Category: Digital literacy (Page 1 of 3)

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Online assessment in the time of Covid

May 4, 2021 / Mike Wilson / 0 Comments

In pre-Covid times, exams delivered via Moodle were limited by the availability of suitable physical spaces. Exam rooms represented a bottleneck to the number of students taking exams concurrently.

For the last year, we’ve used Moodle (and integrated platforms) to deliver the majority of our teaching and assessment online.

A visualisation of the online assessment mix at the University of Portsmouth:

In May 2020 many academics who had previously planned to deliver paper-based exams had to quickly adapt and deliver online assessments. In some cases, these required students to scan or take pictures of their work and upload these to assignments (Moodle or Turnitin) for marking.

In recent months, newer platforms to handle this workflow and ease the marking burden for academics have been developed – platforms such as Turnitin Gradescope and CrowdMark. These platforms leverage the similarities in students’ answers so academics can mark many answers at once. When time allows, we hope to be able to evaluate these platforms in more detail.

In the diagram above you can see “Assignments under exam conditions” as the meeting point between traditional essays and restricted online exams. This year we have seen a big growth in this area as academics move from paper-based written exams to time-restricted assignments. An obvious caveat here is that these haven’t been conducted under true exam conditions and so are best described as open book exams. Many digital assessment platforms now include various types of proctoring and would be able to handle remote time-restricted essays (and other assessment types) securely. There are, however, a number of ethical issues to be considered with online proctoring, and we need to proceed cautiously here.

As a University, I feel we should also be looking to expand our capacity for online assessment as over the next decade we will probably see the end of paper-based exams in favour of typed essay papers delivered online due in part to student expectations.

Academics have had a year to adapt to exams in lockdown and many have discovered the benefits of Moodle quizzes for exams that offer automatic marking. (And note that Moodle is excellent at delivering scientific and mathematical exam questions as well as longer coursework assignment submissions.) Generally speaking the Technology and Science and Health faculties deliver the majority of our Moodle quiz based exams and the number of exams has grown significantly during the lockdown. Many academics don’t want to go back to paper.

In Technology Enhanced Learning we oversee online exams and assessments in terms of supporting and evaluating the digital tools and making sure Moodle can handle the number of exams thrown at it. The number of online exams has increased substantially over the last year, all funnelled into two exam windows. As a team we work closely with colleagues in IS to provide more capacity in Moodle and with timetabling to ensure the exams are evenly distributed to avoid terminal peaks of concurrent users, providing a stable Moodle platform for all users.

Without the bottleneck of physical exam rooms, the January 2021 exams were initially weighed in the favour of academic requests around having exams earlier in the day and only using the first week of the exam window to maximise available marking time. Unfortunately, this translated into a scenario that would have presented a significant number of terminal peaks of concurrent users on Moodle. Members of TEL worked closely with the central timetabling unit to level out these peaks and with the exception of one or two slow points, we all delivered a successful exam window in January.

In advance of the May/June exams, we have gone further and set hard parameters around how many exams (quizzes) or timed assignments (Turnitin or Moodle assignments) can be timetabled in any given time slot. We’d like to thank CTU for their tireless effort to make this happen. It wasn’t an easy job to manage all the necessary requirements but it’s given us an exam timetable that looks like the image below. This really is invaluable work to the University when assessment represents so much effort by students, academics and support staff.

Our increasing reliance on online assessment means, I think, that we should investigate new technologies to support that function. Platforms such as Gradescope or CrowdMark could help relieve the marking burden; one of the many platforms such as Wiseflow or Mettl or Inspera could provide extra exam capacity (with the functionality to proctor exams if that was something the University wanted to do). Moodle, with its advanced quiz and assignment capabilities, would continue to play a key role.

I believe we will get through this coming assessment period well, but as our reliance on online assessment grows so must our technologies to support it.

As a University the Covid-19 pandemic has been a driver for the uptake of online learning and assessment. As a University community, we need to harness this positive momentum and diversify our offering of assessment platforms to support students and staff.

Credit Image: Photo by MayoFi on Unsplash

Designers should always keep their users in mind

From compliance to culture

January 18, 2021 / Stephen Webb / 1 Comment

The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR) provides clear legal requirements for universities in terms of making learning accessible for all students. In turn, most universities have begun a journey towards compliance with PSBAR. This is a good thing, right? Well, not necessarily; at least, not by itself.

Alistair McNaught, a leading champion of accessibility and inclusion for the HE sector, argues that we need to move from an approach based on compliance to one of culture change, a culture in which we minimise barriers to learning and maximise the benefits of different learning technologies. As educators we need to ask: who is consuming our resources, what are their needs, and how can we most effectively meet those needs?

The need for us to shift from a compliance-based approach to one of developing a culture of accessibility maturity is clear when you compare a university virtual learning environment (VLE) with the other types of website covered by PSBAR.

A typical public sector body – a local council, for example – will often run a website that has content that rarely changes, is primarily text-based, and is under the control of a small team of web experts. A university VLE, on the other hand, typically has thousands of academics with a range of skill sets uploading a bewildering variety of content and pointing to third-party tools on a daily basis. A compliance-only approach for universities is thus extremely challenging. In the worst case, a compliance-only approach could lead to unintended consequences that are entirely counter-productive (and there are anecdotal accounts of this happening): an institution could choose to be “compliant” with PSBAR by dispensing with digital diversity and reverting to paper handouts. If they did this it wouldn’t matter if the handouts were poor-quality, smudged, third-generation photocopies – because the accessibility standards don’t apply to printouts. This “compliant” approach would be bad for all students but it would hugely disadvantage disabled students – which is, of course, the opposite of what PSBAR hopes to achieve.

McNaught visited UoP a few years ago when he worked for Jisc as their Accessibility Subject Matter Expert. He played the role of a “mystery shopper”, acting as a disabled student who was trying to access the University VLE, website, and other online systems. He is now an independent consultant and has recently posted some thought-provoking articles about accessibility maturity in an educational context. Throughout 2020 he worked with the charity AbilityNet to build on and update the old TechDis Accessibility Maturity Model. Together they have developed two versions of a maturity model: an institutional model and a course/module model. For anyone interested in issues of digital accessibility and inclusion, it is worth following McNaught’s upcoming series of blog posts.

At the close of 2020, McNaught also published a couple of related posts (part 1 and part 2) that provided an explicit example of how PSBAR can lead to unintended consequences. The example involves something with which UoP and many other universities have been grappling since we all increased the amount of video being produced: captioning.

At face value, the legislation requires us to provide 100% accurate captions for deaf people. A risk-averse institution that lacks the budget to create “compliant content” might remove videos from the VLE. This unintended consequence would have a negative impact on all students, including disabled students. McNaught argues that an approach rooted in accessibility maturity would take into account context, and would provide a roadmap for improving video accessibility.

For example, many courses provide most of their content as text. Alongside this, some tutors provide a video version of the content. If the video explanation provides no more information than a text alternative, then the video does not require captions. It’s only if a video introduces new information, not explicit in the text, that the issue of captioning arises. So that’s one lesson: depending upon the context, videos can be an alternative format.

Here is another example of where context is important, and where the guiding principle must be a pedagogic purpose. Imagine a video of a debate. The video might be used for different teaching purposes: to examine rhetorical devices, to study non-verbal communication, to illustrate legal arguments, to highlight technical recording considerations … there are many possible uses. And the best accessibility solution for each use case might well be different! Captioning might not be the best solution. Thus if you provide a caption and then tick the box marked “compliant video” you might nevertheless have created a barrier, not a solution, to learning needs.

Or consider a video of a long-winded, rambling, needlessly prolix interview: a summary consisting of a few bullet points might well be a better solution – for all students – than captions.

Context is important. As McNaught writes: “digital accessibility is about culture change … we need to steer a path between legalism and realism, a path that raises awareness without raising hackles and that encourages skills rather than excuses”. Steering that path won’t be easy – but the destination makes the effort worthwhile.

Credit image: Photo by fauxels from Pexels

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A different way of welcoming students

November 16, 2020 / Andy Taggart / 0 Comments

For both staff and students, the start of a new academic year is, even in normal times, an exciting (and sometimes stressful) occasion. With this year being far from normal, departments are having to adapt to a more virtual environment and for some degree apprenticeship courses, this is going to mean welcoming new students online. On top of the barrage of information all new students have to deal with, our apprentices have additional requirements to meet such as creating an ePortfolio. Indeed, degree apprenticeship applicants to the School of Civil Engineering and Surveying had an online welcome to the department in mid-August while applicants to Business and Law Leadership and Management and Project Management were also welcomed online rather than face to face.

Welcoming and inducting new students is an essential part of starting out on a new educational adventure and moving online does not have to mean losing out completely on the experience of face to face sessions. Applicants to our surveying degree apprenticeship programme were able to ‘meet’ the staff long before they set a foot on campus through welcome videos hosted on a Google site.

Screenshot from the SCES pre-applicant site.

The SCES pre-applicant site provided a user-friendly platform allowing the department to offer prospective apprentices with a wealth of information, helping to create an early connection with the University. Through this site, the pre-applicants could be made aware not just of the demands of the surveying course but also the requirements of the apprenticeship aspects of the course such as the need to maintain a log of their off the job training.

In the words of Module Coordinator Tom Woodbury,
“Due to the restrictions imposed due to the COVID-19 crisis, our Applicant Open Day moved to an online-only format. Working with TECH OCD, we developed the content for the session using a Google Plus site which meant that as well as having the content organised for the day, applicants that could not attend and those wanting to revisit the content were able to access at their convenience. In the end, this method worked out really well, and seemed very well-received by attendees.”

The sites helped prepare students for some of the skills that they will need to help complete their course successfully, for example, what IT skills will be required and offered early access to study support information and library facilities.

This model was also used by the faculty of Business and Law for their Chartered Manager DA, Project Management DA and their MBA DA course. The ease with which Google sites can be used to create web pages also meant the sites could be put together and published relatively quickly. However, the structure that Google sites forces on the user can be a little frustrating at times, but this can be overcome with some bespoke HTML.

For courses starting before the official October re-opening of the University, the sites were an important way to communicate with students. The sites were not made public and anyone accessing the site needed the actual link that was sent out to the prospective students. Google Analytics was used to monitor the level of access and early data indicated many applicants were using the sites. With Google sites already being used extensively by Business and Law degree apprentices for their ePortfolios, using them as a way of welcoming new apprentices in these unusual times seemed a logical and workable solution but it will be interesting to collect feedback from the students.

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Google in a time of lockdown

April 27, 2020 / Andy Taggart / 0 Comments

2020 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the beta version of Gmail, Google’s first move beyond being just a search engine. Since then Google has created an extensive suite of applications many of which are extremely useful for teaching and learning. In this blog I’ll be looking at some of, what I think, are the most useful apps and why, during the current lockdown, Google can be useful in helping deliver online learning.

Possibly the most useful change Google has made in light of the lockdown was to extend video conferencing (Hangouts Meet) to all GSuite accounts allowing up to 250 participants in any online meeting. Setting up an online meeting using Hangouts Meet can be done via the Google calendar thus notifying participants automatically. While this particular app lacks some of the functionality of Webex, it is useful for hosting and running a simple meeting or online seminar.

In this time of distributive learning, collaboration can still be facilitated and Google provides tools such as jamboard that will allow students to contribute to online tasks and discussions. Jamboard provides a pin-board style interface onto which students can pin their ideas and contributions to group tasks. While apps such as Google docs do clearly provide opportunities for online collaboration, jamboard provides a tool for more focused tasks with a clear and easy to read interface.

On the Degree Apprenticeship programme, we make major use of G Suite including Shared Drives and Google Docs, indeed without these, it would be difficult to see how we could manage some of the required administrative tasks. The ability to enhance the functionality of some Google products such as sheets, also means that they can be tailored to best meet the needs of our students. For example, all degree apprenticeship students are required to keep a log of their off the job training activities, such as their weekly University sessions, to help them complete these logs we use Google forms linked to Google sheets. Being able to add a script to the sheets means that emails can automatically be sent out allowing course administrators to more easily monitor log entries.

In terms of teaching and learning, one of the most useful Google products, and certainly the most ubiquitous in terms of videos, is YouTube, bought by Google back in 2006. By virtue of having a Google account, all members of the University automatically have a YouTube account. This, combined with the unlimited storage offered by Google, provides staff and students with an invaluable teaching and learning platform. Google’s screen capture app, Screencastify, integrates nicely with Youtube allowing users to edit and then upload directly to their YouTube channel.

So, out of the range of apps, Google provides, which ones are my favourites?

Having worked with apprenticeship students in the Business faculty for over two years, helping them with their ePortfolios, I’ve become a convert to Google Sites. I found the old version while having plenty of functionality, a bit clunky and not that user-friendly, often having to write HTML to achieve what I wanted. A downside of New Google Sites was the lack of template functionality, but this issue is being addressed as the addition of templates is currently in development.

But, on a day to day level, Google docs and Shared Drives have pretty much transformed the way I work, simplifying working collaboratively with colleagues and students.

The pace of development of Google products is also impressive and I’m looking forward to making use of Smart Compose (https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/02/smart-compose-ga.html) and neural grammar correction, currently in beta. While Word does ship with far greater functionality and even slightly complicated Word documents do not convert well to Google, for the majority of users, the tools available with Docs are generally more than enough and thinglink (https://www.thinglink.com/scene/1282367584611598339) is great for those new to Docs. Google has also made it slightly easier to share documents with non-Google account holders, users can now use their existing email address to set themselves up with Google to enable access to shared Google docs, Sites etc. while a PIN verification system, currently in beta, will remove the need to set up any kind of Google account at all.

The current situation has thrown up considerable challenges in continuing to provide engaging and high quality teaching and learning especially in terms of students working collaboratively, Google clearly does not provide all the solutions required, but its suite of apps are certainly a good starting point.

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On a table a mobile phone showing a list of courses on LinkedIn Learning app, next to earphones and a mug filled with a dark beverage

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – LinkedIn Learning – Collection and Learning Paths

April 6, 2020 / Adrian Sharkey / 0 Comments

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning contains over 40,000 courses on technical, business and creative skills and is free to all University of Portsmouth students and staff. Many of the courses will map directly to studies, others will be on tools such as Autocad, MatLab or SPSS which are essential for study. The courses on a wide range of business skills can be used by staff for CPD and students for employability skills.

Collections and Learning Paths

With that amount of courses in the library, searching for exactly what is relevant or required can sometimes seem daunting. LinkedIn Learning will offer recommendations based on the skills and interests you have setup as part of your profile. If you’ve connected a personal LinkedIn account to your University LinkedIn Learning, you will also get recommendations based on your professional network. One way to organise courses is to use personal collections and learning paths. Everyone can create these, collections work for a group of courses or videos related to one particular topic or skill, learning paths when you want to work through courses in a particular order, building skills and knowledge. If you create personal collections and learning paths you can share a link to them so others users can access them.

With Admin access however, it is possible to create ‘University of Portsmouth’ collections and learning paths centrally. You’ll see these in LinkedIn Learning in the main library, under the browse button. As well as being available here and shareable via a single sign on link they can be recommended directly to users.

Custom Content

Another advantage of Admin access is that you have the ability to upload custom content into the University of Portsmouth LinkedIn Learning platform. These can be videos, PDFs, PowerPoints, links, pretty much any type of file. It means you can then create collections and learning paths with a mixture of LinkedIn Learning content with bespoke University content alongside it. Great if you want some specific explanation or demonstration alongside the expert industry standard content provided by LinkedIn Learning.

LinkedIn Learning Mapping Service

LinkedIn Learning provides a mapping service where they map their content against a list of competencies or skills in a particular area. We have done this for a number of areas: the CCI Placements team created a learning path based on competencies students need for finding a placement, a similar exercise was done for the student sports club committees. LinkedIn also provide mapping against frameworks used in Higher Education, such as the Jisc Digital Capability Framework and the framework for Researcher Development and Doctoral Skills. As well as this LinkedIn have developed course mapping against the range of activities for a typical university, things like teaching skills, skills for student success, professional development, project management and many other areas.

Next Steps

Have a go at creating your own collections or learning paths or using some of the ones set up by Linkedin Learning. If you think you could benefit from the Admin access and you want to create collections and learning for groups of students or staff contact ittraining@port.ac.uk for further help. Let us know also if you’d like to take advantage of the mapping service and get LinkedIn Learning content mapped to specific skills and competencies for your areas. Lastly check out the Linkedin Learning landing page and the collections and learning paths created by University colleagues.

For further reading on Linkedin Learning, then check out these previous posts:

LinkedIn Learning – Change

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – University of Portsmouth LinkedIn Seminar

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – Goodbye Lynda, hello LinkedIn Learning

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – Digital Capability Discovery Tool

Adrian Sharkey: @adrianjsharkey

Different coloured wall lights spelling out the word google

Guest Blogger: James Lenthall – Google Apps Script

January 20, 2020 / James Lenthall / 0 Comments

Google Apps Script (GAS) is an extension for some Google Suite applications that allow for customisation. It could be compared to macros for Office or ExtendScript for Adobe. My experience of using it is mostly through Google Sheets so that’ll be my focus.

It’s incredibly versatile allowing you to read and write data, create your own functions, menus, pop ups, side bars and even entire web sites. This combined with integration that’s readily available with other Google services makes for an impressive toolkit for creating solutions for a wide range of tasks.

Why should you use it? Being cloud based with the ability to save versions as you work there’s no worry about losing anything, plus you can edit from anywhere. If you regularly do repetitive tasks, part of, or perhaps the entire task could be automated. Google forms don’t have the functionality you’re after? Build your own that can also populate a sheet. Trying to work out post dates? A custom function can automate that based on another cell’s data. Perhaps the most compelling reason to give it a try, taken from “7 Reasons Why Google Apps Script is a Great First Programming Language to Learn”; there’s no setup required and it’s completely free.

If you are already familiar with front end web development then it is quick and easy to pick up. GAS is entirely written in JavaScript. It’s very well documented so finding your way around is easy. There’s also sites such as Stack Overflow for assistance as more often than not, someone else has already asked the question you have.

I know there have been other cases in the University where it has been used to email all users on a spreadsheet or simply whichever row you’re on. Personally, as a follower of Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principles I use GAS or similar tools anytime I have a repetitive task.

To give a very specific case where publishing a Google Sheet as a web application has helped. In our team as we handle all the drop boxes, instead of having administrators update a spreadsheet and send us emails of changes each time or not at all, we have them fill out a form and overnight the developers are sent a single email with a list of requests.

If you’re ever thinking “there’s got to be a better way,” Apps Script might be your answer.

If this is something you’re interested in and want to find out more, email: james.lenthall@port.ac.uk

Feature image: Photo by Arthur Osipyan on Unsplash

12 Days of Christmas – Learning and Teaching Advent calendar

November 29, 2019 / Alana Aldred / 0 Comments

So… December is almost upon us, and this year the TEL team, along with AcDev, have decided to create a ‘12 days of Christmas’ Learning and Teaching Advent Calendar, full of useful resources to support you in your practice as you countdown to Christmas!

We will be releasing a new advent window every working day – We hope you enjoy our festive offerings, and if so please share!

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – University of Portsmouth LinkedIn Seminar

November 11, 2019 / Adrian Sharkey / 0 Comments

LinkedIn Services to Support University of Portsmouth Students and Staff

On Friday October 25th we had a visit from Ralph Blunden the Relationship Manager for LinkedIn. Since 2017 the University has been using Lynda, an online resource with thousands of courses on business, creative and technical skills. Lynda had been owned by LinkedIn for sometime and this summer, Lynda moved over to the LinkedIn Learning platform. Ralph offered to present on how LinkedIn Learning and LinkedIn could be used to support both students and staff and we had a great turnout from all around the University willing to listen.

There are now over 30,000 courses on LinkedIn with up to 40 new ones being added every week. The new platform personalises learning by making recommendations a lot more relevant, these are based on previous learning, on what is popular in the University and if a LinkedIn account is connected – recommendations are based on the skills shown on the user’s account. When courses are completed a badge can be added to a LinkedIn profile, which is particularly useful for students in order to show employability skills to potential employers.

LinkedIn have 23 million accounts in the UK, while only around 10% of these are active at any time it represents a significant section of the working population. Around 70% of employers recruit using social media showing a professional presence for employability and making connections is essential. With Industry 4.0 and changes about to happen because of emerging technologies like AI – skills requirements are increasingly fluid – Linkedin data shows the average skill having a shelf life of 5 years. While hard skills are still important, the most in demand skills for employers is creativity along with other soft skills such as critical thinking, being able to learn, teamwork and adaptability.

LinkedIn are aiming for their services to compliment learning for students and staff in HE. LinkedIn Learning can supplement in class learning, allow opportunities for flipped classrooms, support accreditation and professional development for staff. It can promote employability and placement skills for students and encourage engagement with alumni, allowing students to make important professional connections.

There a number of ways we could leverage LinkedIn Learning to target certain areas by packaging courses and creating collections/playlists or utilising the existing learning paths. Teaching excellence could include blended learning, flipped classrooms, instructional design and VLE training. Digital capabilities can be packaged, staff development and employability for students also. LinkedIn offer a mapping service, where if we supply the competencies we’re looking to develop they will map the appropriate courses against them, allowing the creation of collections/playlists.

For further support/assistance with LinkedIn Learning contact:

adrian.sharkey@port.ac.uk

Twitter: @adrianjsharkey

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/adrianjsharkey/

Image Credit: supplied by LinkedIn

The icon which says In Learning with Lynda.com content

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – Goodbye Lynda, hello LinkedIn Learning

July 15, 2019 / Adrian Sharkey / 1 Comment

Two years ago the University implemented Lynda.com, an online library containing over 14,000 courses on business, technical and creative skills. Over 7,500 staff and students have taken advantage of around 19,000 hours of learning and nearly 280,000 individual videos. Sadly, however, from August Lynda is no more.

Fortunately, none of the great content accessed by staff and students is going. It is simply being moved to a new platform – LinkedIn Learning. This has a lot of new features and advantages, which will be outlined in further communication. Before seeing LinkedIn Learning though, it is worth having a look at some of Lynda’s greatest hits.

Top Courses

For the whole University, Excel Essentials comes out on top of the most viewed courses. This is followed by programming courses, which make up a few in the top 10. The trend in the most-used courses is for programming and understanding data, although it’s good to see skills like Critical Thinking and Project Management featuring. The skills that are in demand mirror the skills that universities should be developing in students and staff around Digital Capability. For more information on the Jisc Digital Capability Framework, and to help students or staff get a tailored report on their own strengths and weaknesses, check out the Digital Capability Discovery Tool.

Use By Faculty

All Faculties have adopted the use of Lynda, but usage is highest where the content relates directly to taught courses.

In Technology and CCI many courses relate to specialist software such as AutoCAD, design, animation or programming – skills directly related to the type of courses taught.

Lynda contains a big section of courses on Business skills, so Business and Law can take advantage of the range of Marketing courses.

Usage in Humanities is quite a bit less, but students are using the courses for applications such as G-suite and SPSS. One way to encourage usage would be to tailor playlists around the kind of skills students need for study and employability, link them to course Moodle pages so they’re readily available. This is something the IT Training team can help with.

BAL

Excel 2016 Essential Training

Advanced Grammar

Creating and Giving Business Presentations

CCI

3DS Max 2018 Essential Training

Cert Prep: Adobe Certified

Associate – Photoshop (2017) Learning Design Research

Hum

Google Drive/Docs/Slides

Word 2016 Essential Training

SPSS for Academic Research

SCI

AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

ArcGIS Pro Essential Training

Programming Foundations:Fundamentals

TEC

Synchro Essential Training

Xcode9 Essential Training

ArchiCAD Essential Training

Mini Case Studies

Nadim Bhakshov, Teaching Fellow, School of Computing

Nadim has, for some time, looked at alternatives to the classic textbook. A well written textbook – as we all know – is a huge benefit to teaching complex material. For a few years now Nadim has been experimenting with Lynda. He has offered students the occasional supplementary video from Lynda to support his teaching. This year, however, he decided to find some learning paths and courses on Lynda and provide parallel material for students.The idea was to use Lynda as a supplement to provide another perspective to what was being taught in lectures and practicals.

After spending more time looking at Lynda, listening to student feedback and looking to establish better integration, Nadim is now working on the ‘alternative to a textbook’ approach more seriously. Next year, he hopes to replace the classic textbook with learning paths and courses from Lynda and use Lynda in his own teaching.

Lee Woods, Associate Dean (Students), Faculty of Technology

In the Faculty of Technology, Lynda links have been embedded in Moodle for student induction and the U/F students. In the School of Civil Engineering and Surveying, all courses have AutoCAD and technical drawing Lynda.com resources embedded into the appropriate Moodle Units.

Lee has used Lynda videos directly in the teaching of his units, International Built Environment Fieldwork (IBEF) and Transportation Engineering. There are a series of videos on Lynda around urban planning. Lee has played sections of these in lectures as a teaching aid. Part of the IBEF unit is a field trip to Copenhagen, and there is a video in Lynda, part of the Urbanised course that directly relates to the trip.

Sarah Harris and Emily Parry, Business & Law and Technology Placement Offices

Sarah used Lynda to point students in the right direction for resources to help with skills for placement interviews and assessment centres. Lynda was also used throughout the year to help students build confidence in their abilities. Emily embedded links to Lynda on their Moodle page emphasising employability and soft skills generally. Specific links were added for GDPR, Excel, communication skills and email communication.

The Lynda resources were also used to support and consolidate learning from the Excel trainer led sessions that Sarah and Emily arranged for their students.

LinkedIn Learning Upgrade

The upgrade to LinkedIn Learning from Lynda is planned to take place on August 1st. The content is the same as Lynda but it offers a new interface and range of new features, making learning more personalised and relevant to your study or work. There will be an option to connect a personal LinkedIn account with LinkedIn Learning – this means that learning history acquired at the University can be kept on the personal account, even when students or staff leave. Another advantage would be the more personalised recommendations based on the skills from the LinkedIn account. The only information the University will see from a personal LinkedIn account will be the profile picture. The alternative is just to choose not to connect and use LinkedIn Learning in exactly the same way as Lynda has been used up until now.

There will be more communications on LinkedIn Learning and all its features. In the meantime, keep an eye on www.port.ac.uk/linkedinlearning and the Myport article to stay up to date.

Image Credit: supplied by LinkedIn

cartoon tablet with a hand pointing at the start arrow

Print-based booklet to accessible online resource

June 13, 2019 / Will Maltby / 0 Comments

Introduction

As an online course developer I recently had the task of creating an accessible online version of a print-based Wellbeing information booklet which Marketing had produced, which as one might expect, was quite heavy on graphics and styling.

The first page provides a good idea to what the 28 page PDF copy looks like:

What is an accessible document?

An accessible document is both simplified in the literal sense in terms of visual presentation and in a technical one to meet specific criteria for accessibility software. The former involves making sure things like making headings and fonts clear/bold and images have proper alt text to explain what they are. Technical concerns are things like making sure the document has proper metadata, has a logical ordering of text for screen readers, and is properly tagged. These concerns can be addressed using common word processing software, such as in this case, Microsoft Word 2016 and Adobe Acrobat DC.

Checking for accessibility

To check the document, the Blackboard Ally plugin for moodle was used. The original document had a score of just 8%:

However, it should be noted that this number is derived purely from the number of occurrences of problematic instances, rather than a rating of how readable it is per se. The Ally tool does provide some useful guidance on how to fix the errors, such as explaining what each issue is, what it means, and how to practically fix it.

Converting to alternative formats with Blackboard Ally

A great key feature, as used on this task, is the ability to automatically attempt to convert the document to an accessible version of your desired format.

The HTML format was exported in this case, and the result was a fairly good rendition of just the basic text with foreground images kept. However, there were some critical errors in the conversion which meant that more than simply a post editing tidy up was needed. For example, the information from the table cells in this document didn’t export in a structured format and so the information was completely unreadable.

Original (left) versus Ally conversion to HTML:

As a result the document would need some manual re-entering of text to finish it off.

Editing with Word 2016

To begin with, the Ally HTML output was opened in Word 2016 as good starting point. The first job was to just go through and make sure all text had been properly converted. This was the most time consuming part of the whole processed, followed by subsequent proofing.

With that done, it was then down to solve the technical issues using Word’s built in accessibility tools.

This tool checks things such as whether tags are added, and more subtle things like whether a table has a heading row, and/or whether it’s properly marked up as such for screen readers. This is mostly a case of clicking each fault and either automatically fixing it (as in the case of meta tags) or manually fixing (the table headings had been stripped by the Ally conversion and so had to be manually re-entered as heading rows).

Once everything has been checked/ticked off, it’s then a case of exporting it as a PDF document.

At this point the advanced saving options panel was used to make sure the PDF would have the correct accessibility features by adding structure tags:

Now, in an ideal world, this would be the end of the process. However, Word 2016 falls short right at the final step here as for some bizarre reason, it fails to add a title in the metadata. You can certainly add a title in Word, however, it seems to be ignored when converted to PDF. Due to this Adobe Acrobat DC had to be used to finished it off, but this was partly the original intention anyway in order to ‘run it by a 2nd pair of eyes’ so to speak.

Finalising with Adobe DC

To finish off, the outputted PDF was opened with Adobe Acrobat DC which has its own accessibility tools.

This flagged up a few more problems and was able to auto correct them. It also enabled me to add the title metadata and then finally export the finished PDF.

The finished result

A 100% perfect score in Blackboard Ally!

The resultant document should now be 100% compatible with related accessibility assistive software. The image shown here has been properly tagged with alt text to explain what it’s representing, and so is perfectly acceptable in an accessible document.

It’s important to remember that accessible documents do not necessarily have to be pure text. And whilst the focus here is ultimately making visual content accessible for the visually impaired, there’s no harm in adding a little well conforming colour.

Image credit:
Header Banner, https://www.jisc.ac.uk, taken Feb 2019

Category: Digital literacy (Page 1 of 3)

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