Update on technology and facilities to support teaching across the University

15 Jul 2020

A message from Ian Hutt, Head of Digital Learning

Technology and facilities to support online teaching

The start of the next academic year will present a number of additional challenges to those with teaching responsibilities. Not least, we will need to make teaching materials available online.

In order to do this we will need to agree on the technology we will use to complete these activities and provide suitable facilities on-campus for recordings to take place.

Work to review our online and digital learning offering had started before the arrival of Covid-19, but our change in circumstances has greatly increased the priority and importance of this. A joint Faculty/Directorate for the Student Experience/IT Services Working Group has been working to accelerate progress in this area.

In future the group will be looking at the more long-term strategic direction that’s required, but for now they have identified what we have in place for the start of the 20/21 academic year.

Details on the full suite of centrally-supported software tools and on-campus facilities to enable the recording and production of online content for the coming semester are now available on the Institute for Teaching and Learning StaffNet site.

Solutions for other aspects of teaching, e.g. for online assessment, are still being discussed and you can expect further communications on these shortly. In the meantime we wanted to get this list of available solutions for online content creation to you as soon as possible.

Specific software/applications that you use (school or subject specific)

In addition, we are mindful that there are many pieces of software (applications) available that are specific to faculties, schools or even particular courses/subjects. We will be circulating lists of exactly what will be available, including reviewing your requests for updating existing or asking for new applications, before the end of the month.

If you have any other questions around the campus reopening, please refer to the dedicated pages on StaffNet.

Best wishes

Ian Hutt

Head of Digital Learning