Over 300 staff engaged with Brightspace training. This included:
The majority of staff have been trained to a level where they feel comfortable uploading and adding learning materials, as well as using the basic functions, as seen in Figure 2 above. Further work will be done via to upskilling academic staff in the use of the more specific toolset via a number of workshop programmes run through the Department of Library and Learning Services Learning Innovation Hub initiative.
During training, the feedback from staff was incredibly positive with only one member of academic staff from over three hundred being less than positive. Some feedback comments are below:
“Getting in to it Aaron and starting to love it”
“This is transformational”
“clean and easy interface, rich set of "adaptive release" rules, possibility of audio feedback on sections of assignment. I also liked the "Intelligent agents" feature - very customizable, it seems. “
“Brightspace being fully adaptive for desktop, tablet and mobile is a huge benefit. Students will not sit at a desktop for hours at a time to causally browse and engage with content.”
The change to Brightspace has seen academic staff re-engage with the use of an Online Learning Environment. Academics are starting to ask how they can use the platform, rather than say they don’t want to use technology because of it, as was the case with Learn. One course area in particular, who have always stayed away from the use of the learning environment, even choosing to have hardcopy submissions have fully engaged and are now looking at online submissions and using inline annotations for e-Feedback.
In terms of student training, a Brightspace session was included in all student inductions for new students. It was felt that returning students were the ones that need the most updating as they were returning to a new environment. The Digital Learning Systems Manager and Digital Learning Opportunities Manager, with the support of one of the Assistant Course Admin Manager ran specific Brightspace sessions for returning students, these were organised directly with the course teams.
Digital Learning Systems Manager and Digital Learning Opportunities Manager also ran three Brightspace drop-ins per day during the two week induction timetable. This was lowered to one per day for the following two weeks, allowing students to drop-in when they had questions to ask. During one session the returning students mentioned they had already accessed Brightspace over the weekend prior to returning and were already saying how much better it was than Blackboard.
Student feedback has included:
“having previously used learn for my foundation degree bright space seems a breath of fresh air!! It is easy to follow and I think the use of pictures in relation to module topics makes them seem less threatening!!! Many thanks :)“
“So far so good. Easy to navigate, simple to pick up, and remember where things are. “
“Bright space has amazing notification settings to ensure you have done the work and also provides statistics “
“The way Brightspace shows progress through content would be very useful.”