The Brightspace training team from IT Skills, CEL and comprising all the Learning Technologists held a meeting yesterday to review the training that has been completed and also to look ahead to how best to support staff involved in the first phase of the rollout in the coming semester.
This is the provision that we intend for academic staff and administrative staff:
1. Academic staff
– We have about 50 academic staff on the waitlist. 8 face-to-face (F2F) training sessions are being arranged in the period July – September. If you are not on the waitlist, have not already been trained and will be using Brightspace in semester 1, please email v4l@bournemouth.ac.uk to request the schedule for these sessions.
– Liz Falconer is writing an online training unit in Brightspace that will substitute for the two F2F sessions and will allow staff to go through the material at their convenience. This is due in mid August. The F2F training was needed to help staff with preparing for semester 1, especially given the numbers involved. We were able to train over 300 people in this way. The online training can be phased in now that the majority of staff have been trained in essential Brightspace.
– When the assessment and grading functionality is in place, we plan to conduct a 60-90 minute F2F session supported by Panopto videos.
– We also propose creating a number of short videos on aspects of Brightspace to support staff.
– We will arrange drop-in sessions for staff. These will be on both campuses and will consist of F2F and sessions using the tools within Brightspace (chat and virtual classroom). We plan a number of dedicated sessions, for example on quizzes, and also a number of sessions where we will be there to help with any issues you have. We can also attend your team and departmental meetings if that would be helpful. If there are any pedagogic or Brightspace topics that you would like to cover, please email dbiggins@bournemouth.ac.uk.
2. Administrative staff
– We will run the 90 minute F2F introduction to Brightspace session for new administrative staff.
– When the assessment and grading functionality is in place, the same F2F session (mentioned above) is proposed.
We will also be setting up familiarisation sessions for other parts of the University who need to know more about the Brightspace platform. Some of these sessions have already been scheduled and more are to be arranged.
I attended both sessions of the training for academic staff on Friday, which was excellent. We have a group of TTO tutors and mentors who return on 12th September and will need certainly the first session (A) and also the ability to be able to log in as a student and help ALS students access resources. Their primary role is preparing for and working with the student so they would need the same type of access as in MyBU. Will their log in be active in September so that they can log in with their BU login. They are all attending training sessions on September 12th pm and 13th am for ALS is it possible to offer them an introductory session in or after 12th September? They do not necessarily need the full grading section (as other administrative staff) just the way of accessing resources and familiarity with using the system.