CELT Newsletters

In the January we will begin work on our new Access and Participation Plan which will cover academic years 2024/25 - 2027/28. While we are yet to receive full guidance from the OFS, we can expect areas of focus to be in line with four new priority areas already identified by OFS for variations to our activity in 2023/24. These are:

1. Make APPs accessible for prospective and current students and their parents / other stakeholders.

2. Develop and enhance partnerships with schools and other local / national organisations to help raise pre-16 attainment of young people from underrepresented groups.

3. Set out how access to HE for students from underrepresented groups, leads to successful participation on high quality and good graduate outcomes.

4. Seek to develop more diverse pathways into and through HE through expansion of L4 and L5 courses and degree apprenticeships. 

Read our current accessible summary, variations for 2023/24 and existing plan. 

As part of our plan we will be asked to produce our equity of opportunity risk register aligned to one produced at a national level by the OFS, define a set of outcomes, design and cost a series of interventions and increase our investment in research and evaluation activity – ensuring publication of and contribution to the national APP Agenda.  

As always, the development and work in relation to our APP is a whole University activity, and we would like to invite you to join us for an initial briefing about the plan, and to then sign up to a series of workshops where we will explore data and identify possible interventions, research and evaluation. Please sign up using the links below. 

Learning and Teaching - APP Briefing - what are the expectations for the new plan, and what does our data tell us? 

Workshop 1

Workshop 2

Workshop 3

SOFiA (Suffolk Online Feedback in Action) now supports formalised module feedback. Ipswich-based students have access to this form via their module homepages in Brightspace; the link is located in a widget called Quicklinks for Students. The module feedback form in SOFiA matches questions students are asked in the NSS and which are used as measures of student academic experience in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The questions asked are: 

How satisfied are you with (scaled from extremely dissatisfied to extremely satisfied): 

• The teaching of this module
• The assessment and feedback of this module
• The academic support of this module
• The learning resources of this module
• The organisation and management of this module

You can find out more about SOFiA online - and speak to your Student Experience Ambassador further information about module feedback. 

As we continue with our Panopto roll out, we want to thank everyone who has started using the platform. Your feedback and help in identifying issues helped us to improve this over the past few weeks. From January 2023, you will be able to use Panopto in your Brightspace module, and through the Panopto app (available to download in the software centre). 

• Staff can access Panopto within the module via the navbar, Insert Stuff and External Learning Tool and the Panopto app. Learn how to set these up. 
• Students can only access Panopto via an inserted video or the external learning tool. 

Why Panopto?

With Panopto we have access to increased accessibility tools and features to support your students, and these require very little extra work to set up. The tools include:

• automated captioning and ability to edit captions
• note-taking directly within the recording
• manual addition of audio-descriptions within having to audio-describe an entire recording
• instant conversion of a lecture into an audio-only podcast
• switch between multiple camera feeds or screens easily during a live session. 

Need support?

You can access a workshop on setting up and using Panopto and access guides and resources. The workshop is offered live in one of the teaching rooms, so you can practice using the tool in the same environment you will be teaching in. The Learning Design team welcomes any feedback or information about issues encountered. You can either contact your Learning Designer or email Learning Services to share your experiences. 

and Bongo?

Bongo Virtual Classroom will remain a part of our learning technology suite until the end of this academic year. 

For Slido users, you can now embed your Slido links in your PowerPoints using the Slido plugin. You can download the Slido plugin via the Software Centre from mid-December. This was previously not available due to an authentication issue.

Please note: to use this plugin, you will need an active account in Slido first. To request an account, please contact your Learning Designer or learningservices@uos.ac.uk.