Turnitin (& Moodle) assignment submission: checklist for students

We are often contacted by students worried about why their submissions to assignment dropboxes are not succeeding. Here are some of the most important things to check. Your document: please check Your filename must be no longer than 40 characters (you may get an error message if your filename is too long: it will be …

Designing for Engagement in a Learning Community – course starts Wed 19 April

Time and again, we hear that students are not engaging with their learning. Being engaged benefits students in so many ways. It can make learning more enjoyable as well as boosting achievement. So what can we do to promote more engagement in our classes? The course “Designing for Engagement in a Learning Community” looks at …

Take a NAP 8: Accessibility checkers

The final core habit of the eight we’re calling Nottingham Accessibility Practices — the NAPs – covers accessibility checkers. These can be an important tool in identifying issues or catching errors in your documents. Much like spell-checkers, accessibility checkers can be found in most text editors and are easy to use. Within Microsoft Office you …

Take a NAP 7: Formats and assistive technologies

The Nottingham Accessibility Practices – the NAPs – are eight core habits that will help make your teaching materials and publications more accessible.  In this seventh post in our series on the NAPs we’re looking at how materials can be formatted to be used with assistive technology tools. Those who will benefit most from accessibility …

Take a NAP 6: Colour

Colour is one of the most important features to be aware of when creating accessible content. In this post, part of our series on the eight Nottingham Accessibility Practices – the NAPs – we’ll look at why colour can be an issue and how to design to overcome that. To make your content easy for …

Take a NAP 4: Multimedia

Our fourth blog post in our Nottingham Accessibility Practices Series covers the NAP on Multimedia. This is one of the eight core habits that will help make your teaching materials and publications more accessible and available. Video and audio are key tools in providing variety of materials. Videos can be important in assisting the processing …

New resource: Digital Learning Frequently Asked Questions for staff

I’ve been asking around my colleagues in Learning Technology in order to find out the questions that have been most repeatedly asked over the years. We’ve then created a Digital Learning Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for Staff resource to help members of staff to find the answers quickly.  Perhaps one of our top questions at …

Take a NAP 3: Images

This is the third in a series of blog posts in which we’re looking at the NAPs, Nottingham Accessibility Practices. These are eight core habits that will help make your teaching materials and publications more accessible, but also more available to all. Images are regularly used elements within teaching materials and assignment submissions, but their …

Using Moodle Choice for engaging students

We’ve been running webinars recently on different tools to use for engaging students with polls, questions and feedback. The series of  iTeach webinars on Engaging students with… continue through February and March. You can find out more information and links to book the next webinars. Ostensibly a simple multiple-choice poll, and deceptively simple for students …

Hybrid Teaching – a year on

A lot can happen in a year! It does not seem that long ago that we hosted the workshop ‘Hybrid Teaching and Learning in HE: a futuristic model or a realistic model for the future’ that was attended by more than 150 staff across the sector. That was actually 12th January 2022 and (as with …