Tel Tales

Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP

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Blurry Colours

Thinking about accessibility

January 8, 2019 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about accessibility and Moodle recently as we move the Moodle Baseline project into the pilot stage. It’s become clear that many of us don’t make our responsibility to create accessible content a top priority when all that’s needed is a small amount of extra time to ensure a vast improvement in the ability of differently abled users to consume your Moodle content. I’m not going to call any specific Moodle sites out here, but some of the most prevalent bad practice that somewhat surprisingly still seems to exist includes using HTML tables for navigation & layout, and using images for headings or navigation.

Both of these issues become problematic to users who use screen readers. Whilst it is true that screen reader support for tables has improved, they should still not be used for navigation or layout. Every time the screen reader box enters a table cell, the screen reader will tell the user which cell they are in. You can easily see how this is not a good user experience if you have to work your way through a four by five table, with a link (or more than one link) in each cell. Using something more appropriate such as an HTML list for this navigation properly give the nav role in the html, as well as a more streamlined experience, a screen reader can also use this information to offer it’s user the option to skip the navigation and go straight to page content, or not. for some more information on this have a look at the W3 Schools page detailing the nav role.

Using an image for heading isn’t automatically a terrible thing. If it’s used in conjunction with either HTML alt text, or if at all possible an ARIA attribute to notify to a screen reader how the image is being used. Using CSS to replace a text link with an image, which will also allow the image to be seen by those browsing visually, but also mean the HTML text link is visible to those with a screen reader It just so happens that Bootstrap 4 has an easy way to do this which everyone can use after the Moodle upgrade in August. Bootstrap also offers ways to totally hide elements in your HTML content from everyone except those using screen readers, so you can really go the extra mile to offer content that’s easier to digest audibly.

There are reasons why you’d need to use a custom navigation, there are also times however that the topic jump list should be more than sufficient for navigating between topics on a Moodle site. If you find that this is almost good enough – but not quite – please talk to us and we’ll try and make it totally good enough for you to use. If you’d like to find out more about accessibility I would heartily recommend the Digital Accessibility MOOC on FutureLearn, it really opened my eyes to accessibility issues I’d never considered – it made me realise what I thought I was doing to enable differently abled people to read my content, wasn’t in fact enough.

I’ll leave you with this from our Moodle content guide which will arrived with the new theme after the upgrade in the summer:

Accessibility for Moodle content means that your content is available to be consumed by all users, regardless of their ability. Creating accessible learning content is the responsibility of us all – It’s not something that should be left until later, or for us to think that it’s the responsibility of someone else.

Moodle – Teaching Block 2 Modules

December 14, 2018 / / 0 Comments

One query which we often receive from students here in TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning), is concern that one or more modules are missing from their Moodle homepage. This is usually because the modules they are enquiring about, are for Teaching Block 2. 

Teaching Block 2 modules are normally hidden from student view until the day students return from the Christmas break.  Teaching Block 2 starts this year on Monday 21st January 2018. However, this is not always the case as some modules have two different cohorts of students attached to them. These modules may have a short name that looks similar to this: UXXXXX-18SEP & 18JAN.  Depending how the module has been set up, both cohorts may have access to the unit in September, or maybe the January cohort won’t be able to see the module until the lecturer releases it to them at a later date.

Lecturers decide when to release their Teaching Block 2 module(s). Some prefer to release them when the students leave for the Christmas break so that they can start looking at them, while others wait until the first day back or when the first session starts. Some students may be able to see their Teaching Block 2 modules now.  It really is up to the individual lecturer.

We’re often also asked why does the January code not reflect the new year – for example, why does the code say 18JAN and not 19JAN, as in 2019. This is because the code is taken from the academic year in which the course started, so as this academic year started in 2018, the code you’ll see is 18JAN. However if your course starts in the new year, it will have the 19JAN code.

It can be confusing, but as long as you can see your module(s) when the lecturer says you should be able to see them, that’s the main thing. If you can’t see your module(s), please email us at servicedesk@port.ac.uk.

In the meantime, the TEL Team would like to wish everyone a very happy holiday and a Healthy and Happy New Year!

 

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Group of people sitting around a table working on different computer devices

Digital Experience Insights – a community of practice

December 4, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I gave a talk on 14 November at the launch of JISC’s new Community of Practice in Digital Experience Insights. The JISC Insights service builds on their work with the Student Tracker – a survey of students’ experience of the digital environment. Portsmouth, as one of the initial pilot institutions for the Tracker, has more experience than most in using insights gained from the student survey.  

One of the key take-home messages from the event, at least for me, was that the issues we are grappling with here at Portsmouth are exactly the same issues with which other institutions are grappling. The event also provided a valuable sanity-check: the approaches we are taking are the same approaches that others are either taking, planning to take, or would like to take!

The graphic below shows one example of how the student digital experience at Portsmouth is not dissimilar to the student experience elsewhere. Students were asked to name an app they found particularly useful. The word cloud on the left shows the national response. Once the various types of VLE (Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas) are combined, the three most popular apps are: VLE, Google, YouTube. The word cloud on the right shows the Portsmouth response. The three most popular apps are: VLE, Google, YouTube. It’s the smaller words that carry the institutional flavour – and I think Portsmouth does extremely well in this regard; 93% of our students rate our digital provision as good or better.

Speech Bubbles

Helen Beetham gave one of the most interesting talks of the day. Helen gave an overview of a pilot into the digital experience of teaching staff. There were insufficient responses to publish statistically robust findings, but there were some interesting titbits in there. For example, students are much more positive than teachers about the digital environment. Is this because teachers are more critical? Or perhaps they have higher expectations of what a digital environment should look like? On the other hand, teachers are much more likely than students to want more digital technology in their courses. Are students more conservative when it comes to expectations around learning and teaching?

The majority of responders to the staff survey identified themselves as early adopters – and yet about 50% never search online for resources; 84% of them are unsure of their responsibilities in relation to assistive technologies; 81% are uncertain when it comes to dealing with their own health and well-being in a digital environment; and 13% never update their digital skills. By far the biggest problem staff face in improving their digital teaching is – of course – lack of time to do so.

For the past three years Portsmouth has sought to understand the student experience of the digital environment, and we plan to run the JISC insight service for a fourth year. But we could build a much richer picture by asking teaching staff as well as students. So this year we plan to run the staff-facing digital insights survey. More details to follow in 2019! 

Credit image: Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Episode 8 – Charles Barker – Presentation Performance

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Episode 8 - Charles Barker - Presentation Performance



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Copyright Information:

Nowhere Land – Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Using Service Desk for your TEL Queries

November 21, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Firstly, please don’t be alarmed – the elearn email address is not disappearing! We would just like to encourage everyone to start using Service Desk for their Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) queries.

Why email Service Desk rather than eLearn

For You:

  • Confidence knowing straight away that your query has been logged.
  • That by accessing your Self Service Portal you’ll be able to track your query.
  • Should you ever need to revisit the email again, it’ll be easy to do so through the call reference number.

For Us:

  • Traceability of emails: we often have to provide evidence for ECFs (e.g. Was Turnitin down on a certain date? Did my student report problems in Moodle on this date?)  
  • As a team we can clearly see who is actioning which query, and no emails will be lost in the system.
  • The IT Service Management (ITSM) tool, Service Manager (was Supportworks), can supply reports and analytics quicker than us working our way through elearn email folders.

Some background information

Some of you may already be familiar with Service Manager, but for those of you who are not, the ITSM tool records all queries to the Service Desk for IS and for other departments in the University. ITSM helps to standardise the IT procedures across departments.

How does it work?

  • From the moment you contact Service Desk (servicedesk@port.ac.uk or telephone them on +44 (0) 23 9284 7777), a call reference number is allocated to your query.  
  • The email is acknowledged by return, supplying the customer with a call reference number.
  • At the same time Service Desk logs the call and assigns it to the DCQE Group.
  • A member of the TEL team will accept the query and will try to resolve it.
  • If further information is required to complete your request. The TEL member of staff  will reply to the original email, if this happens, the query is put ‘on-hold’.
  • This number can be tracked through your Self Service Portal  (http://myport.ac.uk/), servicedesk.port.ac.uk, where you can check the status.
  • Once completed, the customer is emailed back with the actions that have resolved the query.
  • The call reference number stays with the query so should the issue arise again we’ll be able see how it was resolved.  
  • If a pattern appears we’ll either be able to prevent it occurring or be in a position to inform other Moodle users.
  • Templates are available for you to complete (in some cases) on your UoP Self Service Portal, so that TEL can action your request immediately, as you would have supplied all the key information  e.g. new modules, adding members of staff to your modules etc.
  • All the TEL team will be able to see if a query status has changed and should the original member be away from work, one of their colleagues would be able to complete your query.

Please remember whichever way you choose to raise your query, either via elearn or the service desk, we’ll endeavor to resolve your query and get back to you as soon as possible.

A man with virtual reality goggles on looking at his hands

A VLE without a screen?

November 9, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Staff use Moodle to upload learning resources, post and mark assignments, and set quizzes. Students use Moodle to access learning resources, submit assignments and take quizzes. And, of course, there are other activities that take place on Moodle – discussions, forums, wikis, and so on. It goes without saying that all of these activities involve a screen of some sort, whether a computer screen, tablet screen or phone screen. Can we imagine a VLE without a screen?

That question had never crossed my mind, but then I saw a recent edtech challenge from JISC. They are looking for ideas that can help them address the next big edtech challenges in education and research, and one of their key themes is: what might the future VLE look like? In particular, right now, they are asking: what a VLE might look like if the interface were something other than a screen?

If you have sensible answer to that question – from the perspective of either a teacher or a student – then you might want to submit your idea to the JISC challenge. Describe your idea in 1000 words or less, along with a design overview (in appropriate media) and a vision for how your idea would benefit users, and you stand to win £1000 (for best idea), £250 (for one of two runner-up ideas), or being showcased at Digifest 2019 (the top ten ideas).

Further information can be found on the JISC edtech challenge page. Closing date is 3 January 2019 – so get thinking!

Feature image title:  Man trying on VR Headset by Maurizio Pesce is licensed under CC-BY 2.0 on Flickr

Open book storyboard

Using motion to improve the user experience

October 31, 2018 / / 0 Comments

The use of animation in user interface (UI) design, and the effect it has on the user experience (UX), is something I’ve become interested in recently — especially now we have started to redesign the Moodle interface.

What started me thinking about this was reading the endlessly fascinating Google Material Design Guidelines. These are extremely easy to read, and provide a comprehensive background to Google’s look and feel across it’s many products and services.

Incidentally, if you’re that way inclined, read it! It’s full of ‘I didn’t realise that, but it makes so much sense’ moments. For example, did you realise that there are rules governing what elements look like as they overlap?

Motion provides meaning

Material Design is a good place to start when trying to work out what effect motion has on the overall UX of a given product. Material Design specifies motion to be able to offer:

  • Guided focus between views
  • Hints at what will happen if a user completes a gesture
  • Hierarchical and spatial relationships between elements
  • Distraction from what’s happening behind the scenes (such as fetching content or loading the next view)
  • Character, polish, and delight

(Material Design, 2018)

Some of these have been used long before this specification was written; loading indicators, for instance, have existed in many forms — almost always as a “distraction from what is happening…”. Often they are simply a single repeating animation to help users pass the time, and to communicate that the waiting time will be finite, i.e. something will eventually happen.

Many of these points have been created as a result of the rise of mobile design and the necessity to tie together the various screens of an app with some sort of visual metaphor so the user is aware that the screen they are currently looking at relates to one they were just using — but can no longer see.

Retaining user engagement across page transitions

Let’s look at that last scenario — moving from one page of a mobile app to the next — in a little more detail. Google aims to maintain user engagement across page loads by maintaining elements on screen between those pages, and animating the change. A user’s eye is intended to follow elements that exist in both pages: the elements don’t disappear and reload in a new position; instead they animate and move to their new position.

The overall aim of this — and I think it works — is to start with the user looking at the new page from a position of engagement. The user already knows what content they expect to see, because they know why the page has appeared (it’s the result of the action they performed earlier, e.g a tap on a button), and what relationship the new information on the page has to the information on the previous page.

(Material Design, 2018)

The image above is from a video illustrating the approach to maintaining shared elements across a screen change (in this case a card expanding to provide more information). Click the link beneath the screenshot to watch the video in full.

Material Design provides this advice for pages with different amounts of shared content:

  • If all content elements are shared
    While a surface is expanding, a significant number of elements should remain visible during the transition.
  • Few content elements are shared
    While expanding a surface, if only a single element will be present after the transition, that element should be the focal point of the transition, controlling all other elements.
  • No content elements are shared
    If there are no shared elements between views, anchor all crossfading elements to the surface’s vertical movement. The surface crops the content within.

These rules ensure that no transition becomes too complex and overwhelming to the user.

I’ve really only touched the surface with this topic. I hope to expand on this further by looking at some other ways that motion is employed in UI design to create a satisfying UX.

Moodle Front Page

New Features of Moodle 3.5

October 17, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Each year, over the summer, the University upgrades Moodle to ensure staff and students have access to all the new features and fixes.

This year there has been a big improvement to the look and feel of Moodle, and a new theme has been put in place. You can read about that work here:

New Moodle theme

In this post I’ll give an outline of the new features in Moodle 3.5 that are most relevant to the University.

Using icons from Font Awesome provides clearer accessible icons.

Anywhere you have the Atto editor you’ll find two new icons (Microphone and Webcam) that allow you to quickly and easily record up to two minutes of audio or video directly into the section you are developing.

This update allows you to share the results of the choice with the students. It can be set up so that the results are available at a specified time and you can decide whether the results are anonymous.

If you are using badges as a reward system within a module, you now have the ability to release a badge depending on the completion of other badges. As you can see from the image in the link above, the three basic badges are: “Super Staters”, “Marvellous Mains” and “Delicious Desserts”. When these are finished the overall category badge called “Vegetarian Cook” is awarded.

Questions can now be tagged. This means a question may sit within one category but be tagged with key terms that could cross over to other categories. The question is then searchable from with the parent category according to any given tag.

  • Essay questions within a quiz – restrictions on file types

Should a file be uploaded to an essay question within a quiz, a range of options are available to define which file types may or may not be allowed.

 

Westfalian Museum of Industry

Guest Blogger: James Brand – Erasmus+ Staff Training: Visiting the FernUniversität in Hagen (Part 4)

October 3, 2018 / / 0 Comments

This is the final blog post about about an Erasmus+ Staff Training experience to the FernUniversität in Hagen which took place in June 2018. In this post I will summarise the keynote presentation that concluded the training week and reflect on my experience of attending an Erasmus+ Staff Training experience.

Keynote: The Future of Distance Education: Mind the Gaps – Professor Mark Brown

One of the highlights of the week was the inspiring keynote presentation from Professor Mark Brown, Director of the National Institute for Digital Learning at Dublin City University. Professor Brown discussed the future of distance learning and the work being done at DCU.

Professor Brown also highlighted the importance of having a philosophy for delivering distance learning and explained some of the key principles that constitute a DCU programme and a DCU student. At DCU distance learners are referred to as being part of DCU Connected or as “connected learners” and this is part of the student experience that they have envisioned for their learners. They also refer to their learning technologies as part of a suite known as “the loop”. The loop includes Moodle and various other learning technologies and personal tools that a student may use and that might connect learners in the course of their studies. However, DCU avoids referring to systems as Moodle or their students as distance or online students, as this is just the mode of delivery. This is also linked with the negative view of technical determinism, that we should not be rushing to follow technological innovations, instead, we should be considering what is best for education. The quote featured in the presentation, “The future is not something we enter, the future is something we create” is something that resonated in this session and something that we should consider as a University.

A number of different aspects on the future of digital learning were also discussed in this presentation including MOOCs and the global Higher Education market. Professor Brown’s presentation can be found on Slideshare.

Conclusion

The Erasmus+ staff training week I attended was a fantastic opportunity to visit a University which specialises in distance education. I was able to learn from the Fernuniversität through workshops and by visiting their resources. I was able to network with colleagues from the institution and also with attendees from across Europe. The training week provided an opportunity to gain knowledge of HE practices from other European institutions, discuss and share ideas with fellow participants and also take part in the of the cultural exchange of visiting another country.

I would highly recommend the Erasmus+ staff training weeks to staff as personal and career development opportunity. I have made new networks and now have an understanding of HE in a global market. If you would like to know more about Erasmus+ staff training activities please see the Erasmus intranet website.

Image credits: Photographs by James Brand

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