpage to access the video guides.

Current schedule

Help with Moodle submission marking

By Aurelie, on 8 February 2021

Photo by J. Kelly Brito on Unsplash

Most of your students have now submitted their assignments to Moodle. You may be thinking: ‘Am I ready to mark my submissions?’ or you may wonder where to start.

The Digital education team, having received plenty of questions on how to mark and release marks for Moodle submissions, decided to write this post for you!

Wiki

Did you know Digital Education have plenty of resources already available on our Wiki and recommend visiting these on our Wiki pages? Areas we cover are around anonymous marking, Rubrics, Release feedback and so much more to assist with managing your submissions.

We suggest visiting our UCL Moodle Staff Guides on:

• Moodle Assignment;
• Turnitin Assignment.

Training courses

Digital Education also run online assessment training courses, we suggest to enrol onto the courses listed below:

• Hands on with Moodle Assignment (online training) is a self-paced online course that introduces Moodle assignment tool for collecting submissions, marking and returning feedback.
• Hands on with Turnitin Assignment (online training) is a self-paced online course that introduces the Turnitin assignment tool for collecting submissions, marking and returning feedback.

Learning Technology Lead

Alternatively we suggest contacting your Faculty Learning Technology Lead or email the Digital Education team digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

Happy marking!

Need help with your digital skills? Just drop in!

By Caroline Norris, on 29 January 2021

During term time, ISD Digital Skills Development run a weekly drop in session where you can get help with your digital skills. As the name suggests there is no need to book, although you may have to wait your turn if there are other people ahead of you.

Since March last year these sessions have been run in Moodle using Blackboard Collaborate. Just connect to the Blackboard Collaborate session at the appropriate time and wait for one of our team to come and take you to a breakout room where you can get individual support.

We can help with a variety of queries on how to use a whole range of software including, but not limited to, the content of our training courses (the courses prefixed with DSD). For example, you might wish to know how to use a particular function in Excel or have a formatting issue in Word. We can also advise on the best software to use for a particular purpose.

More details about what we can and can’t help with can be found on the Digital Skills Drop In pages. Note that we can’t help if your computer or its software are not working properly, for this you will need to contact ISD IT Services.

Develop your digital skills in 2021 – new dates released

By Jasmin E Mullings, on 12 January 2021

How to book

Please ensure you are using Desktop@UCL or the UCL VPN when booking.

What’s on offer

ISD Digital Skills Development has released new dates for the first half of Term 2 to be offered online via Blackboard Collaborate and Microsoft Teams.

We are offering a wide range of courses covering R, Stata, Microsoft Tools (including Forms, OneNote and Sway) and much more. Highlights this term include:

• Three brand new Microsoft Teams Workshops;
• Inspiration: Mind mapping tool – an overview demo;
• Introduction to Stop Motion Animation.

This term we are bringing back our popular Software for success and In a Nutshell sessions, beginning with ‘Software for success: Choosing data analysis and statistical tools’ and ‘In a Nutshell: Starting an Nvivo Project’.

Software for Success sessions are aimed at those starting a new research project, thesis or dissertation and unsure what tools to use for writing up, citation, data analysis etc. These short, lunchtime sessions will help you answer these questions and determine the best way to get up and running.

In a Nutshell sessions highlight a single task in a particular application, such as starting a project in NVivo for example.

We have also adapted our introductory series of Excel Essential Skills Workshops to a self-paced programme with some interactive sessions. Learn more on the Excel Essential Skills Workshops blog post about the new format.

We are also hosting our usual weekly drop-in sessions remotely via Blackboard Collaborate for those who would like individual support on a specific issue. The dates and times of the sessions, along with the direct Blackboard Collaborate link, are available in our ISD Digital Skills Development Moodle course.

Joining a course

Please view the current schedule of courses and workshops below. Once you’ve looked at the schedule and chosen the course(s) you want to book, follow the instructions on the How to enrol on courses blog post to book. Please also view the course description carefully to ensure you have all the information, check for any pre-learning (if applicable) and know how to join the live session(s).

As we will use Blackboard Collaborate for many of our sessions, please watch the 10-minute Participant video guide which explains how to use and what to expect from the BB Collaborate platform.

Once you’ve booked on a course, please visit our Digital Skills Development Moodle course to find any course materials and pre-learning (if applicable). As some courses have pre-learning, please ensure you allow yourself enough time to complete this. Please also download any available course materials in advance of the live session. Not all the new courses will have pre-learning and course materials available yet, however, we will endeavour to make them available by Monday 18th January. If materials will be made available later for any particular course, a date will be given for when they are available.

We will send out the link to join the session the day before (or morning before if it’s a Monday course) but you can also join directly from MyLearning (see blog post for instructions on how to do this).

Also note that we have added an extra 15 minutes to the start time of our courses to allow participants to test out their audio/connection. The actual course will start promptly on the hour (15 minutes after the advertised time).

More digital skills development opportunities…

Learn online with a vast range of high-quality video-based courses from LinkedIn Learning.  These cover technical skills but also business, personal and creative skills as well.  Visit the UCL LinkedIn Learning page to find out more.

DigiLearn Online is a new library of online videos which covers UCL IT essentials. Topics include remote connectivity, data storage essentials, Microsoft Office 365 applications, and much more. Visit the DigiLearn Online webpage to access the video guides.

Current schedule

Call for participants: research study investigating student advisor use of learning analytics dashboards

By Samantha Ahern, on 6 January 2021

Participants required for the following study: Uses of learning analytics dashboards / visualisations in student advising

This study has been approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee, study: 8673/006 and is registered under reference No Z6364106/2020/11/19 social research in line with UCL’s Data Protection Policy.

Learning analytics implementations are predominantly designed for use by those supporting students there is a need to connect the literature on advising and tutoring with any research into the impacts of learning analytics on student behaviour. In terms of both learning behaviours and welfare (wellbeing and mental health).

This research aims to provide an overview of what is currently perceived as best practice in advising and tutoring. In this context, we will critically review the current literature on dashboard/visualisation design and investigate their use by student advisors with the aim of identifying any synergies and conflicts that exist. With the aim of providing recommendations on how to improve dashboard / visualisation design.
The study is looking to recruit HEI Student Advisors (incl. Personal tutors) to share their experiences of using Learning Analytics dashboards/ visualisations. This will initially be via an online survey.

For details of the study please view the study’s Information Sheet.

If you would like to participate in the study please visit the online survey.

The project lead is: Samantha Ahern, Digital Education – Information Services Division

#LearnHack 6.0 – Reflections

By Janina Dewitz, on 16 December 2020

Like so many things in 2020, #LearnHack, our UCL community hackathon, also went virtual for the first time this year. Instead of running over an intense weekend, we stretched our usual structure across an entire week to accommodate people’s schedules, participants in different time zones and potential tech problems. As usual, the event attracted participants from across the institution (some statistics here). Unusually, we had more staff participants on this round than ever before. Even more unusually for #LearnHack, a lot of the staff came from Professional Services.

In a year of distance, a motto of “Building Bridges” for #LearnHack 6.0 seemed appropriate. We had three broad themes:

• Teaching & Learning
• Mental Health & Well-being
• Community & Connections

A total of nine project proposals were submitted across all three themes. Not all projects managed to attract enough interest to form a team. Although a number of projects didn’t make it over the project submission line, the topics nonetheless generated conversations and connections that might not have taken place without the event. As always we hope that these connections, conversations and projects will continue in some form long beyond this edition of #LearnHack.

Projects that made the submission deadline

Coffee Roulette and Virtual Quad combined forces as there was significant overlap in aims and sharing skills and resources made more sense than having two individual much smaller teams. Virtual Quad/Coffee Roulette spent a morning working in Miro, pulling together research, a long list of desirable features and potential solutions. Next, we managed to get a survey out to sanity check our idea of what such an environment should look like. The survey received 43 responses in total and revealed that we were largely on the right track with our ideas (details here).

The overall project was far too ambitious to come up with any actual product in the very short time we had, however, the conversation about virtual social spaces is ongoing and we’re happy to talk to anyone who’d like to know more or get involved.

The Winning Team

Games Workshop proposed by Ellie Bates, School of Pharmacy scooped the top spot in our community vote. The team managed to develop an actual game: “Click University”

Here are some #LearnHack reflections from Kitty:

Why did you join?

I’d been wanting to participate in a hackathon for a while, and LearnHack’s emphasis on inclusivity and being open to people from all backgrounds with any skill set (not just those technically-minded), to both staff and students, really appealed to me. I also liked the sound of the themes and projects that had been proposed, and that it was UCL-based – I’d be able to see any positive change we might make as a result of the hack right here, in this very community.

What was your team/project?

My team was the Games Workshop team, which aimed to use a games format to address some of the common issues we’d all faced this challenging year, when we’ve had to transition large parts of our life online. Issues like what it feels like to be a faceless name joining a lecture full of other faceless names; not knowing whether it’s better to turn your camera on/off; whether to contribute via the chat; how to make friends when there are no face-to-face social opportunities. Of course, we couldn’t solve these complex problems over one week – but what we did do was create a game that presented optimistic online futures and modelled scenarios in this strange new online world, which we hoped would help players feel less alone and more empathetic towards each other.

How did you find the week?

To be honest, the start of the week was a bit awkward as it was my first time joining a hack and I had no idea what I was doing or what was meant to be happening. But once I met my team and we started drafting ideas and talking about our project, time just flew by. My teammates and I met every day to discuss our progress and work on our game.

It was really fun, not least because we got to play games (for research purposes, of course!). By the end of the week, my team had a small but functional game that we hope to be able to develop further next year. I’ve also personally learned a lot, and not just about games. I’ve learned about practical problem-solving, been reminded of how useful it can be to work through ideas with others, and learned how to use a bunch of new software tools that I’d never heard of before, which I have since continued to explore and use. I may even work on something related for my final year Master’s project.

If I had anything to say to anyone thinking about joining a future LearnHack, it would be: why not? It’s a great way to do something out of the ordinary.

– Kitty Ho
Quality Assurance and Governance Officer, Joint Faculties, UCL
Final Year MSc Computer Science (Part-time), Birkbeck

Thanks to everyone who took part in this year’s event. Special thanks to Paul Bailey from Jisc for being our independent project judge.