In 2022 a task group was set up to review our centrally supported audience interaction system, Ombea. As part of our remit, we are establishing user requirements for a system of this type, and inviting other suppliers to demonstrate their own AIS systems.
All the systems that will be demonstrated are established suppliers with experience of working with higher education institutions and could be viable options to replace Ombea, therefore colleague opinion of the available options is very important. After initial consultation, we have five suppliers who are interested in sharing their product.
To book a place to attend any of the demonstrations or to request links to the recordings please complete this booking form. After attending the demonstrations you will be sent a short form to complete to tell us what you thought of the system.
Any queries about the demonstrations or AIS review should be sent to the project team via ltds@ncl.ac.uk
I often copy and paste bits of text from one place to another, but don’t necessarily want the formatting that comes with the text. Just using Ctrl + V, or selecting ‘paste’ brings that formatting across. This means that text might look ‘odd’ when pasting it into another document, or something like a Canvas page.
The Method
Windows: Ctrl + Shift + V
Mac: Option + Shift + Command + V
The Solution
This means you just keep the characters, meaning your pasted text looks the same as the rest. This works in lots of desktop applications.
Microsoft Applications
To do this in Word, right-click and select ‘paste without formatting’ as below.
Introducing a new series – Taking Ctrl – a guide to keyboard shortcuts that can save you time!
Many of the tasks we do using the computer have a ready keyboard shortcut to speed up the task, though we might not always know what these are. We have asked the FMS TEL team to share their favourite keyboard shortcuts in this series. This is the team at their most geeky – enjoy, and see how much time you can save!
Our first keyboard shortcut is Windows key + E. This opens up your file explorer – much faster than looking for that icon.
This post summarises posts from 2022 – thank you to all of our contributors!
We hope you have enjoyed learning more about the work we do in FMS TEL, below are a few areas we covered and successes we had in 2022. If you have any suggestions for content for 2023 we would love to hear from you.
For the second year running we ran our very own FMS TEL conference. We had sessions on Accessibility, Augmented Reality, Lab Teaching, Escape Rooms and more. The materials are available on the FMS TEL Conference 2022 page.
The blog is edited by a different FMS TEL team member every month, and many team members have taken on this task, as well as contributing posts to the blog – thank you to all of you! Our thanks also go to those colleagues who have offered their examples of practice for us to showcase here. We look forward to working with many more of you in 2023.
This post is a review of the conference experience by FMS TEL members John Keogan and Andy Stokes.
This years conference was going to be a bit different to any conference we had ran in the past, the decision was made for the 2022 conference to be hybrid! We would run in-person presentations, online only sessions, and some sessions would be a hybrid of both. We were excited to take advantage of the video-conferencing technologies on offer within the University.
Using lessons learnt from last years online version, we set out tasks to complete and deadlines to meet.
The Tasks
We divided the main tasks between us and ran through the list of jobs involved in preparing for the conference. We quickly realised that there was lot more involved than we initially thought!
The main tasks included:
timetabling
booking rooms
communications (including mail merges)
creating online conference materials
One aspect of the preparation was getting word out about the conference. We approached schools within the faculty and asked them to put up posters in areas with heavy footfall, as well as staffrooms. We put up posters in cafes, corridors and even lifts – please let us know if you saw them! We also requested that the campus messaging screens carried information about the conference in FMS areas.
Tips
Room Bookings
Consider your criteria before booking, for example:
‘Is the room big enough?’
‘Do the speakers work?’
‘Can we connect a laptop to the projectors?’
The room bookings website is not always accurate when you nominate the relative criteria; i.e. ‘Hybrid’, ‘videoconference’ etc.
Give yourself enough time to visit the rooms in person (It’s also worthwhile booking the rooms for when you plan to test them, as they can be snapped up pretty quickly in term time).
Reserved your rooms well in advance!
Technology
Contact the Audio Visual team for a demonstration of the hybrid technology. They showed us how to set up and use the cameras and mics, and also how to troubleshoot common problems.
Consider your booking platform and its limitations, we used workshops.ncl which required us to use an iCal maker so delegates could add the events to their diaries.
Familiarise yourself with video editing software. As a team we edited the recordings using a mix of ReCap, Premiere Pro and Adobe Rush.
Schedule a block of time to review captions. We have some excellent posts on how to edit your captions.
Conclusion
Overall, the conference was a great success and we all enjoyed our time being part of the 2022 FMS TEL Conference team.
Being new to running a conference we developed skills and knowledge during the journey. The encouragement and support from our team helped ensure that we fulfilled our tasks and that looming deadlines were met.
We learned things that we will do different, or better, next year and we hope the tips shared in this post will be a good starting point for anyone wanting to run their own conference.
During the FMS TEL Conference, Leonard Shapiro of the University of Cape Town presented an overview of the many ways in which people draw, dispelled myths about the ‘quality’ of a drawing, and covered some of the many ways in which drawing can be useful in learning and in communication once we stop judging ourselves on our artistic skill.
The university has a range of tools that allow us to draw for learning and communication, and draw collaboratively when teaching in person and online, such as smart boards, interactive whiteboards, and collaborative whiteboards in Zoom and Teams, as well as note making apps on devices we have in our pockets.
Drawing as a method to understand 3D anatomical structures is central to Leonard’s work – how might drawing allow your students to take a different viewpoint in your subject?
You may also wish to consider the approaches and methods used in the other linked FMS TEL videos below:
The materials from the FMS TEL Conference are now available for NCL and NUMed staff. You can find links to all of the sessions on the FMS TEL Conference 2022 page.
Many thanks to all presenters and speakers for their contributions!
