upgrade and move to cloud hosting – amended date for planned downtime
As previously communicated, the University will upgrade the ReCap service to the latest version of Panopto (the software that powers ReCap) and transition the service to being cloud hosted for academic year 2023/24.
In preparation for this transition the University IT Team are working closely with Panopto to transfer our recordings to the cloud and ensure that all existing integrations with other University systems (e.g. Canvas and timetabling) continue to work correctly.
To complete this work a period of system downtime is required and this will take place later than initially planned due to the transfer of existing recordings taking longer than Panopto anticipated.
The downtime will now take place during early September (likely to be week commencing 4 September, the exact date to be confirmed when available) and the impact will be as follows:
Viewing of recordings – during the downtime recordings will continue to be available for viewing although users may experience short outage periods of a few minutes.
Creation and editing of recordings – the following activities should not be attempted during the downtime as they will not be transferred to the upgraded system:
creation of new recordings
copying of existing recordings
editing of existing recordings
interactions with recordings (e.g. taking a quiz, making a note, subscribing to a playlist, adding a bookmark)
We are aware that some teaching is due to take place during the downtime and plans have been made to ensure that these sessions can still be recorded using ReCap. Those with teaching sessions scheduled during the downtime will be contacted directly with information about the plans. This will not involve any changes to what presenters are required to do but will mean recordings will not be available as quickly as they normally would.
If you have any queries regarding the ReCap upgrade, contact ltds@newcastle.ac.uk.
The Vice-Chancellor’s Education Excellence Awards aim to raise the status of education at Newcastle University by rewarding individuals and teams who have made a marked impact on the student educational experience.
The 2023 winners of the Vice-Chancellor’s Education Excellence Awards have now been announced, with two winning submissions out of a very competitive field of nominations:
Dr Carys Watts School of Biomedical, Nutritional and Sport Sciences
Dr Watts receives her award for her sustained, and much valued, record of achievement and dedication to student learning and support. She is commended for her excellent work on the Support to Study, Virtual Exchange and Study Abroad initiatives, and more generally for her collegiality and passion for teaching.
Carys commented “I am delighted to receive this award and to be recognised for progressing student mobility, co-creativity and enterprise activities. Working with some incredible colleagues and teaching a diverse student community keeps me motivated, reflective and innovative in my approach to education”.
Rosalind Beaumont School X
Rosalind receives her award for her record of innovation and creativity in support of student learning and staff development, both within her School and Faculty and more widely across the University. She is praised for her teaching excellence, dedication to sustainability, and for her support and contributions to the University’s Professional Standards Framework scheme.
Rosalind remarked “It’s an honour to be recognised by my peers for my work with both students and staff in different educational contexts at Newcastle over the last 15+ years. I’m here through a lot of determination, luck, and the countless conversations with colleagues and students which have helped shape me into the educator and colleague I am today. Thank you to all of you who have been part of my development so far – there’s always more to do, so let’s get on with it!”
The panel, chaired by Ruth Valentine (Interim PVC Education), were extremely impressed with the scale of impact, breadth of activity, and the creative approaches to education and student support demonstrated by all awardees.
In a recent presentation at the Three Rivers Conference, Learning and Teaching Development Service (LTDS) advisers Gosia Rabenda Derman and Michelle Black shared their learning on collaborative approaches to curriculum redesign from a project they have been working on with academic and professional colleagues in the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences (SNES). Read the summary of the presentation, and learn more about the project.
H5P, the Canvas-integrated tool, allows you to create more interactive course materials. From simple formative quizzes to complex branching scenarios, H5P is an easy to use, but powerful tool to enhance students learning.
Why should you consider using H5P?
As a busy academic, it can be challenging to find the time and resources to enhance your teaching methods. However, H5P is a powerful tool that can significantly benefit your teaching, even amidst a busy schedule. Here’s why:
Interactive and Engaging Content: H5P allows you to create interactive and engaging content easily, allowing you to increase students’ attention, their engagement, and make the learning experience more enjoyable.
Time Efficiency: H5P provides a user-friendly interface and a wide range of pre-designed templates, making it easy to create interactive content quickly. Once you become familiar with the tool, you can save time by reusing templates, clone and modifying existing content (created by you or shared with colleagues) to suit different topics or courses.
Versatility: H5P offers a variety of activity types, including interactive videos, presentations, quizzes, games, timelines, and more. This versatility allows you to cater to different learning styles and adapt your teaching methods to meet the needs of diverse student groups. Whether you want to assess knowledge, reinforce concepts, or promote critical thinking, H5P provides a wide range of options.
Seamless Integration: H5P is compatible with our learning management systems, Canvas. You don’t even need to leave your Canvas page to create your content, and minimises the need for students to navigate between multiple tools.
Help and support is at hand available: All content types have built-in tutorials. To support colleagues, we are also running additional workshops on using H5P.
Using H5P to Enhance Learning and Teaching Webinar
H5P is a tool integrated into canvas that allows users to easily create, share, and reuse interactive and multimedia content. H5P offers a wide range of content types, such as quizzes, interactive videos, games, and presentations. With H5P, users do not need to have advanced programming skills to create engaging and interactive content, as the tool provides a simple and intuitive user interface that allows them to add multimedia elements, interactions, and assessments to their content with ease.
Using H5P to Enhance Learning and Teaching: Advanced Webinar
A session on more advanced tips on working with H5P – for users who would like to explore more advanced content types. This session is designed to empower educators with the skills and knowledge to harness the full potential of H5P in their teaching practices. This workshop is specifically tailored for academics who are already familiar with the basics of H5P and want to explore advanced features and functionalities. Through hands-on exercises and guided demonstrations, you will learn how to integrate H5P content seamlessly into your existing course materials. The workshop will also provide a platform for collaboration and sharing of best practices, allowing you to network with peers and gain inspiration from real-world examples. By the end of the workshop, participants will have the tools and expertise to create engaging learning experiences using H5P, thereby enhancing their teaching methods and fostering a more interactive and impactful classroom environment.
We have also published a new guide on H5P on the Learning and Teaching Website: Tutorial on Creating Virtual Tours Using H5P. It contains a step-by-step instructions on creating a virtual tour, with some example 360 and static images for you to practice.
How do you use H5P?
What is your experience H5P? Do you have examples of content you would like to share? Comment below and let other colleagues get inspired!
Inspera assessment is the University’s system for centrally supported digital exams. Inspera can be used for automatically marked exam questions, for manually marked question types including essays, or for exams with a combination of both.
New functionality has recently been launched that enables colleagues to do more with digital written exams.
Question choice for students
Candidate selected questions is used to give students taking your exam a choice of which questions to answer from a list.
For example in an exam where students need to answer 2 essay questions from a list of 6 questions, you can set this up so that a student can choose a maximum of 2 questions to answer.
How does it work for a student?
If candidate selected questions is used in an Inspera exam the student sees information above each question that shows how many questions to select in total, and how many they have already selected. To choose a question to answer they change the ‘Answering this question?’ drop down box to yes.
Screenshot showing student view of Inspera, with the option to choose whether to answer a question.
If a student starts answering a question without changing the ‘Answering this question?’ drop down box, Inspera automatically changes it to ‘Yes’.
When they have selected the maximum number of questions, the student cannot start answering any more questions. However, if they change their mind about which question(s) they want to answer, they can simply change the ‘Answering this question?’ drop down to no, and select a different question instead.
How does it work for a marker?
A marker only sees answers to the questions that a student has chosen to answer.
As students can only submit answers for the maximum number of questions they are allowed to choose, this means you can say goodbye to the dilemma of trying to work out which questions to mark when a student has misread the instructions and answered too many questions!
How can I use it in my exam?
The Candidate selected questions function is available when you are authoring a question set for an Inspera digital exam. Find out more in the Inspera guide for Candidate selected questions.
Rubrics for marking
You can now create a rubric to use for marking any manually marked question type in Inspera. Rubrics allow you to build the assessment criteria for an exam question into Inspera, and use them in your marking.
Choose whether you want to use a quantitative rubric to calculate the mark for a question, or a qualitative rubric as an evaluation and feedback tool, and then manually assign the mark.
How to introduce a rubric for your exam
When you are creating the exam question in Inspera, set up the rubric you want to use for marking that question. The Inspera guide to rubrics for question authors explains how to create a rubric and add it to your exam question.
If you’ve chosen to use one of the quantitative rubric types, as you complete it the student’s mark for the question will automatically be calculated. If you’ve chosen a qualitative rubric, once you’ve completed the rubric use it to evaluate the student’s answer and help you decide on their mark for the question.
You can choose to add feedback to the candidate in the box below the level of performance you’ve selected for each criterion (you can see an example of this in the image below).
Screenshot of the Grader view of a sample points-range rubric in Inspera
Want to learn more about using Inspera for digital exams?
Come along to a webinar to learn about creating exam questions or marking in Inspera.
Enroll onto the Inspera Guidance course in Canvas to learn about Inspera functionality at your own pace.
Find out about the process to prepare an Inspera digital exam, and how the Digital Assessment Service can help on the Inspera webpage.
Contact digital.exams@newcastle.ac.uk if you have questions or would like to discuss how you could use Inspera for a digital exam on your module.
** Deadline Extended to 4 March to Join a Working Group **
This online partnership event is an excellent opportunity for the region’s 5 universities (Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland, Teesside) to come together and share ideas. This year’s event will focus on Innovations in Learning. The keynote speaker for the conference is Prof Chris Headleand, NTF.
The conference/call for abstracts is open to colleagues and students from the 5 universities.
Get involved
1. Submit an abstract. The call for abstracts is now open, closing on 2 May 2023.
2. If you have a special interest in Student Retention or Doctoral Training join a working group by 4 March. These cross-university working groups will meet online in the lead up to the conference and present and host sessions on the day.
The Newcastle University Learning and Teaching Conference took place on March 31. This year’s theme was all about learning together, sharing effective practice, and exploring an education for all.
The event was opened by Professor Tom Ward, PVC Education, and was followed by a keynote presentation from Professor Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education and Head of Department for Educational Research at Lancaster University.
As a result of the fantastic response to our call for submissions we ran several parallel sessions throughout the day, including over 40 workshops, lightning talks and presentations. Video recordings of the event presentations are now available to view via ReCap.
Conference feedback needed If you attended the conference, or if you registered but were unable to attend, we would greatly appreciate your thoughts and feedback. This will help us improve our Learning and Teaching Conferences in the future.
The School of Mathematics, Statistics & Physics will host the fifth international conference on E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences (EAMS). The conference aims to bring together researchers and practitioners with an interest in e-assessment for mathematics and the sciences. It will consist of a mix of presentations of new techniques and pedagogic research, as well as workshops where you can get hands-on with leading e-assessment software including our own Numbas.
EAMS 2022 is an entirely online conference with a mix of live sessions and web-based activities, and plenty of opportunity for discussion and collaboration. Before the conference starts there will be a programme of optional training workshops available for participants to get hands-on with state-of-the-art maths e-assessment software.
Live talks will take place over Zoom at 9am and 4pm BST (UTC +1) each weekday, with recordings available later. The online format and longer timescale allow participants to engage more deeply with the material presented.
The call for talk and workshop proposals is currently open. If you have some research or an innovative technique related to mathematical e-assessment that you would like to present, then please submit an abstract at eams.ncl.ac.uk/call-for-speakers by 13th May. We’re actively seeking to increase the diversity of our attendees and speakers, and particularly encourage speakers from groups under-represented in previous editions of EAMS to submit proposals.
Working alongside student interns, Newcastle University HaSS colleagues have developed a new Learning Communities toolkit – a range of accessible and reusable ice-breaker and community-building resources. Available via Canvas Commons, this toolkit is ideal for educators looking for ways to encourage and facilitate effective learning communities within their module groups.
Why is a learning community needed? Developing a learning community amongst a group of students can be hugely beneficial. Not only does it provide students with the opportunity to come together in a safe place to share opinions and ask questions, but it also allows them to feel a sense of belonging and connection with other students (this is particularly useful where minority groups are concerned). Learning communities also provide academic benefits: encouraging attendance at lectures, active engagement, and group collaboration. This toolkit provides a range of ideas to get you started and support you along the way in the development of your learning community.
How to use this toolkit We’ve published our Learning Communities toolkit on Canvas Commons to make it easy to find, download and reuse in your own courses. To help you find activities quickly, we have organised them into three separate categories: Icebreakers, Building Community Activities, and Maintaining Community Activities.
The internal call for 2022 NTF and CATE nominations has now ended (deadline for nominations was Wednesday 10 November 2021at 12.00 noon).
Application to be an institutional NTF nominee
Nominations will be considered at a panel meeting in November, chaired by the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education and consisting of current Newcastle NTFs and members of the Learning and Teaching Development Service. All higher education providers are eligible to enter three nominations to NTF. Following this panel meeting the 3 successful nominees will work with NTF mentors to develop their full claim submitted to Advance HE in March 2022.
Application to be an institutional CATE nominee
Nominations will be considered at a panel meeting in November, chaired by the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education and consisting of current Newcastle NTF/CATE winners and members of the Learning and Teaching Development Service. All higher education providers are eligible to enter one team that can clearly demonstrate having an impact on teaching and learning through collaboration. Following this panel meeting the successful team will work with CATE mentors to develop their full claim submitted to Advance HE in March 2022.
For further information get in touch with LTDS@ncl.ac.uk
