Flipped Classroom: An Approach to Teaching and Learning

‘Flipped Classroom‘ is a term that refers to the restructuring of teaching in order to maximise the benefit of contact time between students and tutors. In a ‘flipped classroom’ the’ homework’ and ‘lecture’ elements of a traditional teaching approach are reversed, with the students engaging with the required information as pre-work so that the contact time can focus on…

Archiving Blackboard Organisation Sites

Each year we archive Blackboard organisation sites from the previous academic year. This is to clean up the view for staff and students and ensure the correct Blackboard sites are used in the coming year. This year, Blackboard organisation sites from 2016/7 will be archived on Wednesday 11th October. This means that they will disappear…

What’s new in Blackboard? Summer 2016

Following the Blackboard upgrade (scheduled from 6pm on Friday 5th to midday on Sunday 7th August 2016), there will be some changes to functionality and in the way in which help and support is provided and presented in shuspace and Blackboard. Help and support The Bb support ‘tab’ has moved to the right-hand side of…

Changes to Bb Support in Blackboard

Following the upcoming Blackboard upgrade (scheduled from 6pm on Friday 5th to midday on Sunday 7th August 2016), there will be changes to the way help and support articles are presented within Blackboard. ‘Where has the Bb Support tab gone?’ The Bb Support tab will move to the right-hand side of the screen and will be…

Change in Blackboard upgrade date

Due to a lengthier upgrade process than usual this year, IS&T need further time to do testing on the Blackboard upgrade. As a result we have had to move the upgrade from its usual date in early July to be the weekend of 5-7 August. The upgrade will start at the end of the day…

A woman wearing a computer headset

Screencasts as an Essay Alternative

A guest post by Roberta E Taylor on the Assessment Journey Programme (AJP) blog has just been published and describes her experience of replacing a 4000 word essay-based assessment with a short screencast. Roberta describes the background to the assessment, the approach taken to introduce students to screencasting concepts and techniques and the creative skills that…

Jisc Summer of Student Innovation competition

Jisc’s Summer of Student Innovation programme awards money and mentoring opportunities to students with either an idea about how technology could improve study or general student life, or a completed product that they would like to pilot within an educational setting. The participants work in small teams to implement their proposed project and, in addition to…

Create ebooks in Google Docs

Google has just added a new feature to Google Docs that should make it much easier to create ebooks for use on tablets, phones, Kindle-style devices, PCs and laptops. Google has added the option to export documents in the ePub format, which is the international standard for ebooks and so is supported by most software and…

SHU project featured in 2016 Horizon Report

Each year, the New Media Consortium (NMC) works with a panel of academics and technologists to identify developing trends in technology-supported pedagogy that are likely to have significant impact on learning and teaching over the next five years, challenges to technology adoption and trends accelerating technology adoption. The 2016 Higher Education edition was published online last week,…