The ALT CPD programme of events is a series of regular CPD webinars that are free to attend for ALT Members.  

You can watch recordings of previous events in our Youtube Playlist, checkout last years webinars here.

CPD Webinar Series 2024

Throughout 2024 we plan to hold regular CPD webinars that are free to attend for ALT Members. We aim to make these webinars as practical as possible, giving participants hands-on experience of the topic covered. The schedule of webinars for 2024 is below:

CPD Webinar Series 2024: Supporting climate action through digital education

Monday 18 March 2024, 12.30pm - 1.30pm

This CPD webinar will be led by Leigh-Anne Perryman from the Open University. 

A new free course from The Open University is supporting educators from multiple sectors and subjects around the world in addressing the climate crisis in their teaching, responding to teachers’ widespread calls for training that will help meet their students’ demands for relevant and effective climate education.

The 16-hour, OpenLearn-based course - Supporting climate action through digital education - is unique in focusing on multiple subject areas – including science, visual art, literature, geography and health. There’s an emphasis on supporting young people in participating in climate action, and in engaging with local communities to tackle climate crisis-related problems. The course aims to support educators in schools, colleges and universities in designing and delivering online, blended and technology-enhanced teaching and learning through a pedagogy of hope and care that supports students of all ages in understanding the causes and impacts of environmental collapse and addressing them through global citizenship, individual and collective direct action, and democratic participation. Completing the course gains participants a digital badge.

In this webinar, course leader Dr Leigh-Anne Perryman, Associate Director (Curriculum) at The Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology, will give an overview of the course and share how it was created by a team of passionate educators working across disciplinary boundaries.

A discussion will follow, exploring how teaching in different subject areas can help support students in climate change mitigation and adaptation, and how collaboration across disciplines and across generations is essential. 

CPD Webinar Series 2024: Copyright Essentials for Learning Technologists

Tuesday 30 April 2024, 12pm - 1pm

This CPD workshop is run by Chris Morrison and Jane Secker who are the Co-Chairs of the Copyright and Online Learning ALT Special Interest Group. They established the group and the Copyright and Online Learning webinar series in 2020 and have run over 60 events to support those in the education sector. In 2023 they were highly commended by ALT for Digital Leadership. Their webinars have covered a wide range of topics including:

• understanding copyright exceptions and educational licences,
• copyright and audiovisual resources,
• finding and using open educational resources,
• accessibility and copyright,
• copyright and Generative AI,
• And lots more!

In this hour-long session, they will distil the key aspects of copyright you need to know when working in the field of learning technology. Chris and Jane believe that misconceptions about copyright and the fear of getting it wrong make copyright a much bigger issue than it needs to be. As a result, they are on a mission to make learning about copyright, fun engaging and empowering. Come along with all those
questions about copyright you were afraid to ask and be prepared to leave with a large slice of copyright literacy! Once you see the light, copyright will no longer be a barrier to you and perhaps become your new found super power!

CPD Webinar Series 2024 - Moving Away from SCORM: Using Metrics that Matter

Thursday 30 May 2024 2pm - 3pm 

Description: This CPD workshop presented by Heidi Kirby talks about practical ways your organization can move away from relying on SCORM. We'll discuss the following:

• How SCORM fails to measure up to the data of modern content creation tools
• Why modern businesses don't care about completions and number of hours trained
• The benefits of replacing your authoring tool with a more robust tech stack
• How to integrate your tech stack so that you can collect meaningful metrics the business values

CPD Webinar Series 2024: Adoption of Graduate Attributes through the use of Badges

Tuesday 25 June 2024, 1-2pm

Presented by Daniel Villalba Algas. Most universities have been working on identifying skills that their graduates will achieve after graduation, regardless of the programme of studies. Some examples of those skills are teamwork, communication, critical thinking, etc. Employers have identified those skills as essential in the current job market.

Those skills are typically called graduate attributes, and in the case of The University of Sheffield, there are 12 graduate attributes and 3 sub-attributes for each, making the total sum of 36 skills.

One of the problems that we have discovered is that because of the number of attributes and how some attributes are described, they are difficult to identify, and students don’t know when they have achieved them. In this practical session, I will demonstrate how self-made badges have been used to make students and staff aware of those graduate attributes and identify what activities are working towards achieving them.

This session is aimed at Learning technologists, Course Designers and Employability Managers who seek ways to promote those graduate attributes among their students through the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). This project is an example of the use of internal badges and how those can evolve so they become a tool that can help students outside the university environment; it is also a case study where the VLE has been used to increase student engagement and add extra functionality.

CPD Webinar Series 2024: Co-Creating the Future: Empowering Students in Technology-Enhanced Learning

Thursday 29 July 2024, 1pm - 2pm 

This interactive webinar will explore the exciting potential of student-staff partnerships in designing technology-rich learning experiences. Offering critical insights into various pedagogical partnership projects from the facilitators, the session will showcase how co-creation could ignite student engagement and foster a culture of innovation in higher education.

Grounded in established theories of student engagement and co-creation models, the webinar will provide a strong theoretical ground to establish the significance of fostering meaningful student collaboration within co-curricular and extra-curricular initiatives. Participants will engage in reflective activities designed to explore practical strategies for integrating student input into their own practices, considering their specific professional contexts. This CPD session is expected to equip attendees with actionable insights and practical strategies to utilise the power of digital tools for collaborative learning and to effectively involve students in co-creating technology-enhanced learning experiences, fostering a dynamic partnership that empowers both educators and learners.

Speakers: Nurun Nahar & Sue Beckingham 

ALT Members can register for any of our free CPD events over on our events page. More will be added in the coming months. If you’d like to express an interest in running a session for the 2025 CPD programme of events, please email cpd@alt.ac.uk to express an interest.