Full message available at: Friday 16 August - Deadline to register for ALT’s Annual Conference 2019 and FREE EMBED Pre-Conference Workshop

  This week is your final chance to register for ALT’s Annual Conference 2019, taking place 3-5 September 2019, in Edinburgh, UK. Registration closes: Friday 16 August 2019 at Midnight (BST). Discounted rates for ALT Members are still available https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2019/registration/. The conference provides an international platform for Learning Technology research, practice and policy work from […]

Full message available at: Weekly News Digest - Issue 517, 12 August 2019

A post by Dr Monica Chavez Munoz, Educational Developer (TEL), Centre for Innovation in Education, University of Liverpool. @drmonicachavez

88% of change initiatives fail. What are the factors that make change difficult or a failure? There are people and process dynamics.  I will talk about my experience of organising a  TELFest in my presentation during the ALT conference in Edinburgh.

TRANSCRIPT

1-The Mexican Catholic meaning of the  piñata represents the struggle between man, temptation and sin. In my case, the piñata  represents TELFest as the technology adoption strategy which brings all its players into a one big fiesta:

2-The struggle between the institutional leadership, the community of practice, and the TEL team as the organiser of TELFest. 

3-We got the institutional leadership as the entity that holds, swings and sponsors the piñata, without their support, vision and commitment, TELFest would not be possible as their role in change management is key for the successful adoption of technology in higher education. 

4-Then there is the community of practice attending the ‘party’.  They stand and watch, racing thoughts about attending an event that advocates the adoption of technology in teaching and learning.  

5-The community members share their experience in TEL by putting their contribution in the piñata ( the sweets!). 

6-The TEL team is the entity who brings and hits the piñata: TELFest is like a piñata, you don’t know exactly what you are going to get and yet you must face it with a good attitude and skill. There is lots of good practice inside, you have found the perfect vehicle to instigate change and yet, the successful outcome is uncertain. 

88% of change initiatives fail. What are the factors that make change difficult or a failure? There are people and process dynamics.  I will talk about my experience of organising a  TELFest in my presentation during the ALT conference in Edinburgh. See you there!

Dr Monica Chavez Munoz, Educational Developer (TEL), Centre for Innovation in Education, University of Liverpool. @drmonicachavez 

If you enjoyed reading this article we invite you to join the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) as an individual member, and to encourage your own organisation to join ALT as an organisational or sponsoring member.

Post by James Slack from Edinburgh University

Apologies for the title but I used up all my imaginative title mojo for our recently accepted ALT Conference Submission Out of this World: Jupyter notebooks and Noteable at the University of Edinburgh.

Now, on to business…

There’s a very good chance that you may have heard of Jupyter before. If you’re interested in supporting digital skills, data literacy or computational teaching then it’s probably leaked into the periphery of your vision at some point. So, let’s take a step back and try to start on solid ground:

What are Jupyter notebooks?

Jupyter is an open source web application that allows you to create live editable documents – notebooks – that allow you to run code whilst also containing text, data tables and other rich media items such as images and videos. For instructors, this means you can give context alongside your code exercises or create distance learning materials. This also allows students to run, edit and experiment with code without having to open an intimidating Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It’s difficult to get your head around without seeing it:

Adapted from “Exploratory computing with Python” by Mark Bakker. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Jupyter notebooks are broken up into two types of cells: Text cells and code cells. Text cells use a markdown notation to allow basic formatting and allow you to add structure and context alongside your code to create a ‘computational narrative’. The second type of cell is the code cell, the programming language is set by the kernel, this interprets the code and returns the output within the notebook. Standard Jupyter notebooks support Julia, Python and R (hence the name JUlia PYThon R) but there is now support for over 100 additional kernels to fulfil your wildest dreams. You can ‘Run’ these code cells and then see the output within the notebooks as shown above; the order in which these cells are run is recorded to make it easier to keep track of the run order. It’s not just limited to simple Print commands to output text results: You can create graphs, visualisations, work with data tables, manipulate images, and the list goes on. Really the best way to start getting your head around what Jupyter can be used for is to head to the ‘Gallery of Interesting Jupyter notebooks’

Jupyter notebooks were originally created as a platform for reproducible research, being able to work with large data sets remotely, record computational analysis (and funky graphs) and then share this with other researchers who could both see your working and validate your results. Very quickly, these were picked up as an excellent educational tool. The ability to create a narrative to guide students through worked examples, giving them the opportunity to interact with code, quickly editing and re-running code and being able to break up your programming into easily defined ‘chunks’ (cells) all helps to lower the barrier to engagement.

It also helps that Jupyter looks remarkably different from a traditional IDE, which can itself act as a barrier to working with code for beginners (I include myself in this bracket: The ‘hackertype’ interface makes me sweat).

The real benefit of Jupyter is realised when using Jupyterhub, which is a multi-user hosted instance. This allows you to set pre-configured workspaces that students can access without the need to install anything beforehand. You can define the programming language that students will use and pre-load packages and libraries to free up class time. Both you and the students are working within a copy of the same environment which makes leading a class of 80 much easier.

Jupyter at the University of Edinburgh

This is what we’ve embraced at the University of Edinburgh: the Noteable service is a version of Jupyterhub with a selection of instances that suit a variety of teaching needs. Instructors create material in Noteable and then share this with their students, knowing that the document will work for them because they are running in an environment with all the associated dependencies and without any prerequisites. This method works incredibly well in a variety of situations: Distance learning where students have a differing setup; lab sessions where you want to work through examples together; or one-off workshop sessions where you want to maximise the time you have available. The medium also lends itself well to creating OER materials or activities like this Christmas example *cough*shameless plug *cough*.

The Noteable service at the University of Edinburgh has been in a pilot phase for the past two academic semesters and will be transitioning to a full service in September 2019 based on its success. Across the year, over 1,000 students have used the service across a variety of courses and the feedback has been great – all the courses will be using it again next academic year. There were already existing pockets of Jupyter users scattered across the University, with some schools managing their own Jupyterhubs or individual academics using Jupyter installed on personal machines. Having a centralised service means that all schools can use Jupyter, not just those fortunate enough to have internal support. This is exemplified by the fact that the students using the service are spread across six different schools including the College of Art, School of Biological Sciences, School of Political Science and of course Informatics (our Computer Science).  

The provision of Jupyter extends outside of the classroom as well. Many students state how they use Noteable to explore other concepts on their own, working on small side-projects or using other available environments to try out something new in another programming language.

The next step in this process is to start making it easier for people to adopt Jupyter into their teaching by creating an extended set of support materials, for both staff and students. So far, we have been able to work with existing Jupyter devotees, but the real growth will come from converting existing courses or helping to provision new courses, where appropriate. All these materials will be openly shared for other institutions to use and to help lower the barrier for adoption in higher education.

The Noteable service itself can also be used by other institutions to further remove barriers to adoption. If you would like to arrange a trial/demo, then get in touch using the contact form.

This leads me on to my final point, something that I can’t help but mention when talking about Jupyter:

Open Source, Open Community

Jupyter is open source, which has certainly helped with its proliferation, but the real driving force has been the community that has built up around Jupyter. There are countless examples of people working on their own projects or collaborating to build Jupyter into something larger: the Zero to Jupyterhub project makes it much easier to set up your own hub, the nbgrader extension allows you to create and grade assignments, RISE allows you to turn your live notebooks into a slidedeck. Project Jupyter has been very active in encouraging all these activities, recently helping to fund a series of community events on various themes, one of which led to the creation of a Teaching and Learning with Jupyter ‘book’ which is a great overview of Jupyter in education.

I could go on but I’m already past an acceptable length for an introductory blog post. We’re keen to be involved in this which is why we will be releasing our help guides and contributing our work on nbgrader back to the community, and we’re also hosting events like our Jupyter Community nbgrader Hackathon. You can find out more about this on the Project Jupyter Blog.

I could go on but I’m already past an acceptable length for an introductory blog post. We’re keen to be involved in this which is why we will be releasing our help guides and contributing our work back to the community, we also recently hosted a Jupyter Community Workshop event. This was part of the Community Workshop series that was supported by Project Jupyter and funded by Bloomberg, you can read a bit more about this on the Project Jupyter blog.

This workshop had two parts, firstly a hackathon; getting a lot of people together to work on adding functionality to nbgrader but also to highlight the use of Jupyter in education by getting some of the hackathon attendees and awesome local Jupyter gurus to give talks. The hackathon was a great success and the new features are being bundled into the next release of nbgrader. The afternoon of talks was the real party, we were fortunate to have a great line-up of speakers, thankfully you don’t have to miss out as we made sure to record and publish all the talks from the afternoon. You can use view all of the talks on the following open playlist, these talks include a good overview of how Jupyter can be used but also a few tips from the pros to help you make the most of the tools available. 

I’m James Slack, I’m currently a Service Manager for the University of Edinburgh looking after various services including the Noteable service. Before moving to Edinburgh, I was a service manager for the University Sheffield’s Lecture Capture service, so this was quite a side-ways move. For the past year I have been working to introduce the Noteable service to an eager internal audience but am now keen to engage with other Universities using Jupyter to try to promote the platform for use in education. I’m always happy to talk to people about the work myself and the team from EDINA have done and how Jupyter can be used in teaching. Feel free to contact me at james.slack@ed.ac.uk

If you enjoyed reading this article we invite you to join the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) as an individual member, and to encourage your own organisation to join ALT as an organisational or sponsoring member

This year, we give a warm welcome to three inspiring keynote speakers at the Annual Conference 2019. Over the three day conference, each keynote speaker will introduce the day with an inspiring hour-long keynote based on this year’s Conference themes: Student data and learning analytics Creativity across the curriculum Critical frames of reference Learning Technology […]

Screenshot from https://www.nmis-skills.org/home/development-team

A post by Joe Wilson and Lewis Ross, NMIS skills.

NMIS-Skills is part of the wider National Manufacturing Institute Scotland project. NMIS aims to “to be a distributed  industry-led international centre of manufacturing expertise. Industry, research and the public sector will work together to transform skills, productivity and innovation”.

A barrier to engaging and upskilling the workforce was the lack of digital skills of trainers and lecturers working across the manufacturing industry  specifically in relation to content creation, collaboration and sharing. They also lack a virtual space beyond institutional IT systems to co-ordinate the sharing of materials. 

To tackle this problem Skills Development Scotland (SDS) put out a tender for the delivery of digital skills training and the building of a community of practice. City of Glasgow College (CoGC) put in a bid and was awarded the contract based upon an innovative model. 

Using an instance of G Suite, with a Google Site at its heart, a resource could be created at a very low cost that could be handed over to a team of administrators/ambassadors from across the educational community at the end of the initiation phase.

To model best practice around collaboration and co-creation, all of the core materials would be open and easily repurposable through a CC BY 4.0 license and delivered using technology that could be accessed by all, including commercial organisations. The principles were designed to be in line with those of  Open Scotland and the Open Scotland Declaration. As the project got underway the Scottish Funding Council published their digital strategy to 2021 enshrining these principles too.

The digital skills interventions were chosen via analysis of the new Professional Standards for Lecturers in Scotland’s Colleges and Jisc’s Building Digital Capabilities framework. The resources were built around repurposed materials from a unique PDA in Technology for Enhanced Learning and Teaching delivered by the CoGC and mapped to the CPD frameworks around digital delivery. The focus on some simple interventions relevant to all staff in FE , HE and work-based learning. Additionally, the site would provide a deep set of links to free training opportunities from a range of providers around the themed interventions.

Technology Used

All technologies used for the project were free to use or open resources, with the exception of  the registration of our domain name, nmis-skills.org. The learning content was created in an instance of G Suite, which is free for educational institutions and charities. 

The slide decks for the webinars were created using templates from Slides Carnival, which are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Icons were sourced from Flaticon under a CC BY 3.0 license. 

Images were mainly sourced from Unsplash, which feature a licence that allows the use of works and creation of derivative works without the need to ask permission of or crediting the original author. The only caveat was that images could not be used to create a similar or competing service to Unsplash.

Zoom was chosen as our webinar platform for three reasons. Firstly, it ran directly from a downloaded .exe file or a browser plugin, so could work within most institutions’ IT infrastructures. Secondly, the team already had experience of using the platform. Thirdly, Zoom had a free version where meetings can only be 40 mins long. However this was long enough for a chink of learning content and we turned this restriction into the planned length of our webinars.

Webinars were recorded using Zoom’s built in tools and then uploaded to a dedicated YouTube channel so that viewers could watch at a time of their choosing. 

Lessons Learned

Our open methodology is sound and easy to adopt. By working closely with Google we have built a resource that is easily co-owned and we have broken out of the institutional silos that can easily restrict developments of this type. As our G Suite is outwith the control of an institutional IT department, we have full control of creating user accounts and hosting content. This gives us the flexibility required to work with colleagues across a wide range of institutions while maintaining regulatory control. The community aspect comes with detailed guidance.

In addition, open practice was central to our project bid. This ensured that everyone was onboard from the start and that open methodologies did not need to be retrofitted, with all the negotiations this usually requires.

Our model of creating downloadable Google Slide decks and YouTube videos of the webinars is a useful method for disseminating information. We have seen that the outputs are used more asynchronously, as we had relatively few live participants in our webinars compared to views of YouTube videos.

Our method of short chunks of learning is perhaps more of a viable alternative for vocational learning than the lecture capture model currently being adopted in many Universities. Rather than hour long monologues, our model encourages short interactive presentations that better suit vocational learning.

The outputs can be easily managed: the platforms adopted are free , the technical skill needed to set to set up, record and archive are relatively low. 

Engagement remains the thorny challenge. It is hard to reach the specialist practitioners who will eventually use the forthcoming resources from Edinburgh University and other NMIS partners. 

The project has attracted a lot of interest from other organisations who have a cross institutional constituency and need a more sophisticated approach around collaboration and the sharing of learning materials. We are certain more initiatives of this kind will develop.

Written by Joe Wilson @joecar and Lewis Ross, Lewis.Ross@cityofglasgowcollege.ac.uk.

Joe Wilson

Lewis Ross

If you enjoyed reading this article we invite you to join the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) as an individual member, and to encourage your own organisation to join ALT as an organisational or sponsoring member.

The ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Awards 2019 will take place on 4 September, at the University of Edinburgh.  Voting is now open for the Community Choice Award. Find out who the finalists are and cast your vote. ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Awards 2019 are proudly sponsored by Edina. Established in 2007, […]

Full message available at: Weekly News Digest - Issue 516, 5 August 2019

Excitement is building for the ALT Annual Conference 2019, which is now just a month away. Hosted in the city of Edinburgh and spread across three days, the event is seeking to confront and challenge established assumptions, approaches and accepted truths in relation to key dimensions of digital education, focusing on the following conference themes:

 

This time I am delighted to be talking to Sue Beckingham, National Teaching Fellow and Principal Lecturer in Business Information Systems and Technology, LTA Lead in Computing at Sheffield Hallam University as well as one of the highly anticipated keynote speakers of the 2019 ALT Annual Conference, taking place 3-5 September, in Edinburgh.

Maren: Tell us about what you are currently working on?

Sue: The last month has been consumed with marking, moderating, preparing for the exam boards and writing module reviews. It was good to take a few days out to attend SOLSTICE Conference at Edge Hill in my role as Visiting Fellow where I co-ran a session with my colleague Prof Peter Hartley on ‘Communication revisited – new perspectives and their implications for our practice in learning and teaching.’ This gave us an opportunity to shine a light on the use of new technology for learning and how we could communicate with students, for example through chatbots to provide 24/7 answers to FAQs and hologram lectures to bring in speakers from afar! We are also working together on new editions of two books Peter has written ‘Success in Groupwork’ and ‘Interpersonal Communication’, to bring in the use of technology and social media. Technology wise I am re-exploring the use of augmented reality and how this can be used to evoke curious learning and animated videos to share information.

My interest in the use of social media for learning is always at the forefront and I love having the opportunity to develop student partnerships. The SMASH (Social media for Academic Studies at Hallam) team formed in in 2016 will be looking to share an open web site of resources and activities they have co-created. This project has resulted in a collection of opportunities for the students to present their work at conferences and a recent publication co-written titled ‘A SMASHing approach for developing staff and student digital capabilities within a Community of Practice‘ in the Journal of Educational Innovation. I’m excited to see how the students take this project forward in the new academic year.  

I am involved in the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium and about to take on a new role to co-facilitate the social media channels. This is an annual conference for women students of computing and related subjects, which provides a forum for networking, sharing of ideas, and advice from academia and industry about careers in computing. As a female working in a department that is predominantly male I truly value opportunities to network and this event brings many women together, both staff and students.

Last but not least is #SocMedHE19, an annual conference with a Social Media for Learning in Higher Ed focus. A seed planted in the summer of 2015 resulted in the inaugural event that December at Sheffield Hallam University with Eric Stoller as keynote, co-facilitated with Helen Rodger and Alison Purvis. After three iterations the baton was passed to the wonderful Rachel Challen at NTU and this December the brilliant Dawne Bell and Sarah Wright at Edge Hill University will lead the event. I’ve continued to contribute as part of the organising team as well as presenting with my students. Do take a look at and consider submitting a proposal. https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/clt/conference-2014/social-media-for-learning-in-higher-education-conference-2019/

Maren: What influences your work? 

Sue: The NSS, TEF, and more recently the Augar Review all contribute to an ongoing analysis of the way we work; as do restructures, cuts in budgets and new policies. Whilst not an advocate of incessant change, I do see the value of new interventions that will enhance the student experience and be both inclusive and accessible. Taking time to step back and reflect on my own practice is important; and I frequently seek inspiration from my peers through the use of social media and my international network which extends way beyond my institution

Maren: Current recommended reading?  

Sue: Hot off the press and highly recommended is Social Media in Higher Education: Case Studies, Reflections and Analysis edited by Chris Rowell and is available to read online for free! The book is split into seven sections: professional practice, teaching and learning, leadership, building networks, innovation and finally the personal journey; so has something for everybody. I contributed one of the chapters which is about developing a professional online presence and effective network.

Maren: How do you make your to-do lists.. analogue or digital or both? 

Sue: Both! I use the notes app on my phone and when working collaboratively with colleagues we have made use of Google Docs, Trello and Slack. I’ve tried a few other apps like Todoist but frankly I still like post-its and my notebook! That said I am going to revisit OneNote next academic year, having seen a colleague use this.

Maren: On work travel, you are never without..? 

Sue: Tech wise I’m never ever without 

• my iPhone, charger, and for back up my ‘recharge’ in case there is nowhere to plug my charger cable in to
• a notebook and pencil
• my Kindle if there is time to read. 
• I may also take a laptop to work on (and of course its charger).

Maren: Which learning technology makes the biggest difference to your work (and why)? 

Sue: It is without doubt my smart phone and access to the social media spaces that I use to connect with my learning network. Yes I can also use my iPad, laptop or desktop, but it is my phone that gives me the connection whilst commuting to work, in between meetings, and other snatches of time. Every day I learn something new that is valuable and relevant to my practice from so many wonderful educators who openly share their practice via social media.

Maren: Who are your learning technology heroes?

Sue: Ooh where do I start? The #altc community as they openly share so much. On Wednesdays at 8pm I am constantly learning from the #LTHEchat community both the guests that lead a topic relating to learning and teaching and those who engage in the conversations. Thinking about individuals, there are so many… I couldn’t call out just a few. That’s the fantastic thing about this community – everyone has the opportunity to contribute and be a learning technology hero through sharing their perspectives on learning and teaching and how technology can support this.

Maren: If you had learning technology superpowers for a day, what would you change? 

Sue: From a practical perspective I would deploy free and secure WiFi everywhere! 

I’d like to relook at the IT spend on PCs and provide all students with an “intelligent device”, which would become their personalised, interconnected virtual learning hub. This would hold a profile of their academic and personal life, syncing all their work to their tutors, connecting to university services with options to communicate in text chat or voice, and linking to their extra-curricular life and their peers. Students would also submit work and get feedback on this device and have a space to reflect using multimedia that feeds into a professional development portfolio. These are not new concepts but currently are fragmented as they happen in different spaces. I expanded on this at the Jisc Network Conference, where I was invited to join a panel to talk about what a university would look like in 2030. I told some of my MSc students about this idea and one contacted me with a view of investigating this as a PhD. Watch this space!

Maren: What are your favourite hashtags?  

Sue: I’d say #altc which is a constant stream of so many interesting conversations relating to learning technologies and #LTHEchat which is a weekly conversation on all things learning and teaching. Each week there is a different theme and a guest leading the conversation with questions. If you’ve not come across this do follow @LTHEchat and take a look at https://lthechat.com.

Maren: What’s the best way for someone to learn more about what you do?  

Sue: I’d suggest follow me on Twitter (@suebecks) or via one of two blogs I write. One is about Social Media for Learning; the other is my own musings about my own learning journey and the work that I do. I also have a site called the The Project Based Learning Toolkit that I created as an output from a project.

Maren: Thank you, Sue, I really excited to see your upcoming keynote #altc!

If you enjoyed reading this article we invite you to join the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) as an individual member, and to encourage your own organisation to join ALT as an organisational or sponsoring member.

A big thank you and a warm welcome to all our exhibitors for the 2019 ALT Annual Conference: Association for Learning Technology, Blackboard, Immersive VR Education, Jisc, Keylinks, Myshowcase.me,  Rapidmooc, RM Results, Surpass by BTL, Turning Technologies, Turnitin, Urkund, and Vevox. We are sure you will enjoy meeting them in Edinburgh. The exhibition hall will […]

A post by Stuart Allan, Director of Online Learning, Edinburgh Business School (Heriot-Watt University), @OpenPlanStuart

Reports of ‘the death of the VLE’ have been circulating for long enough for it to become a kitsch subject in ALT circles. But the institutional VLE – whether as a monolithic system or a central column into which other technologies are integrated – remains a ubiquitous presence in most universities.

Meanwhile, in spite of bold proclamations (mainly from tech firms) about how ‘technology is increasing access to quality education on an unprecedented scale’ (edX), significant global digital divides remain. Online courses are still accessed mainly by the privileged few who already have good access to education and technology, and a drive towards interactivity and synchronicity arguably exacerbates the impact of this inequality (Hillier 2018; Sheail 2018).

When they acquire and adopt digital technologies, are universities doing enough to consider the needs of students who have low-quality or intermittent internet access, or are less able to access synchronous classes due to geographical, technological or financial constraints? Many of the 9,000 students at my institution (Edinburgh Business School, EBS) could be described in this way; around one in four live in Africa.

So when we began thinking about a new environment for digital education in 2017, reflecting on global digital divides was a key concern. The first step was to conduct research with our global student body to gather feedback on their prior experiences and future needs, as well as data on their levels of internet access. Overall, only 43% of the 1,132 respondents to our student survey described their internet access as ‘full and unrestricted’; the majority of students who said they had limited internet access lived in southern Africa.

Armed with a set of technical requirements, which flowed from a value-driven vision for our future online pedagogy, we met with several VLE vendors then conducted a formal procurement process. However, we found that the platforms we analysed were not fully aligned with the needs of our students in three main ways:

1. offline study options were generally lacking;
2. surprisingly, smartphone optimisation was patchy in some cases;
3. online content was generally siloed by mode (i.e. text pages, videos, quizzes and discussions were accessed via separate menu items), and this structure seemed very difficult to override via customisation.

We felt that these issues severely limited our potential to create the accessible, rich, intuitive and collaborative experiences many of our students were looking for. Worse, it seemed that these limitations would disproportionately disadvantage students who had limited internet access.

So while we did select the best candidate from the VLEs in the procurement process, instead of customising it ‘out of the box’ we decided to integrate it and other ‘best-of-breed’ technologies underneath a custom-built student interface (see Brown et al. 2015). This approach was only possible because we had an in-house IT team with expertise in software development and user experience design, who have spent the last 18 months developing the student interface.

In my poster and GASTA talk at ALT-C I’ll reflect on this process, as well as proposing some scenarios that could make it a little more straightforward for others to take a similar approach in future.

In the absence of digital technologies that are designed specifically with their needs in mind, students with limited internet access will continue to be excluded from digital education and instead forced towards campus models or print-based correspondence courses, or even miss out on education altogether.

I’d argue that this issue is too important to be left solely in the hands of technology companies. If we’re serious about addressing inequality of access to digital education, technologies must be anchored in the needs of those who would otherwise be marginalised or excluded. This will require leadership, collaboration and investment across the sector.

References

Brown M., Dehoney J. and Millichap N. (2015) The Next Generation Digital Learning Environment: A Report on Research. Available from: https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2015/4/eli3035-pdf.pdf

Hillier M. (2018) Bridging the digital divide with off-line e-learning. Distance Education, 39 (1), 110–121.

Stuart Allan, Director of Online Learning, Edinburgh Business School,Heriot-Watt University @OpenPlanStuart

If you enjoyed reading this article we invite you to join the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) as an individual member, and to encourage your own organisation to join ALT as an organisational or sponsoring member.

Have you booked your place for the ALT Annual Conference 2019 in Edinburgh? As well as offering an exciting and packed programme and social events during the Conference, we have also put together a great guide of things to do in and around Edinburgh during your visit.

Funding from the Doug Gowan Memorial fund (in memory of Doug Gowan, President of ALT, who passed away in February 2016)  gives Learning Technology professionals in the UK the opportunity to travel to ALT’s Annual Conference they might otherwise be unable to attend. We were delighted to receive a record number of applications, 17 in […]

Have you booked your place for the ALT Annual Conference 2019 in Edinburgh? As well as offering an exciting and packed programme and social events during the Conference, we have also put together a great guide of things to do in and around Edinburgh during your visit. With the help of our ALT Conference Committee, […]

  We are delighted to announce our sponsors for this year’s ALT Annual Conference 2019: Blackboard, EDINA, RM Results, Positive Internet Company, and Vevox. Limited sponsorship opportunities and exhibition spaces are still available, so if you’d like to find out more, check the website for further details or reasons to get involved. This year’s Conference is being […]

Full message available at: Correction: Vacancy at Queen Mary University of London

Full message available at: Weekly News Digest - Issue 515, 29 July 2019

Barriers in digital information can prevent people with disabilities from participating as full members of society. It’s surprising that digital accessibility practices are still rarely taught as part of formal education. Digital accessibility is integral to enabling all learners in today’s information society. Teaching digital accessibility as part of college and university curriculum is important.
    
To fill the gap, Ryerson University has created five practical online courses and corresponding interactive, modular, and open textbooks aimed at raising awareness of digital accessibility globally.