A fun Saturday with the family, scooters, and pumpkins. Tonight, I watched a recorded session from ALT 2021 entitled “Leading through listening: drawing from staff and student experiences to adapt the implementation of a new VLE” presented by James Youdale and Malcolm Murray from Durham University. VLE is the acronym for virtual learning experience. During the pandemic, students wanted a more friendly system. These survey results correlated with what staff requested. Analysis of comments led to identification of four issues: endless ‘scope-creep’, it was heavily customized and extended, ‘clunky’, and became a repository. Murray described how the pandemic and increased online learning have highlighted “the focus on digital inequalities, digital skills gaps & dated learning systems.” Their project was to move from servers to a cloud-based solution. They also realized it would be a painful migration for faculty and staff. The pilot was a competitive invitation, and five departments began. I thought it was great and also risky how they decided to start from “clean new courses” instead of migrating from duo to Learn Ultra! Student surveys thought the new system was more user-friendly and easier to navigate. Staff also wanted “ease of use.” Surprisingly, the results from staff surveys were mixed. Focus groups identified lack of awareness of features, lack of time to migrate courses, lack of understanding why Ultra is designed the way it is… They spoke about the pilot and progression to help all staff access Ultra and build courses. For this, they had over 90 planning meetings, how-to-workshops, and support. For their self-paced module, they made it simple and using the features of the Learn Ultra platform. This was a big project during a global pandemic! I do find this fascinating and enjoy learning about VLEs and educational technologies. The presenters concluded by stating that consistent messaging is key and well-designed templates are very useful. It was also welcoming to learn that staff seemed to pay more attention to the student experience and be more open to trying new things as a result of having to recreate or shift to a new system.
A second session presented by Ian Nicoll was about “Equid Education in the time of COVID-19 – Implementation of a Digital Learning Environment.” Nicoll is a learning designer at The Donkey Sanctuary, a UK charity with global reach. The Donkey Sanctuary has done some training but mostly face-to-face, mentioned Nicoll. The organization does help donkeys and operates differently, as you would expect, from higher education. To run this project of developing and improving a learning environment, there was a project leader team with management and subject matter expert leads. The project started in May 2019 to choose a digital learning environment and set up the system to create courses… and then the pandemic hit. The project continued at a slower pace. Nicoll shared a video of donkeys at a sanctuary finding a solution to how to access their food. There were technical challenges and a need to customize. Nicoll talked about including H5P. From the pedagogical perspective, they offered training, course design support, learning objective help, and design. Nicoll talked about how busy they have been and mentioned that one thing they would do differently is to better facilitate the exchange of expertise between users and the platform manager. “You don’t know what you don’t know… you don’t know the questions to ask…” and having someone to help with that and training others from the beginning is critical.
