karen I don’t really understand how we got to the end of August (well, nearly) already. It feels like minutes ago we were welcoming the summer in with our new intern cohort and today is the day that most of our summer internships finish. I can’t tell you how much I love and appreciate the opportunity … Read more
The numbers have been crunched, the results are in. We’ve had record usage of our lecture recording service by our staff and students this year! We’ve had a whopping 40,160 recordings created since June 2024 and a massive 28,945,731 minutes of lectures watched in the same time frame. Of course, our lecture recording service is … Read more
I’ve had an exciting week so far (and it’s only Thursday), in a good way rather than a bad exciting week (which sometimes happens but is less fun….!). We had 3 new interns join us in DLAM (David, Hera and Otis) more about that in a future blog post) to join Tallulah who is continuing … Read more
I’ve long been interested in the value of AI and where and when it is particularly useful or gimmicky. Given the impact of AI on the environment (and costs), I often reflect on whether the AI input is worth-the-impact. I have been using ELM to help tidy up and reword documents, I typically heavily edit … Read more
Many of you will be aware of our FLORA project (if you aren’t, find out more on Melissa’s helpful FLORA blog post). Named after Flora Stevenson, a pioneer of education for girls and women but also a quirky acronym – Feedback, Learning, Online Rubrics and Assessment. FLORA was really our chance to review and reflect, … Read more
I wrote a blog post in January 2023 (where did the time go!?!) about the work we’ve been doing on data retention for our services. Work has continued in the background and currently we are almost at the point of: Automating the deletion of courses and users in Learn. Sean has heroically been manually deleting … Read more
When I went to university, we didn’t have lecture recording. To be honest, I’ll admit that when I went to university, the ‘AV kit’ in a room was an overhead projector and a chalk board. I struggled with lectures. They were often boring to my 18 year old self and in some subjects they went … Read more
AI is getting more accessible (as in more easily available or pushed-down-our-throat, depending on your perspective). My home Windows 11 laptop now has the ‘free’ version of copilot on it, in the taskbar, pretty obviously it’s also available in the Bing search and I’m expecting Apple Intelligence to drop onto my phone imminently (I believe … Read more
After a conversation with Tracey Madden in the dim and distant past, I’ve been more and more interested in the impact our services have on the environment. Our Web and Communications Section in LTW have had some very talented ‘green’ interns this summer and I’ve been lucky enough to get a bit of time to … Read more
On the 19th of July (past Friday) we had a global IT outage which impacted hospitals, trains, air travel, supermarkets and many other businesses. It seems like it was caused by a small/inconspicuous update to a bit of anti-virus software for Windows operating systems which seemed to ‘break’ Windows. Although the issue has been fixed, … Read more