In January I visited Dr Carina Buckley and her Instructional Design team at Southampton Solent University.  It was a great chance to see how a similar team to our own was approaching TEL in HE and if there was any best practice we could share. Their ‘SOL Baseline’ to guide their academics in the philosophy of how they should be utilising their VLE has parallels with the materials we produce here at BU.

After seeing some of the projects they were working on in their VLE SOL (Moodle) and showcasing some of the things we’ve been doing in Brightspace (such as the staff resource area) it was obvious we shared similar concerns on how our VLEs were being utilised by academic staff to complement their teaching.  One of the tools they are currently piloting is H5P, which makes creating HTML content (the programming language of the web) a lot more streamlined and user friendly without the need to know how to code.  They were currently piloting it on a pre-arrival page to help students from different vocational and educational backgrounds to start the course at a similar level.  Further information about their use of H5P in the pre-arrival course can be found on their blog post here.

During lunch Carina and her team were hosting a live webcast called Digital Capabilities: Thrive in a connected world.  It was a great chance for them to advertise the type of work their team were doing including the use of H5P and their digital partners scheme and I was invited to be part of the broadcasting panel.

The webcast recording is available on YouTube here.

Overall it was a very useful day seeing how another university is tackling similar issues to ourselves and learning about the tools and methods they are using to combat them.

Scott Hedger

TEL Developer