SoSS eLearning Newsletter Issue 4 - April 2023

Teaching Online Workshops

The Teaching Online Workshops series aims to demonstrate and share good practice in teaching and assessment with or without technology. We have two Workshops in April and May, showcasing work by SoSS academics.

In this session, Chika will describe her use of an ‘unessay‘ group assignment, which can easily be adapted to use in large classes. The task also included elements of self-reflection and peer evaluation inspired by ‘ungrading’.

You can find out more about ‘ungrading‘ by listening to Chika and Hannah's "Outstanding Teaching" podcast, where they explore what students want, being inspired by Ungrading, and how to implement alternative forms of assessment.

Institute of Teaching and Learning

Led by Prof David Schultz, ITL Fellow 2021/22 and Professor of Synoptic Meteorology, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Wednesday 3rd May 2023, 13:00-14:30, on campus - book via the University Training Catalogue.

Intended learning outcomes:

Understand why many exams consisting of multiple-choice questions facilitate easy cheating
Employ natural assessment and research-informed teaching approaches in assessment design
Write improved multiple-choice questions for the participants’ specific discipline

Full information about this session is available on the Institute of Teaching and Learning Open Workshop's page on Staffnet.

Teaching and Learning Conference 2023

The Institute of Teaching and Learning are excited to announce the first University of Manchester Teaching and Learning Conference on 6th July 2023. This will be a one-day, flexible, free internal conference focusing on teaching and learning at the University of Manchester. It is open to presentations and participation from all students and staff and will showcase effective practice, drive discussion around teaching and learning and facilitate networks and collaboration.

Full information about the conference, and how you can contribute, is available here

Box of Broadcasts

Embedding On Demand TV and Radio into your courses

Box of Broadcasts (BoB) is an on-demand TV and Radio recording service for education and enables all UK based staff and students at the University to view and record programmes, create clips and playlists, search transcripts, and share broadcasts from over 75 free-to-air TV and Radio channels.

These new, live, online training sessions will teach you how to use the site to request recordings, make clips and create playlists, as well as how to add your clips/playlists to Blackboard.

To read more about BoB and access a collection of video tutorials, visit the BoB Hub on Staffnet.

Training sessions are held online on the following dates:

Wednesday 19 April, 11am-12pm
Friday 28 April, 2-3pm
Wednesday 10 May, 2-3pm
Wednesday 24 May, 11am-12pm

Visit the Training Catalogue to register to attend

Staff Development and Training Spring Update

Information and dates for all upcoming online training sessions, self-paced courses and upcoming workshops see the Humanities eLearning Staff Development and Training Spring Update.

Staff eLearning Champions

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

You can now find a handy list of academic eLearning champions for SoSS on our Teaching and Learning website: https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/sossteachlearn/teaching-learning/elearning-champions/

You can approach our champions to seek guidance and advice regarding online teaching. Each individual has highlighted a theme or tool they have used recently, and are happy to share advice on their experience of utilising these tools in online teaching.

If you would like to be listed as one of our Staff Champions, please email janean.lancaster@manchester.ac.uk

A full list a champions across the whole Faculty of Humanities is available here

Top Tip: Hypothes.is

How to annotate PDFs when they are images not text

What if Hypothes.is can't annotate my PDF?

Sometimes, PDFs are created from images of text rather than actual text. This means Hypothes.is cannot read these files. Hypothes.is have created their own OCR converter for such files, which is available on their website.

OCR converter: http://docdrop.org/ocr
Guidance: https://web.hypothes.is/help/how-to-ocr-optimize-pdfs/

Still not tried Hypothes.is? You can find out more about this social annotation tool, by visiting our Hypothesis Hub.

Managing meetings and bookings

Linking MS Bookings to Excel via Power Automate

Following on from our "Getting Started with MS Bookings" video in the last newsletter, we have created another video guide. This is an introduction to Power Automate - which is also part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite. This app can be used to automate repetitive tasks by connecting many other applications and services.

This 6 minute video shows how you can automatically keep a record of your Bookings appointments in an Excel spreadsheet.

You can also access the video via the UoM Video Portal

IT Services will soon be launching a "skinny" version of MS Bookings. More on this at a later date.

Contacting eLearning Support

As a reminder, please log issues and requests via the Support Portal using this link. This ensures that your request will be seen without delay as this form comes straight to the eLearning Team, bypassing Frontline IT. Emails sent to our eLearning email address are held in IT's triage queue and there can often be a long delay.

Remember, you can also drop-in to our Zoom room, Mon-Fri 10am-4pm. https://zoom.us/my/humelearning

Humanities Teaching Academy

Humanities eLearning on StaffNet

Follow SoSS eLearning on Twitter

Zoom Support Drop-In Room: https://zoom.us/my/humelearning

https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/humteachlearn/what-works-in-teaching/

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