Utilizing exported data from teaching and learning systems

Posted on by Tyrone Knight

Over the years I have seen and responded to academic and senior management interest in usage data to support teaching and learning. Digital tools often provide access to data to provide insight to how they are being used. This helps better manage our time and effort, as well as resource. For this post, I have asked Benoit Sharp, the ITS trainer, to contribute and help promote the support and resources the University offer.

Having already mentioned analytics in Online teaching spaces: Exploring the digital myths, Microsoft Excel allows us to view data in a manageable and meaningful way. Excel files are often referred to as workbooks, which can contain one to many worksheets. Good management of these worksheets, help us utilise these in the longer term. Data can be sorted into one or multiple fields/columns to make it easier to analyse.

Data, for example Panopto usage data, can have filters added to reduce what we see to specific areas of interest. There are other options available to manage and view, but another of my favourites is the freeze panes option, which allows me to be sure what fields the data is part of with large volumes of data. There is often a need to do more with exported data, like make checks and extract parts of it, and this is where functions and formulas come in. Here are some examples:

  • SUM is useful for quickly totalling a range’s values.
  • SUMIF allows totalling of numerical data based on data in another range.
  • COUNT allows us to count up numeric instances, and similarly COUNTIF will count instances but based on a criteria.
  • VLOOKUP allows us to use multiple data tables, to bring across data, where a column value (like a name or id) exists in both tables.
  • IF can be used by itself, or expanded upon, to create a field with data from checking another field (you could check if people are revising based on recent dates).

My final functions to mention are LEFT and RIGHT, which allow you to create a field with data and take a number of characters from another field, either starting from the left or the right. More information on functions and formulas in Excel can be found in this video Excel Formulas and Functions Quick Tips.

A quick point about General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when gathering data and analysing it. Any use of personal data must be necessary and proportionate, so Canvas data use should be reasonable, and usually linked with teaching and assessment. In most cases you should be making the data anonymous and creating your own summaries. If you have any queries about data protection, please contact GDPR@sussex.ac.uk  

Support for analysing data and understanding Excel is available to you at Sussex. EE can help you understand what data is available and how to act upon your findings (contact your School LT or email tel@sussex.ac.uk). ITS can provide you with access to data (where needed) and will offer training material to develop your skills. You can contact ITS by visiting the ITS website and clicking on the ‘Contact us for help’ tile to open a support ticket.

LinkedIn Learning has loads of helpful tutorials on how to use Excel – Benoit would recommend Excel: Managing and Analyzing Data to start.

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Posted in Apps and tools

Tips to avoid death by Announcement

Posted on by Rachael Thomas
Image generated by Dall-E-2

Do you use Canvas Announcements to let your students know about events your school is running? Are students not responding to important announcements, only for you to find that they have disabled that notification channel?

A Student Communications Survey by Middlesex University London found that almost a quarter of students say that they receive too many emails, with 14% opting not to access their university email account on their phones. It is important to keep students informed, but with so much information to share, it can be easy to fall into the trap of posting too many announcements in your VLE. This can be overwhelming for students, and it can also make it difficult for them to find the information they need.

Feedback from students in a recent University of Sussex Education Committee Report states that ’students are receiving too many emails‘ and that ’lecturers have complained that students are not reading emails because they are being too overwhelmed by the mass‘. Announcements about school events were specifically cited as contributing to the volume. Students (and staff!!) reach ‘announcement fatigue’ which results in them muting all announcements from certain channels.

Here are a few tips on how to avoid posting too many announcements:

  1. Only post announcements that are truly important. Before you post an announcement, ask yourself if it’s necessary. If you’re not sure, err on the side of caution and don’t post it.
  2. Group related announcements together. If you have several announcements, group them together in one post. This will make it easier for students to find the information they need.
  3. Apply a time limit to your announcements. Regularly review and delete old announcements after a set period – the recommended period is two weeks, maximum. This limits the amount of scrolling students need to do to reach important information on the page. Operate a ’one in – one out‘ policy to stay on top of announcement administration, with a limit on the number of announcements in play at any time.
  4. Keep your announcements short and to the point. Get to the point quickly to make it easy for students to find the information they need.
  5. Use the Canvas Course Calendar to hold information about events. Store school events in an account calendar to avoid duplication and instruct students how they can subscribe to the calendar when you send out other messages.
  6. Use clear and concise language. When you write an announcement, be sure to use clear and concise language. Avoid using jargon or technical terms that your students might not understand.

By following these tips, you can avoid posting too many VLE announcements and keep your students informed without overwhelming them.

If you need any help to investigate ways you can reduce the number of announcements you post, please contact your Learning Technologist or email the Educational Enhancement team on tel@sussex.ac.uk.

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Posted in Apps and tools

Digital literacy and capability in school-leavers

Posted on by Helen Morley
Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

The Educational Enhancement team has published two blog posts recently which address digital literacy. Dan Axson wrote about the expectations on university faculty and Ty Knight wrote about the experience of our undergraduates. I will attempt to complete the trilogy this week by looking at the levels of digital literacy an 18-year-old leaving a school in England is likely to have.

When I first worked in EdTech towards the end of the noughties, a rather catchy and exciting term was emerging in our conversations: children born after 1990ish were  ‘Digital Natives’; they had spent the entirety of their lives in a digital world and were believed (did anyone really believe this?) to be as comfortable with electronics as my dear old grandad would have been with a yoyo. Of course we were blithely overlooking the fact that my grandad was not born able to use a yoyo and he had to be taught its art, much in the way he taught my brother (born after 1990) the very same. At a recent event held at the University of Sussex by ICT for Education, Tig Williams, a school teacher in Computing, explained very clearly: ‘There’s no such thing as a digital native; if you give a six-year-old an Excel spreadsheet they will not just start auto-formatting the cells.’

Tig went on in his interesting presentation to explain some facts about ICT in schools which shocked me, and I spent most of my working life in schools. Having carried out some further research, I ask if you knew the following:

  • It is mandatory for high schools in England to offer GCSE Computing and not doing so can cause them to fail an Ofsted inspection.
  • While computing must be taught to children aged 5-16, it is not necessary to choose it in ‘options*’.
  • Schools have such difficulty recruiting Computer Science teachers that many of them cannot offer GCSEs in the course.
  • According to a 2022 Government report, over 50% of teachers delivering the Computing course at secondary school do not have a higher qualification in the subject.
  • The shortage of resources and other factors can mean that a lot of younger children are taught shorter courses in Computing than the National Curriculum requires.
  • Schools with higher rates of economic hardship in the community are less likely to offer Computing as a GCSE subject.
  • In 2022, approximately 16% of GCSE students took exams in Computing.
  • Approximately 4/5 of students who take GCSE Computing are boys.

Clearly this is not the Brave New World we envisioned for 2023 when those BBC Basics were wheeled into the primary schools of the 1980s, but what does it mean for the school leavers who join us every September and whom we assume come with levels of digital literacy which do not reflect the reality?

It is important to note that the GCSE in Computing is far from the only indicator of digital literacy and that students who can code, program or hack are not necessarily going to find our apps and platforms easy. Indeed, the opposite can be true. It is also important to make it clear that while our Freshers may arrive with gadgets and devices that could outperform an early space rocket, that doesn’t mean they know how the tools actually work. I’m reminded of a job I had over ten years ago where I trained supermarket cashiers on how to use and support the self-scan machines. As you can imagine, a lot of my learners saw themselves as ‘not very technical’, products of a ‘different education’ and even ‘too old’ to learn. It was a common refrain that I was ‘wasting [my] time’ and that only ‘they [gesture to the Saturday kids] would understand’. In response I would ask the group if anyone had ever used a twin-tub washing machine; many had. I would select someone to explain to us the process and they would recount, word-for-word and step-by-step, the entire task. They would include moments when they had to use their judgement to change the water, the temperature, whatever, and they would do so with the tone of a true expert. We would then ask one of the teenagers to explain how the washing machine in their home worked: ‘You press the button’ would be the reply and thereby demonstrate that access to a technologically advanced bit of kit does not make the user advanced.

Our students have access to some of the most sophisticated tools ever created and their exposure to digital content is unparalleled. They are consumers and creators, but it is unfair to assume they are experts. If you are reading this and are one of the tutors here at Sussex, perhaps consider putting some time aside to make sure your students know how to find the resource you’re directing them to or how to use a digital resource they might be unfamiliar with. As always, if you’d like to explore ways to use digital technology in your teaching and would like some support in that, you can reach us at tel@sussex.ac.uk.

*options = colloquial term for the subjects students choose to take for GCSE, also used to refer to the process of selecting these subjects.

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Posted in digital skills

Generative AI in education: an introduction

Posted on by George Robinson
Image created using AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made huge strides recently, with the rise of AI Chatbots such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft Bing becoming commonplace. Prominent tech figures, such as Bill Gates, have claimed that this is the start of a new epoch for humanity, the age of AI, and could be as seismic a shift as the industrial revolution.

Within the context of education, AI is both exciting and worrying in equal measure. Therefore, it is worth examining some of the potential opportunities and issues that might be presented to us. This blog post will hopefully serve as an introductory look at generative AI and how we should seek to approach it.

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI encompasses AI driven tools that can generate content which could take the form of text, images, video, audio, code or other forms.

One of the most common tools using Generative AI are chatbots, these are AI driven bots that users can chat to by giving them questions, the bot will then provide a response and the user can then ask follow up questions which the bot can respond to. So you could ask the bot to tell you everything it knows about the city of Brighton and Hove, or to write you a song about the planet Jupiter from the perspective of the Moon, or give you a thousand word essay on the work of Keats, and it would produce a response. View a recording of a bot responding to a query. 

These chatbots are essentially language models that are trained on a huge corpus of information, often taken from the internet or another source, when a bot creates a response, it doesn’t really understand the question but rather the is using its corpus to locate the words with the greatest possibility of being related to the user’s question and being related to the prior words in its response. In the image below you can see the probability the bot has given to the most likely words and it will use this to generate its response. 

showcasing word probability selection for an AI Chat bot

The main thing to keep in mind is that these bots are not truly sentient or alive, bots don’t understand what they are saying but rather present a very convincing illusion. 

How should we approach Generative AI? 

AI will be something we will have to deal with as an institution. The University of Sussex is taking the approach that rather than attempting to ignore or ban AI we should embrace it and use it to enhance teaching and assessment. There are a few good reasons why we should do this.

The first is that there is no effective way to ban or ignore AI. Students are aware of AI tools and will start to use them regardless of what we do. It is also incredibly hard and potentially impossible for a tool to identify if a piece of work has been generated by AI and any tools that do emerge are quickly being made irrelevant due to the speed at which AI tools are improving. Engaging in a cat and mouse game of AI tools and AI detectors would simply be a massive waste of time and effort.

A better approach is to educate students on what constitutes appropriate use of AI and what would constitute misconduct, so they know when and how it’s appropriate to use such tools. If we engage in transparent conversations with students then the vast majority are likely to be honest and transparent with us in return. Student want their assessments and degrees to have authenticity and integrity and are as concerned as teaching staff that this integrity is maintained.

By embracing AI we also level the playing field by showing all students how to use AI appropriately rather than creating a digital divide where more tech savvy students will understand how to use such tools and other students won’t, putting the second group at a potential disadvantage. If we embrace and educate around AI as a digital skill then we can close this divide. 

We also need to consider that AI will be everywhere in the next few years and students will need to know how to use it both within their careers and general life much in the same vein that using the internet is now a required skill for most aspects of life. We would be doing students a disservice if we didn’t prepare them for this. We need to equip students with the relevant digital skills to use AI in an ethical, critical and practical manner, just as they would have to use any other tool.

Educational Enhancement now has a page on our website Artificial Intelligence in teaching and assessment that includes a variety of information and resources, this will be continuously updated to keep abreast of new developments in what is a very fast moving technology. Also look out for further blog posts in this series which will further examine the opportunities and challenges of Generative AI within education. 

Please also reach out to our team if you have any questions or would like help using AI within your teaching and learning, contact us at TEL@sussex.ac.uk

Posted in AI

Flexible learning for teaching staff

Posted on by Anne Hole
Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay

It has always been difficult to find times and spaces to train staff in some of the tools and platforms they need to use in their teaching. Now, in addition to on-campus and online sessions the Educational Enhancement team are developing some ‘self-study’ courses. The courses are in Canvas and allow staff to enrol themselves.

Benefits of self-enrol / self-study courses.

The most obvious advantage of courses that can be accessed and studied asynchronously is that busy academics can develop important skills at times, and in locations that are most convenient for them.

More interactive than a resource on the EE website, a Canvas site allows us to include videos where appropriate, and quizzes to allow people to check their understanding. Anyone who has further questions about the content can then contact the team at tel@sussex.ac.uk.

As the courses are also developed asynchronously, Learning Technologists and Academic Developers in EE are able to work together on topics so the courses can explore the ‘why’ of digital learning topics alongside the ‘how’.

The latest course to be published, ‘Marking and Feedback (Canvas Turnitin and Canvas Online)’ is a great example of this, with advice on enhancing feedback practices alongside the technical aspects of marking online submissions. This will be particularly useful for new staff or anyone wanting to refresh their understanding ahead of the marking season.

The course looks at principles of effective marking and feedback as well as how to access marking; use Turnitin Feedback Studio and Canvas SpeedGrader; release marks and feedback and help students access their feedback. Sussex staff can enrol on the Marking and Feedback course here.

What other topics are available now and what’s next?

There are currently three other courses, with more to come. University of Sussex staff can enrol on:

  • Canvas essentials. Taking learners through the basics of editing a Canvas site including Navigation, module setup, Canvas’s Rich Content Editor, Pages and Files. Enrol on the Canvas Essentials course here.
  • Padlet for staff. Padlet is a versatile online platform that allows you to create collaborative digital boards (called padlets). Learn more about Padlet and how you might use it in your teaching in this course, including tips for Padlet activities, how to create a padlet, share it and/or embed it in Canvas. Enrol on the Padlet for staff course here.
  • Power up with podcasting.This course aims to equip you with the knowledge and ability required to be able to plan, record, edit and share your very own podcast, including getting started, using Audacity, using Anchor and considering accessibility. Enrol on the Power up with podcasting course here.

The team are now planning the next course which will look at Formative Assessment, including discussion of benefits and challenges as well as some ways to carry out formative assessment in class and online.

We have lots of ideas for other topics that could benefit from this form of delivery, but would be pleased to hear from staff what they think would be useful. If you have any queries about these courses or EE’s other events, workshops and seminars please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk.

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Posted in Professional Development

Say what you see: alternative text for complex images

Posted on by Faye Brockwell
Photo by ALAN DE LA CRUZ on Unsplash

When making digital content accessible, adding alternative text to images is key. But in a presentation on Demystifying alternative text for complex images at a recent Future Teacher session,  Matthew Deeprose from the University of Southampton showed how not all alternative text is equal, and how, in most cases, ALT text is not enough for more complex images such as graphs and flow charts.

What is alternative text?

Alternative text is the written text that appears in place of an image and conveys the same information as the original image. This is essential for people with visual impairment using a screen reader, or students who use Sussex’s Sensus access service to convert content into alternative formats, for example audio files. It’s also useful for students who are reading content using a weak internet connection, as alternative text will appear when images fail to load.

Writing alternative text for complex images

For some complex images, you may need more than just the ALT text function to add short text to your image. As when composing any alternative text, ask yourself why you included the chart or graph. Deeprose says to consider the purpose and intention of the chart or graph as follows:

  • If you’re using the image for visual interest, mark it as decorative.
  • If the chart or graph replicates text already in the document, then you should add a caption describing the essential content and context, and use the alt text feature to mark the image as decorative.
  • If the chart or graph supports or rationalises what is in the text, then we should write a brief alt text describing essentials of the image and use a caption or title.
  • If the chart or graph goes further than what is in the text, or you students to use the graph in some way, then you should write a brief alternative text describing the essentials, add a caption, and then provide a full description elsewhere in the document. Ideally you should also provide the tabular data that was used to generate the graph or chart.

Source: Deeprose, M. (2022) ‘ What is alternative text? How do I write it for images, charts, and graphs? (slide 27). Available at: https://matthewdeeprose.github.io/alt-text-and-images-charts-graphs.pptx (Accessed: 22 March 2022).

Examples

Writing alternative text for complex images can be time-consuming, and is best done at the time of creating the content. Deeprose describes the composition of alternative text as a creative writing process, with no perfect descriptions.

In this video they walk through some specific examples, including a line graph, Venn diagram, and flow chart (and even updates one of the examples when challenged by a member of the audience!)

Where to find out more

You can also contact our team at tel@sussex.ac.uk for support and further guidance.

Share your experience.

Have you suggestions for writing good alternative text for your discipline? Please share your experiences in the comments

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Posted in Accessibility

Online teaching spaces: Exploring the digital myths

Posted on by Tyrone Knight

From supporting staff with their Virtual Learning Environment module sites and related teaching tools, I have seen past experiences become barriers. I aim to explore some of the myths heard over my 14 years working in FE & HE across different institutions.

Student skills

We might assume students have the required skills for a task, but they have different learning journeys. You can support students by linking to training resources and referring to the more relevant sections. Doing this as early as possible and signposting during delivery helps students explore these in time. This can also be an opportunity for everyone to refresh their skills. You may also want to consider checking their skills, and How to assess students’ prior knowledge – Eberly Center – Carnegie Mellon University (cmu.edu) includes some ideas to adapt.

Who might benefit?

We shouldn’t assume that additional resources and assistive software only benefit those with additional needs. These should not create an advantage for some students, but be available to the whole group to benefit from. Some students choose not to register their additional learning requirements and others may not know they have them. The ‘support for all’ section in this article ‘We must embrace technology to make education easier, fairer and more inclusive’ | Jisc gives one example.

Including links to support materials or additional reading is not necessarily enough of an incentive for students to visit and read them, as learners have different motivations (as briefly noted in Principles Of Student Engagement In A Virtual Classroom (teachthought.com)). Consider where and when those support materials are more relevant. When linking to additional reading, promote in a sentence or two, the resource and its benefit, for example ‘it expands on … and will be of interest to …’.

Online discussions

Setting up discussion boards is not enough of an incentive for students to use them, and this was looked at in one of the team’s posts last year, How to encourage student engagement using Canvas discussion forums. They need a good reason to use spaces that aren’t part of the taught delivery, so why not make them part of this? We might worry that some students might misuse these spaces, but we can help support them on how to manage these, to help develop further skills. This post will also give you some ideas to think about this further, Online Discussion Forums | GSI Teaching & Resource Center (berkeley.edu)

Final thoughts

Try to debunk the myths. The covid lockdown significantly impacted the learning experience for students. This could have broken habits, changed expectations, and affected the skillsets students have. Asking your students and utilising analytics tools can help get to know your student groups.

I will end with mentioning that Canvas, and other teaching tools, like Panopto and Turnitin, provide analytics for academics (explored in this blog post on How Learning Analytics can aid your teaching). These provide an insight into how students are using resources and identifying gaps and opportunities. The following figures may surprise you. These show the Panopto lecture capture content viewed just across January and February 2023 at the University of Sussex:

  • View and Downloads: 196592
  • Unique viewers: 19026
  • Minutes delivered: 3845161.3

If you would like to talk to us about seeing and reflecting on the figures in your modules, or to discuss any of the above points, please contact your Learning Technologist or email tel@sussex.ac.uk.

Posted in Learning Technologies

Why we still need to talk about digital skills in 2023

Posted on by Daniel Axson

If you stand near me long enough, I’ll start talking about digital skills and if I had a soapbox, I’d be standing on it. I think it’s one of the most important areas of personal and professional development, however it’s one that’s given the least amount of love, which is precisely why I think it’s one of the most important.

If you work at a higher education institution, chances are the person specification for your job role requires you to have ‘excellent IT skills’, or similar. Whilst it’s great that we’ve moved on from ‘good with Microsoft Office’, what exactly does having excellent IT skills mean in practice, and if we’re honest, can we really say that we do?

Given that the focus of Educational Enhancement is on staff development, this is the lens for this post. Specifically digital skills and how they impact student skills development and experience. Whilst digital skills development may seem innocuous and sometimes irrelevant for one’s career progression, it has fundamental and long-lasting impact on your students’ experience and consequently their development of said skills. For the purposes of this post, I use the term digital skills, but in this context, you can replace that with digital literacies, capabilities and competencies if you see fit.

Why does it matter?

Let’s look at one specific set of skills as an example, digital accessibility. Nearly any digital content you create has the capacity to be accessible to a wider audience than it would otherwise have without some basic edits or adjustments for digital accessibility, in many cases it is a legal obligation.

Just a few examples of digital accessibility are:

  • Videos having closed captions,
  • Images having alternative text,
  • Text having read aloud option,
  • Colour contrast for legible text legible.
  • And of course much more.

Without such things some of your students simply can’t access and engage with your course material. Thus, creating digitally accessible content is a critical skill for staff to have.

Student experience? Check. But what about skills development?

I’ve highlighted why one digital skill is crucial for staff and how that affects the student experience. So how does staff having these skills help develop the same skills in our students? We’ll answer that with two things we expect from students when submitting written work. One, something most text editors do for us without us even thinking about it, check for spelling and grammar. Two, require references to be submitted in a very specific format. (Note: we’re focusing on written media for the sake of word count, but the following equally applies to other media types.)

As an HE institution, we’re well versed in requiring written work to be appropriately checked for spelling and grammar, many of us use the built in tools for auto correct and final checks before submitting work. Similarly great efforts are made to make sure we reference in a specific format. However, when it comes to digital accessibility, how often do we expect students to check their submissions for alt text in images, proper use of heading styles, tables formatted and used appropriately and so on? We could probably count on one hand, across the institution.

We know that some of our staff use and rely on assistive technologies and require digitally accessible content, so the question remains, why do we not ask this of our students? Creating digitally accessible content is more than just a desirable skill, in many cases, as we’ve noted, it is a legal requirement for someone who produces digital content. So, whether one uses assistive technology, require accessible alternative media or not, this is a critical skill we want our students to develop and why we need to still talk about digital skills in 2023.

Here are just a few examples of other skills that our students – and therefore we, need to make an effort to get to grips with:

  • Working with cloud storage,
  • Online safety and security,
  • Managing file types (crucial for assignment submissions),
  • Collaboration,
  • Video conferencing,
  • Making sense of developments in technology (AI assisted content creation?).

The list is much longer and probably growing, for a good overview of the breadth of skills, see the Jisc Digital Capabilities Framework.

Don’t be put off by this, you don’t have to be the fount of all digital skills knowledge. There are many sources of support for you, Educational Enhancement, IT Services, and LinkedIn Learning to name just a few. Additionally, colleagues across Skills Hub, The Library, Careers, Employability and Entrepreneurship teams as well as your own colleagues and students are all sources of support and guidance.

The mechanism for developing the skills is simple, it starts with you. It starts with a willingness to engage with it, a willingness to accept it is everyone’s responsibility and, as Jo Coldwell-Neilson says in her video, Developing students’ digital skills through online learning, don’t assume someone else is doing it in their modules – find the opportunities and run with them.

Call to action

Discuss digital skills in your next developmental meeting, what do you want to know and who are you going to get to help? Try and figure out what ‘excellent IT skills’ means for you and your subject area. Not having the skills is fine, not doing anything about it is not, because it’s our students who suffer.

Useful resources

  • TPCK framework (technological, pedagogical and content knowledge).
    Helps contextualise the skills required for teaching, learning and assessment, framing technical (or digital skills) amongst pedagogy and subject knowledge.
  • SAMR model: (substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition).
    Helps us categorise and therefore more purposefully address adoption of edtech within teaching and learning activity. As noted on the page, it’s best not seen as a hierarchy.
     
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Posted in Accessibility, digital skills

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Based on a work at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/tel/.