Written by Sam Pilgrim, Learning Technologist (FHM)
As Learning Technologists, we are asked to become involved in a wide variety of projects. One recent example is a research project I started working on in my previous role in Information Systems Services (ISS) and continued after my move to the Faculty of Health and Medicine (FHM).
The IPOF (Improving Peer Online Forums) Project on Mental Health Forums is a research project led by Professor Fiona Lobban in conjunction with NHS Berkshire’s SHaRON team, to investigate mental health forums and ways to improve them. More information on IPOF, its aims and outputs, can be found on the Lancaster University FHM research pages.
I worked with the research team and co-design group to develop a forum moderator training package using Xerte, online software that allows a user to create interactive learning packages. The package consisted of nine modules developed by lived experience experts and forum moderators along with LU academic and research staff on different topics including:
the moderator role;
moderator support;
mental health on online forums;
expressing empathy through language;
managing risk;
managing challenging situations;
encouraging activity; and
a final quiz.
Each module was reviewed and amended by the co-design group at monthly meetings, and the final design and content emerged from the feedback discussions.
Graphics and animations created by others in the team were embedded into the training package to aid understanding and increase engagement.
The final package was handed over to the NHS Berkshire who are now in the process of publishing it to their website.
The front page of one of the Xerte packages entitled ‘Mental Health Forum Moderator Training’
The University has purchased staff licenses to Mentimeter, an interactive polling solution. This gives staff free access to all the features of Mentimeter if they sign up for an account with the University. Since its launch in October, use of the tool has been growing across the University.
Mentimeter gets students more actively involved in sessions whether they be seminars, lectures or workshops. Students can type in a code or scan a QR code and get right to the activity. It is particularly useful for engaging large groups especially when some of those students may be anxious to speak out or ask a question in front of their peers.
Mentimeter offers a range of features and activities such as:
Multiple choice quizzes
Word Cloud creation
Pin on an image
Q&A sessions
Quick forms
Open ended questions and more!
How does it work?
Once you have requested your license and completed the sign up, you will find that the Mentimeter “Home” page has a simple interface. An activity or presentation in Mentimeter is known as a Menti.
A screenshot of the Mentimeter home page when a user is logged in.
To start your own Menti, click the black “New Menti” button. This will take you to a new presentation. The first slide of the presentation gives you three options:
Start from scratch
Use a template
Import slides (from a PowerPoint, Keynote or PDF)
When you click “start from scratch”, this gives you the option to choose from a range of interactive questions, quiz competitions or content slides. Once you have chosen an option, you can use the right-hand menu to begin setting up the question/activity/presentation.
You can add as many slides to the presentation as you wish and have a range of content types. As with any presentation, you can change the size and colour of the text as well as the background. You can include images too. There are options to have “themes” and to adapt the participation options to your needs. For example, you can change the settings so students can select multiple options and you can show responses live or hide responses until everyone has answered.
It certainly is a solution that is easy to use and play around with. Nevertheless, there are lots of guides and support out there too. A good place to start looking for support is the ASK page on Mentimeter.
Why move from my free license?
You may have been using Mentimeter for years now and be using a free license like that you signed up for. It is worth switching your account to a University one for several reasons:
With a license, you are no longer limited to 50 participants on your Menti at one time. You can have up too 10,000 participants!
You can access the moderation feature to assess the suitability of responses
You get access to a wider range of activities such as the “quick form”.
You can export results to Excel
You can collaborate with other colleagues to create presentations together
The University of Lancaster has also done due diligence when agreeing to purchase licenses from this company and therefore, it is more secure to use this one than any other third party solution that may not have been investigated.
How can I learn more on how to use it?
On Friday 22nd November, I gave a training session to Faculty of Health and Medicine (FHM) staff on how to use Mentimeter. It was part of a series of short, lunchtime sessions on a range of topics. The recording of this session is available to view on eStream. If you need further help or support on the use of this tool, get in touch with myself if you are in FHM or raise a ticket with the IT Help Centre.
Over the past couple of months, in preparation for the new academic year, I have been supporting staff across the Lancaster Medical School (LMS) and the Division of Health and Research (DHR), to redesign their Moodle pages. The aim has been to create more attractive spaces, that are easier to navigate and more engaging for learners.
Last year, while still working in ISS, I led the Moodle User Experience (UX) Project. We did a student survey as part of the project and we got 273 responses. 82% of respondents were undergraduates and 18% were postgraduate taught students. 139 students said that a good Moodle space was a well-organised one and in many of the free-text responses they mentioned the need for images and colour to make the spaces more visually appealing. Overall, students like Moodle but just find the way content is uploaded difficult to navigate. When asked if Moodle was easy or difficult to use, 83% of students found Moodle easy to use or had a neutral impression of it as “neither easy nor difficult”. As part of the UX project, we also surveyed staff. Like the students, staff also want to see more attractive Moodle spaces with more colour and images. So enter…the ‘one section per page’ layout.
I have written about this layout before but, over the past few weeks, I have moved several LMS and DHR Moodle spaces to this new layout and want to share with you all the ‘new look’.
Some of the spaces that have undergone this transformation (or are currently undergoing it) include:
MBChB Hub
Year 4 Primary Care
Medicine Year 4
Medicine Year 5
407: Mental Health: Theory, Research and Practice
DHR Autumn Academy
MBCHB101: Problem Based Learning Year 1
The newly reorganised MBChB Hub space.A snapshot of the newly reorganised Year 4 Primary Care Moodle space.
How do you set this up?
Before changing settings and choosing images, consider the organisation of material on your Moodle page. Try to have a clear welcome section at the top with introductory materials such as a handbook, learning objectives etc. This section should not be over-filled though and consideration needs to go into whether some of the material should be on the Moodle space, in a Moodle hub space or even in the Lancaster Student Portal instead. Then group materials into larger sections with sub-headings created using the ‘text and media area’ activity. Folders in Moodle, although a good way to group materials, can mean that students can’t quickly find what they are looking for so avoid using too many of them.
To get the ‘one section per page’ layout, you need to have the following settings under the ‘course format’ section of your Moodle page settings:
Course format: topics
Course layout: one section per page
Once you have chosen the above options, click ‘save and display’.
To add the summaries:
Click the three dots menu next to the topic/section you wish to add a summary too.
Type in your summary. For example, the summary could be some information on what students can find in the section or a ‘to-do’ list for the week.
To add images, choose high quality, landscape images for the best results. These could relate to the topic or subject material or just be high quality photos from around the Lancaster campus.
Click the image icon.
Choose a picture from your file explorer. You can add in information about the ‘Author’ and the licence.
Click ‘upload file’.
Untick ‘auto-size’ and the best size that I have found is 262wx143h (in pixels).
The default option for the image alignment is ‘top’, I would recommend leaving this.
Click ‘save image’.
Once done, click on the image again and change to ‘left alignment’.
Then click ‘save changes’.
A full-video explaining how to set up the above, can be found here:
How else can you improve a Moodle space?
Looking beyond the start of term, there are more things that we can do to improve Moodle spaces and the resources stored in Moodle.
Moodle isn’t OneDrive or Dropbox. It shouldn’t just be a list of Word documents, PowerPoints and PDFs! For a more engaging online learning experience, consider creating high quality videos for students to watch that include some interaction where possible. You can ask a Learning Technologist to support you in filming the material if it is something like a ‘Welcome video’ and the University also has Digital Media Engineers who are on hand to create very high-quality videos. Using the H5P activity (HTML5 package activity) in Moodle, it is possible to create an interactive video with quizzes, text boxes and other interactions popping up for students to engage with. H5P can also be used to create over 50 different content types. More information on H5P activities can be found in another post. These activities can support students to engage with your Moodle space more and can support effective revision/review.
It is a legal requirement that the resources posted on Moodle are digitally accessible. This is something that should always be on our minds when we create resources. For more information on how to improve the digital accessibility of your Moodle course, you can read this article on my ‘10 top tips’. One of these tips includes using Blackboard ALLY, the accessibility tool that is integrated into our Lancaster Moodle spaces, to check how accessible your resources are and use the guidance it gives to improve this if necessary. The score gauge provided by ALLY should always be green in colour.
For support with learning design and Moodle, feel free to get in touch with me. More training sessions on how to create H5P activities, digital accessibility and more will be forthcoming in the next couple of months – keep an eye on your emails!
From the Digital Learning Team’s recent surveys and focus groups, we know that students really appreciate when lectures are recorded.
Lecture recordings are useful to support revision and to support students when reviewing difficult concepts. At Lancaster, there are a number of Panopto features that are used consistently such as captioning. It is also common for lecturers to review the viewing statistics which can help identify which parts of a lecture students are watching the most.
However, many people are unaware of the ability to add formative quizzes and also short video clips to recordings. This post, will walk you through how to do this to support student engagement and revision.
Adding a quiz
There are four types of question that can be added to a Panopto video:
True/False
Multiple Choice
Multiple Select
Fill in the Blank
To add a quiz to your chosen video, click the edit button (see below) on the banner across the top of the screen.
Choose the part on the video editing timeline that you would like to add a quiz to. The red verticle line is where the quiz will be added.
Then you can either click the quizzes option on the left-hand menu as shown below:
OR
You can click the plus button above the video editing timeline which gives you a pop -up list of options as shown below:
This will then give you the option to add a quiz at the point that you have chosen in the video and the quiz editing screen will appear (see below). You can add as many questions as you like and change the type of question from the drop-down menu on the right-hand side.
It is possible to have multiple short quizzes in one video and the video will pause to allow the students to complete the quiz. The screenshot below shows the quiz screen that students would see and the number of questions in the quiz appears in the right hand corner. Students get to review answers at the end of the quiz and can see their total score.
You can also view the quiz results of your students from the settings menu. This will give you an insight into which topics your group feel confident with and which topics they might need support with.
A great way to help your students review complex material!
Adding a YouTube video clip
This can be done by selecting plus button and then the option from the drop-down menu below the ‘Add a quiz’ option.
This editing screen will then appear:
From here you can add the link (URL) to the YouTube video you would like to include, adjust the time when you want the video to start playing and you can also decide whether you want the whole clip to play or just part of it using the “start” and “end” options.
If you keep “Show YouTube controls” ticked by default, this will allow users to view the subtitles for the video if required due to preference or accessibility needs.
For more information on Panopto, you can visit the ASK page.
If you need further support on making Panopto videos interactive, get in touch with a member of the Digital Learning Team.
The Digital Learning Team have a whole host of training courses available this term. These are mainly aimed at academic and professional services staff to help you make the most of our suite of digital learning tools and services.
Below you can find the dates and sign up links to the training sessions we are offering in January.
A 30-minute introductory session looking at Moodle, which is Lancaster University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). This session covers what Moodle is, what it does, and how staff can access and interact with it. This session is a hybrid one and staff are welcome to join online or in-person in Library Training Room 1
This 60-minute session looks at the management of Moodle spaces and will detail Moodle’s links with LUSI, the student records system, as well as how to manage materials and participants (staff and students). This session is a hybrid one and staff are welcome to join online or in-person in Library Training Room 1
Panopto is our Lecture Capture system and is primarily used to record in-person lectures in rooms on campus, but can also be used for recording lecture materials from your home or office. Lancaster operates an “opt-in” lecture capture system – nobody is recorded by default but you have the opportunity to opt-in to recordings should you wish to. Nowadays, the majority of modules are recorded and published to Moodle to aid students in their learning, revision and access to learning.
This session will give an overview of the Panopto system, and explain how it’s set up in rooms on campus and how you can be recorded automatically, make basic edits to your recordings and publish them to students.
This 60 minute session will cover some of the activities and features in Moodle that lecturers can use to increase student engagement and the learning experience as a whole. Activities that we will cover include Moodle Board, Collaboration Map, Student Quiz and more!
The 12 Days of AI is a self-directed online course run by the University of the Arts London. Participants can learn about a new AI tool each day. I’ve signed up via Eventbrite and places are still available if you want to join up. It is free!
Each day, participants receive an email that directs them to a ‘daily task’. You are then introduced to an AI tool and given a quick run down on how it works. You can then follow the instructions to familiarise yourself with the tool. There are other resources shared on the website too including articles, demos and more!
So far this course has introduced the following tools:
Chat GPT – the one we have probably all heard of! Participants are given some tasks to prompt this tool to generate information and there is some guidance on ‘Prompt Engineering’.
Claude.Ai – a tool that can summarise text. You can create an account and test out this tool on an article or some text that you have permission to upload.
I’ll be working my way through these tools and hopefully some of you will be able to join in too!
In October 2022, Lancaster University announced a multi-million pound investment in new teaching facilities, supported by funding from the Office for Students. This includes a new Semi-Immersive Decision Theatre, currently under construction on A floor in Charles Carter. But what is a Semi-Immersive Decision Theatre and what opportunities does it create?
The Decision Theatre concept is not new. Arizona State University developed theirs nearly 20 years ago. Since then, other universities, training centres, and corporations have built their own. All Decision Theatres are dedicated spaces in which groups of people can collaboratively work through complex problems supported by data visualisation technology. Decision Theatres could be used as command centres during genuine crises with real life data being streamed into the room live. More often, Decision Theatres are supported by educators who develop scenarios specifically designed to train decision makers in crisis management and leadership.
An example might be useful. In response to a major incident, it is important that the emergency services can work together. Police, fire and rescue, ambulance, the armed forces, search and rescue, mountain rescue, coast guard, RNLI (the list goes on…), each have their own processes, data streams, communication channels, even jargon that other organisations cannot interface with. To deal with this the UK developed a protocol (JESIP) under which major incidents could be coordinated. To be effective in applying this protocol in a disaster situation the organisations need training and exercising. This is where a Decision Theatre comes into its own. Educators can create a complex scenario that unfolds over hours or even days. Decision makers from each emergency service can sit together in the Decision Theatre, see all the data that they would have available to them, and collaborate with their opposite numbers from other services. The participants can be monitored from an adjoining control room, allowing for two-way interaction between educators and participants. Learning from this kind of scenario improves collaboration, identifies issues within the protocol, and gives decision makers experience of life like, time sensitive decision making.
Decision Theatres can be used for much smaller scale teaching too. Any situation in which learners are given a scenario and asked to make decisions could be enriched. Having the facilitator out of the way in a control room may change group dynamics. The ability to monitor the room using video and audio feeds and supply information via digital displays opens new possibilities for engaging learners. In addition to teaching, the space could be used by researchers for monitoring group dynamics or decision making.
At Lancaster University we are taking the Decision Theatre concept a step further. We want to make the experience a little more immersive. One of the unique aspects of Decision Theatres is their ability to dynamically display data. An immersive environment such as a CAVE takes immersion to an extreme, turning walls, floors and ceilings into surface on which a dynamic environment is projected. One can be transported to a forest, the top of a mountain, the bottom of the sea or anywhere else your imagination (and graphics design budget) could come up with. The problem with a CAVE is that they are difficult to do well at high resolution and applications of low-resolution CAVEs have been shown to be limited.
Lancaster University’s Semi-Immersive Decision Theatre aims to take the best elements of these applications to create a decision space that better immerses learners/research participants.
At our last DLT event in July, we showcased several plug-ins and activities for Moodle. One of which was the H5P activity. So, for those who missed the session, and want to look at revamping their Moodle spaces for the new academic year, this one is for you!
What is H5P content?
H5P is an abbreviation for HTML5 Package. It is free open-source content that enables educators to create engaging content that can be integrated into Virtual Learning Environments such as Moodle. There are over 50 types of activities to choose from! This includes flashcards, Cornell Notes, interactive videos and books, diagram hotspots, charts and, when we are feeling Christmassy, advent calendars. On the H5P.org website you can find some examples of H5P activities such as an interactive video on smoothie making to show you what is possible. The DLT team have also set up a Moodle H5P demo site which Lancaster University staff can view. Students can access H5P activities easily and quickly through Moodle and you can keep an eye on engagement through activity completion and the reports.
How does it improve engagement?
These activities can also be used as part of a strategy to improve the online experience for distance learners. The H5P plug-in is part of the ‘gamification’ set that is available in Moodle. It aims to enhance engagement and motivation by creating similar experiences to those when playing online games. For example, H5P activities such as the memory game, virtual tours, interactive timelines and even crosswords and quizzes make learning more enjoyable for students.
By using H5P activities, course content can be broken down into manageable pieces and learners can complete the activities at their own pace. This is important to ensure that learners don’t feel overwhelmed and feel a sense of achievement as they work their way through their course content.
These types of activities are also particularly good in higher education as retrieval practice (the practice of remembering) and feeds into teaching learners how to learn and what works for them. They can also be used in the lead up to exams to help students with their revision. For more information on retrieval practice, Tom Sherrington’s ‘Kitchen Pedagogy 2:2’ video is a great introduction and you can find lots of information on his website.
How do I start creating some material?
H5P activities are created and stored in the content bank area of Moodle. It acts as a repository and allows individual H5P activities to be reused multiple times. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel and can use resources that you already have. For example, you could use a YouTube video and make this interactive or use some presentations that you already have and turn these into an interactive book.
Written by Susan Armitage, a member of the Educational Development team.
Mentimeter is a way to interactively engage a group of participants either in person or online (or both!).
I use Mentimeter as a strategy to keep participants engaged in a session, particularly to quickly share views of a large group in a way that everyone can see, usually for a follow up discussion, to set up the next teaching point, or to encourage reflection on what has just been the focus of the session.
I have also used it to gather views after a discussion, which is a quicker than going round each group/pair in turn.
For generating discussion between participants, this works equally well online (sending participants into breakout groups) or in person with small group discussion.
I have also just discovered that they have a ‘Spin the wheel’ slide, which is really useful for identifying in a fun and random way which pair or group will present or feedback next. Previously I have used “wheel of names” for this. Remember to select the extra option “Eliminate options to prevent repeated results” if you are using it for this purpose!
It’s easy to set up with a few ‘standard’ question types such as multiple choice, word clouds, ranking. There are also templates available that are helpful for getting new ideas for using it.
I use the free version which has up to 34 slide types with a limit of 2 questions and 5 quizzes per presentation. So far, I have never needed more than this.
It is well received by participants in terms of generating discussion and/or exposing the range of views within a group. It is something that they too can use with their students which has been mentioned in feedback on sessions using Mentimeter.
