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.
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.
Due to the success of using Microsoft Power Automate to support flipped learning for an advanced KEATS training session, the Power Automate process was rolled out to all training sessions offered by Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning (CTEL) and other elements of the Microsoft Power Platform have been introduced. This blog post will outline the processes, successes, and challenges.
Rollout of Power Automate Process
Once the decision was made by the CTEL CPD Chair to roll out the Power Automate process to all CTEL training sessions, we needed to decide how this would work practically. The established process, or flow, used for the KEATS: Personalising the Learning Experience training session was built specifically for that session and was the only one that included pre-session work. We navigated around this by creating individual flows for each of the sessions run by CTEL and removing and adding steps as appropriate. The Assistant Learning Technologist for the team and I worked closely with the session leads, customising and creating the flows and encouraging personalisation of their flows to better reflect their sessions, such as adding attachments and editing email text.
Another risk was that the flows would reference the same Microsoft Excel spreadsheet hosted on a SharePoint site, and with multiple people accessing and changing the data, flows could be affected and send out emails at the wrong time. We navigated around this by creating individual spreadsheets and pointing the flows to the relevant spreadsheets for each session, which allowed for further customisation from session leads if desired.
Flows are usually triggered 2 working days before the session is scheduled, but this can vary if the pre-session work required will take more time to complete. The core template automatically completes 5 core steps when triggered:
Creates a Microsoft Teams Meeting and invites all attendees to the meeting.
Sends an email containing further information about the session if needed. This is on a 5-minute delay to allow for any manual intervention should any mistakes be made in step 1.
Sends an email to participants as soon as the scheduled session is finished containing links to further resources and a request for feedback to be left via the Microsoft Form.
Sends an email 2 working days to participants after the session has been completed, asking for feedback if it hasn’t been left.
Sends an email 10 working days after the session to participants to ask if they have attempted any content that was covered in the session and if they have any success stories to share or need any further support.
The above template is core and session leads can add further steps as relevant to their own flows. Working days are calculated within formulas in the Excel spreadsheet and are utilised to increase the response rate, rather than send emails out over a weekend or bank holiday which can be ignored.
Displaying Feedback in Power BI
The Power Automate process outlined above is fairly simple in terms of its structure and aims; it sends out emails at predetermined times based on the date and time of the relevant session, which is calculated in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Each email sent to attendees once the session has been completed contains a link to CTELs feedback form. Once feedback is submitted, it is collected,anonymised, and stored. I designed a Power BI report to display the quantitative and qualitative data submitted to display the impact of the sessions and assist each session lead with making any changes using free text submissions.
Figure 1: The Power BI report for feedback submitted for CTEL training sessions. Data is organised by session title, calendar month, and by faculty. 373 pieces of feedback were left for 2021/22.
After organising this data and gaining experience in Power BI, I was able to link this data to attendance data extracted from SkillsForge, to gain insights into our historical CPD attendance and how this relates to our feedback submissions. An advantage to this was to see if the flows had an impact on gathering feedback for our sessions.
Figure 2: The Power BI report for attendance at CTEL training sessions. Data is organised by calendar month, attendance type by sessions, and by faculty.
Key findings revealed that attendance for 2020/21 was significantly high with 2209 members of King’s staff signing up for a session offered by CTEL, with feedback submissions at 324, so around 14.7% of attendees left feedback. Attendance dropped for the year 2021/22 with 1247 members of King’s staff signing up for a session. This is to be expected as we saw an increase in face-to-face teaching taking place and there were fewer modules delivering fully online teaching, but feedback submissions increased slightly with 373 submissions, around 30% of attendees submitting feedback. This is a positive revelation as although attendance figures fell by almost three quarters, the total amount of feedback submitted increased, and the percentage rate doubled. However, we need to be aware of several caveats with this data.
Figure 3: Data displayed in a stacked bar graph of bookings against feedback submissions for the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22.
As previously mentioned, the teaching in the academic year 2020/21 was delivered fully online. 2021/22 saw a gradual increase in face-to-face teaching from January onwards, so this data isn’t 100% comparable due to a significant change in circumstances.
CTEL ran a total of 29 ‘Breakout Rooms in Microsoft Teams Meetings’ training sessions in 2020/21 with 861 sign-ups, which massively increases attendance data for that academic year. 719 sign-ups occurred in September alone. Breakout rooms were a highly desirable feature of Microsoft Teams Meetings, but the functionality was not robust enough to be rolled out en masse, which may have impacted feedback submissions.
As digital capabilities in King’s staff increased throughout the months of the pandemic and demands on staff members’ time have reduced, this may have resulted in more time to engage with and submit feedback.
During the academic year 2020/21, CTEL joined other departments across King’s to offer a full suite of training opportunities in delivering teaching online. During that time, a generic feedback form was sent to attendees which were mainly concerned with joining instructions to Teams Meeting links, so we cannot see detailed responses to questions usually asked on the CTEL feedback form. Based on the 373 feedback responses submitted in 2021/22:
~94% agreed or strongly agreed that they would recommend a CTEL training session to a colleague
~95% agreed or strongly agreed that the session they attended will have a positive impact on their teaching.
~95% agreed or strongly agreed that taking the session was worth their time.
Figure 4: Data displayed for 2021/22 quantitative questions.
The above is very positive as it demonstrates the impact that CTELs training sessions are having across the King’s community. The feedback form has not been changed for the academic year 2022/23 and so data can be easily compared in the future.
Based on an overview of the data, the Microsoft Power Automate process appears to be working well as the feedback response rate has remained steady as attendance figures have dropped, and Power BI has been a very useful tool to display and filter feedback data. Session leads have fed back that the Power BI report is beneficial and allows greater insight into the feedback for their sessions, and the CTEL CPD Chair has passed on positive feedback regarding the overall attendance data visualisations. I am currently working on an additional Power BI report that will utilise row level security to allow Technology Enhanced Learning Managers across the university to see attendance figures for their own faculties and tailor demand or promote courses that CTEL offer at strategic points in the year.
I am pleased that the automated process works and has helped free up time for CTEL staff and helped increase our feedback response rate, but I am dissatisfied that the session leads need to access two pieces of software (Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Power Automate) to get this to work. I am currently investigating whether I can achieve the same results with a Power App (another Microsoft Power Platform application) to improve usability and increase satisfaction.
Dave Busson-Crowe is a Learning Technologist at the Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning and has been involved with Learning Technology in some capacity for approximately 6 years.
He has a keen interest in the use of artificial intelligence in education.
As the new academic year gets under way, we will be looking at some new features available in Echo360 which are now available to staff. Echo360 is one of King’s College’s core technologies (read more about our core technologies) and is used for Lecture Capture platform which is used to record live lectures. Echo360 can also be used to create video content on your desktop using your webcam and microphone and can also record your screen. For full guidance on using the features described here, please refer to the links at the bottom of this post.
Browser Capture
Until recently, the only way to create a desktop recording using Echo360 was to download and install Universal Capture to your computer. Browser Capture allows staff to create a desktop recording without the need for additional software, using their browser. Browser Capture allows you to record your screen, webcam video and audio.
What are the Pros and Cons of Browser Capture?
The main advantage of using Browser Capture is that it doesn’t require installing additional software. Other pros include the ability to record just one application or window on your computer, or a specific browser tab, none of which are on option via Universal Capture. However, unlike Universal Capture, you cannot create recordings if you are offline, so you will need an active internet connection whilst recording.
Advanced Editing
Echo360 have introduced advanced editing options, including:
The ability to remove segments from your recording
The ability to insert other media in your recording
The ability to remove or add tracks from your recording
Removing Segments of a Recording
This new feature allows users to remove a segment of a recording, including one from the middle of a recording. This is useful if you have a break during your lecture, or if students undertake group discussion, which is not useful to have as part of your recording. Once you are in the video editor, you will see a new option to Split Clip via the play head menu.
Using this on both ends of the segment that you want to remove will allow you to delete it.
Insert Other Media in a Recording
It may be useful to insert other media into your recording, for instance if you want to record an introductory video for your lecture and have it be part of the recording, or if there are challenging parts of your lecture content that you want to expand on after it’s taken place. In the Echo360 video editor, click on Insert Clip as shown, you will then be prompted to add the clip via your Echo360 library.
Remove or Add Tracks
A track is a particular element of your recording, such as the audio, a camera feed showing the Lecturer, or the screen recording. The ability to remove a track may be useful if the camera feed was part of your recording, but you later decide that you want to remove that element. You can remove a track by accessing the editor, clicking on the 3 dots next to the track you want to remove and clicking on Remove Track.
Similarly, you can add tracks to your recording that will play alongside the existing tracks. To do this, access the editor, click on the Actions dropdown menu and select Add A Track. You will then be prompted to add the track from your Echo360 Library.
Note: You can only have a total of 3 tracks in one recording, so if you already have 3 then you won’t be able to add a new track until one is deleted.
Customising Video Thumbnails
A thumbnail is the preview image of your recording. You may choose to change this to something that better summarises the content of your recording. For instance, you can select a frame from your recording that shows a slide that shows a summary of what will be covered, or you can create an image to upload as your new thumbnail.
You can grab a new thumbnail from your recording by navigating to the part of the recording showing the slide/video that you want to use and selecting Set Thumbnail on the play head menu and following the remainder of the on-screen prompts.
For full guidance on using this feature, including how to upload a thumbnail from your computer, please refer to the link below under further guidance.
Further Guidance
Please note following links are accessible only for King’s staff:
Fariha Choi is a Learning Technologist in 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.
This recording by Dr. Manasi Nandi, Reader in Integrative Pharmacology, complements the blog post, Digital Education Accessibility Baseline: Raising our standards for digital accessibility. It focuses on how Manasi approached the implementation of the baseline, provides tips on where to start and how to overcome some of the challenges she encountered. The benefits of accessible KEATS courses and content are explained, and resources to support accessible design are signposted.
Please click on the image below to access the recording:
Feedback from students from various channels across King’s have reported that there is a lack of consistency in the User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) across KCL’s digital platforms, particularly the website and across templates and module pages within KEATS. Continue reading “KEATS 3.11 UI Refresh”→
