Case study: Building and rolling out the Ultra VLE template in the Department of Biology

Department of Biology
Amanda Barnes and Gareth Evans

Amanda Barnes and Gareth Evans provide an overview of how they approached the process of building and rolling out the Biology Department’s VLE template in collaboration with other members of their Ultra Adoption group, student interns, and the VLE transformation project team.

They describe how they utilised the resources available as part of the project to implement support for all module staff when building their module sites, aiming to achieve a higher level of consistency and accessibility.

Watch their presentation:

Building and rolling out the Ultra VLE template in the Department of Biology (Panopto viewer) (11 mins 44 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi, everyone. My name is Amanda Barnes. I'm a lecturer in the Department of Biology, and I'm going to tell you about our team of VLE Avengers and the project we've worked on in the age of Ultra as we've moved to the new Blackboard Ultra, for our sites for teaching.

So this has been a group project. It's not just been myself. So we've had a biology Ultra Adoption Group that's consisted of Gareth Evans, who is our Chair of Board of Studies, myself and Mike Nolan, who works in our student services team. And we've had a fantastic amount of support from two postgraduate research students, Lubna and Sanjana, who we've recruited to be our VLE support officers through funding on the VLE project. And they've done lots of the work that you'll see in creating attractive planners and banners for the module sites.

And to give you some context of the number of modules that we have in the department that we needed to create new sites for, we've got 58 modules across all stages of the degree programmes and we have a couple of community sites as well where we provide key information about assessments and studying in the department for both undergraduate and postgraduate students.

This is the timeline that we've been working on for the VLE Ultra project. So back in May and early summer, we created a template with the VLE team and we had all of our 58 module sites made. We also recruited our two postgraduate students, Lubna and Sanjana, that have been helping us with the project. They've been with us since early July, working 4 hours a week, and they meet with us fortnightly to discuss the progress of their work.

And the bulk of our time in the summer and early autumn was spent developing Module one sites. And then as we've moved into semester one, there's been support for the semester one sites in terms of captioning of recorded materials. And then we've been working to develop the semester two sites and our GTAs will stick with us in early 2024 as well to continue developing the semester two sites before teaching begins in February.

So one of the things we were really keen to work on was improving the consistency of the student learning experience across all the modules sites on the VLE. And that's because we've had quite a lot of differences in module sites previously. So lots of module sites had similar outlines where they had key information in left-hand menus and this involved things such as assessments, introductions, planners and discussion boards. And for the last few years, we have had a weekly structure to our modules so students know which week to go into during each term to find their learning materials. But when you delve a bit deeper into the different modules, you can see that we're all doing things a bit differently. So I've previously embedded Google Docs into our modules for weekly planners, we've had other modules use images that aren't very accessible for students with certain needs in their learning. Previous discussion boards were quite varied as well, so some individuals were using the discussion boards built into the VLE and we liked those because of the anonymity. And some individuals are using things such as Padlet, where you could have threads of comment on different module sites, but we wanted to work towards having something consistent on all our modules by building this into our templates.

And this image here is just to show you one of the modules that I teach on. It's a first year module and shows you the different elements that we've now built into our Ultra VLE sites across all the different modules. So all the modules in the planner have documents with key information about the modules. They've got module planners that are consistent and look the same. So I'll show you those in a second and they've been heavily created by our GTA interns that have helped us. And we've got key module information, key assessment information, where it's all set out in the same way. Reading lists, we've got lecture capture recordings built into the front page and then discussion boards again, which I'll go on to show you in a second.

And to support staff in developing the VLE, we tried to make the processes as straightforward as possible so they could use the support provided by VLE GTAs by submitting requests for the modules they needed support with and outlining the type of support they wanted help with, so things such as copying across materials from old VLE sites or looking at accessibility so checking whether hyperlinks worked whether documents were accessible by looking at Ally scores.

We put together frequently asked questions because we found quite quickly staff were able to get to grips with building the sites, but there were key things that they might struggle with because it wasn't immediately obvious where they were. So it took me, for example, a long time to find out how I embedded Panopto videos directly into a page using the content market, so that's gone on there. Hyperlinking into different sections felt a bit different. And making the VLE site available to students, that's not necessarily very obvious if you if you don't know where it is when you're looking for it.

We've also provided additional support for staff for captioning if they had any requests from students to caption lecture capture recordings by developing a pipeline using an open AI tool called whisper that's relatively good at correcting downloaded caption files from Panopto. And this is then some of the work that our VLE GTA interns had done for us. So their major project that we had when we recruited them is that they were going to be working on planners and banners and this gives you an overview of the different banners that they've created for module sites. So we had to work quite hard to make sure that they scaled properly because it's quite hard to put text into these banners. So we defined usable areas within the banners to make sure that when you access different module sites on a laptop, on an iPad or mobile phone, you could still see the module site name at the top. And we think they've done a fantastic job of just making them look really effective and distinctive when the students look at the different module pages.

The other thing the VLE interns have really heavily helped us with, is pulling together consistent planners for every module. So they build templates in Google sheets and then they embedded those into the relevant sections of the template for each of our modules. We've also created additional banners for the tops of different sections - So on the planners, this is consistently on every module site to help students get used to seeing planner information for the modules they're studying, and then they can see week by week the different activities, so what might be timetabled, the members of staff that are teaching them. And if there's any directed study, so any short videos or worksheets that we want students to work through, those are also captured there because they wouldn't be included on our timetable. And then that directly matches with the structure that the students will see as they scroll down the pages of the VLE and see the weekly content folders.

And we've got the same layout within every weekly folder. So they get used to seeing learning outcomes for the week, their learning materials, so those are embedded PowerPoint presentations from lectures, any worksheets and lecture capture recordings as well. Some staff have been put in in multiple choice quizzes each week as well for formative learning opportunities. So they really know every week where they're going to find the materials and what's going to be covered by linking together their timetables and the planners with the way the material's laid out on the VLE.

One of the challenges we've had when we've moved to Ultra for all our module sites is having an anonymous, and accessible discussion board as the built in discussion boards on the sites don't allow a student to submit a question anonymously. So to try and be as accessible as possible and make it as straightforward as possible for students. The approach we've had is to embed text into the discussion board part of our template to show students how we want them to submit questions. So when they go through to the discussion board part of the template, they'll be presented with a Google form for each module that's split into the different parts of the module with different staff that teach in it and opportunities to ask questions. So they go directly to the right person so they can open the form by clicking this hyperlink. And then what we do is we move the questions that are asked onto a Google doc that's been set up with accessible styles, that has any general questions at the top and then blocks the questions laid out clearly with question numbers. And we can add images to these as well where members of staff can answer the questions that pop through from students. And it keeps the anonymity that we used to have on the previous discussion boards.

So in terms of what we've learned from the project, we do really think that VLE Ultra is an improvement. We think it just looks crisper and nicer. The sites are now a lot better organised than we've had previously. It's quite nice how students can click through different documents in a weekly folder rather than needing to scroll and open lots of folders as they used to on the old VLE. But we do think it's still a bit clunky and quite hard to build and populate module sites as we get used to it.

And generally on the whole, it's been quite an easy adjustment from previous blackboard. There are some members of staff that have found it harder than others, but it hasn't felt the challenge we thought it might have been and it's actually been quite convenient that it's happened at the same time as M and S, because it's helped us start from a clean slate in developing new online learning materials.

We haven't had any specific feedback from students at this point to say how they have found the structure of our VLE pages, but we haven't had any negative feedback. We've done a pulse survey halfway through the semester where we ask students what's going well and what could be improved. And in previous years the VLE has popped up on this and it hasn't this time, so we're taking that as a win.

There are a few things that we've had some issues with and we've tried to come up with workarounds because of features that we used to have on Blackboard that are present in Ultra at the moment. So that includes using announcements and being able to schedule when an email would go out to students rather than having to either email or have it announced on the site. And we have lots of staff that will populate a section of learning materials, maybe want to time the release of certain parts of that, so, for example, solutions to workshop questions - have those appear after a teaching session. And it's harder to time the release of those when they're within a specific document and on their own document page.

We've been really happy to be able to involve GTAs in the process. So I think that's been a really nice learning opportunity for them to see the digital materials that we have to support our teaching.

And probably the most important point on this last slide is just to give a really big thank you to the VLE team that supported us through this project. So it's been various members of staff and some that have now left the VLE team. So big thanks to Jess, Matt, Lou, Foteini and Wayne for all the help that they've given us on the project. And thank you for listening. And if you've got some questions about this, feel free to email myself or Gareth Evans, and we're happy to answer those for you. Thank you.