News and Events, Technologies

KEATS Upgrade to Moodle 4

KEATS will be upgraded to Moodle 4 in Summer 2023, this will bring a variety of improvements to the student and staff user experience. The existing functionality of KEATS will still be core to your teaching and learning, but the user experience has been redesigned with a new, modern look and feel that makes it more intuitive and user-friendly. The provisional date for the upgrade is 18 July 2023, and we expect KEATS to be unavailable to all staff and students for the majority of the upgrade day.

Improvements for Students

For students, these KEATS improvements will include:

  • Oversight of their course deadlines on the dashboard (the KEATS landing page). Deadlines can be filtered by due date, courses, and by activities that are overdue. The list of deadlines is also searchable using the activity type (e.g., assignments) or activity name.
  • A more streamlined interface for viewing activities and resources and any activity completion requirements for these, including new colour-coded icons.
  • Improved navigation for modules, including a course index on the left of the module page, which acts as a table of contents for activities and resources and allows the students to click on an activity and navigate directly to it.
  • Activity completion is indicated on the course index, allowing students to easily see what they still need to complete.
  • A new collapsible ‘block drawer’ that includes any blocks that have been added to the module. The course index block is also collapsible, allowing students to view only their course content in the middle of the page when needed.

Improvements for Staff

For staff, the new design will bring the following benefits:

  • More intuitive features, such as easier access to module settings at the top of the module page, which were previously found in the ‘Administration’ menu.
  • Activities and resources can be moved within a section, or to another section, by dragging and dropping them with the main course content or within the course index.
  • Clicking on an activity will navigate staff directly to that activity, where they can easily access the activity settings at the top of the page.
  • When changing an activity’s settings, staff have the option of selecting “Send content change notification” which will notify students that a change has taken place.

The video below shows what these improvements look like in Moodle 4. Please note that the Moodle 4 site shown in the video does not yet include King’s branding, this will be added in due course when Kings’ new branding guidelines have been finalised.

Moodle 4.0 Upgrade Video


Written by Fariha Choi

Fariha Choi is a Learning Technologist at the Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning and has been with CTEL since June 2021. She has a particular interest in educational multimedia and has worked as a Learning Technologist, eLearning Developer and Learning and Development Manager for the past 11 years.

News and Events

M25 Autumn Meeting: Education 4.0

In mid-November 2019 nearly 60 people attended the Autumn meeting of the M25 Learning Technology Group (#M25LTG) at King’s College London. This event was themed around Education 4.0 and brought together sessions on education surviving industrial revolutions; what Education 4.0 could look like, holographic lecturers and the ‘cold indifference’ of technology. Continue reading “M25 Autumn Meeting: Education 4.0”

Evaluation and Reflection, News and Events

From Conception to Completion: The Digital Education Student Committee

I recall leaving University in 2010 and being faced with nearly one year of unemployment. The fact I had a good 2:1 in BSc Applied Psychology and Sociology and experience on a placement year was clearly not enough, particularly as I graduated soon after the global financial crash. After meeting numerous recruitment agencies, sending my CV’s to what felt like hundreds of companies and applying to various jobs, I finally realised that I did not know how to properly complete application forms, and I did not have enough recent work experience for my CV to make an impact. I was one of many recent graduates that just could not get to the interview stage of a job, yet alone a job. What made my experience slightly more frustrating was that many of my friends who chose to go straight to work, rather than to Universities, were in greater demand than I was. What set us apart, was that they had gained a few more years working experience, and they knew how to sell themselves to potential employers.  Continue reading “From Conception to Completion: The Digital Education Student Committee”

News and Events, Pedagogy

King’s Business School Education Hub

In May 2019 the King’s Business School launched a KEATS-based bespoke education hub to act as a one-stop central space to support teaching and learning, list key dates and build a vibrant learning community. It responds to concerns that good practice was not being shared effectively, version control of documents was problematic, and there was no repository to support initiatives such as peer review, GTA induction and education strategy projects. The aim is for it to become a powerful vehicle to enhance pedagogic practice, facilitate communication between staff, increase productivity by offering highly efficient and effective tools for educational delivery and share best practice around digital education.

kbs education hub
Continue reading “King’s Business School Education Hub”

VR headset
News and Events, Technologies

Hacking the Future at the CAN Conference: Hackathon 2019

The 2019 ‘Change Agents and Network’ (CAN) Conference hosted by JISC brought academics from the UK (and worldwide) together. The conference was held at the Open University Walton Hall in Milton Keynes, England. The aim of the CAN conference was to understand the ‘evolving landscape of staff-student partnership’. How can technology be used to support the learning experience for students? Part of the Conference was a Student Hackathon.


Continue reading “Hacking the Future at the CAN Conference: Hackathon 2019”

jigsaw
News and Events

The Inbetweeners

Or are we more than that?  The Learning Technologist – Faculty Liaison (FL) role was introduced by CTEL (Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning) in August 2017 to act as a direct liaison with academic faculties and departments. The main aim of the role is to support the management and delivery of multiple projects aimed at both the development of academics’ pedagogic understanding and the practice of technology-enhanced learning. In short, acting as the conduit (inbetweeners) between  faculties/departments and CTEL whilst also improving engagement with key staff members on new initiatives from initiation right through to completion. Continue reading “The Inbetweeners”

News and Events, Technologies

Practical advice on creating accessible online learning opportunities

On the 23rd of September, the UK government brought the EU Web Accessibility Directive into law with a statutory instrument. So, tying in with this recent and upcoming focus on accessibility, I thought it would be useful to share with you some notes and insights from a book I recently read, concentrating on the practical aspects of putting theory into practice. Continue reading “Practical advice on creating accessible online learning opportunities”