Category: From the DEO

Find your digital balance on University Mental Health day

Posted on by Naomi Beckett

Written by Souwoon Cho, Digital Education Developer and new team member of the Digital Education Office.

If you haven’t heard this phrase recently, here it is: ‘Unprecedented times’. Of course, this was the go-to phrase to try and describe the impact of the pandemic on a global and personal level. A lot has changed since 2020 including more teaching and social events taking place in-person. However, the dilemma we face trying to manage the digital world and our wellbeing remains.  

You may hear of some approaches to this such as getting rid of your smartphone, deleting all social media, and not looking at e-mails for an extended period. But these approaches to eliminate screen time are not realistic for a student navigating day-to-day university life.  

So, what digital tools can help you achieve digital balance on University Mental Health Day and beyond? 

Man looking at his phone
Man looking at his phone

Digital tools for focus and motivation.

Do you ever feel distracted and constantly switching between different screens and digital tools? You are not alone! Rather than making you feel less productive, there are digital tools and apps available to help you focus on the task at hand. The list of great apps to help student’s focus and motivation by AbilityNet is a great summary of some of the tools for you to try.  

Dark mode for a better nights sleep.

Student Minds recommends avoiding your use of screen devices at least an hour before you intend to sleep as one of their tips to improve your sleep. This can be easier said than done. Another approach to ease your transition from screen to pillow is to reduce the blue light being emitted from your screens.   

You can set your screens to night or dark mode a few hours before you intend to go to sleep. Steps on how to set your display for night time mode are available for Windows and Mac. Most smartphone will also have this mode available, so check your phone’s user manual for further information.  

Image of lit up laptop in a dark room
Image of lit up laptop in a dark room

Free Yoga, HIIT, and Meditation.

Cat stretching
Cat stretching

Being physically active is one of the NHS’s 5 steps to wellbeing, but going for a run or attending an online dance class can seem like a lot of effort despite the obvious benefits. Fitness apps such as Downdog offer guided Yoga, HIIT, Meditation and even Ballet Barre sessions at your convenience. You can set the time, level and intensity of the session which gives you control to fit it around your schedule. Even a 5-minute session of chair yoga is better than nothing right? Since the pandemic, Downdog has been and is currently still available free for students. Of course, there are other similar apps available, so if this isn’t for you, explore different apps or digital tools until you find one that works for you.  

Looking after the mental health of university students and staff is not a conversation just for University Mental health day. We hope these tips will help you create ongoing positive change to the future of your mental health.  

If you have any comments or further tips to share. Post them in the comments below! We would love to hear from you.  

Further support and resources
Whether you are a staff member or student, if you feel like you are struggling, it is always good to tell someone about how you are feeling. If you don’t feel able to do this, the University has wellbeing support for staff and students. We’ve also listed some further resources below.

Student minds mental health day poster

Access to Re/Play recordings – Update

Posted on by Suzanne Collins

This post is a further update to the issue first identified on 07 February, where students were seeing an error message when trying to use the Re/Play link in the Blackboard left-hand menu.

As reported yesterday, all students should now be able to access Re/Play materials shared via left-hand menu links in Blackboard. Automated recordings have not been affected, and no recordings have been lost. Recordings will be available after 48 hours or when published by the academic staff member, as usual.

However, we are still applying fixes to some pre-existing problems with Re/Play which might affect whether you can view some videos in Blackboard. Yesterday, there were some sporadic reports of videos being unavailable if added into Blackboard so that they appear as a thumbnail image and a link within a course page.

If this is affecting you, first try to access any unavailable videos via the Re/Play link in the left-hand menu of your course, if that is available to you. If the problem persists and you need urgent access, please contact your school, or the IT Self Service site Home / IT Services Self Service (ivanticloud.com).

We hope to have this issue resolved as soon as possible and are still actively working on solutions.

Access to Re/Play recordings now restored in Blackboard

Posted on by Suzanne Collins

From the afternoon of the 7th February 2022 to 11.30 am today, the 8th February 2022, there was an error in the connection between Re/Play and Blackboard, meaning that you may have been unable to access your videos from the Re/Play link in Blackboard courses.

We believe this issue has been resolved, and you should now be able to view your videos as normal. We are now in the process of thoroughly testing this fix, so there is a possibility some access is yet to be restored in all instances.

We sincerely apologise for any disruption this issue has caused you. Please be assured we have been doing all we can to resolve it as soon as possible.

Captions on your Re/Play videos will now be automatically added

Posted on by Suzanne Collins

Suzanne Collins: Digital Education Office

From the 31st of January, we’re making a change to the way captions get added to video content in Re/Play. Instead of lecturers having to add captions manually, Re/Play will now add them automatically. This is good news for all of you who have said that having captions on video helps you to learn, and it also means that we will be working towards making your learning material as accessible as it can be.

“I use captions whenever I am watching a video. I find it really helps me to process what someone is saying. The Powerpoint slides help me to clarify any inaccurate captions.” UoB Student, Autumn 2021

The software that will add the captions does so using a computer, not a human, so there will inevitably be mistakes in the captions. Therefore, it’s really important to see captions as a way to support your learning, not as a replacement for the video content. They will not be accurate enough if you rely on captions to learn for accessibility reasons. If this is your situation, there is a separate support route in place where human written captions can be provided for you – get in touch with Disability Services who will be able to help further. For recordings of in-person lectures (lecture capture), captions will be added once the recording is published. If you don’t immediately see captions available, check back in an hour or so.

“When there are no captions, I am much more likely to need to keep rewinding to listen again.” UoB Student, Autumn 2021

If you use captions as a support to your learning, you’re adding to your set of study skills, as well as your digital skills! If anything doesn’t look right, especially terminology or names, double check against what’s on the slide, in handouts or reading materials, or listen to that section if you can. Captions should never be used as the sole source of information, especially for assessments and revision. Always check with your lecturer if you don’t understand something important. 

To turn the captions on or off on a video, look for the small ‘CC’ icon at the bottom of the video. Captions will appear at the bottom of the video.

Screenshot showing the CC icon on the Re/Play player

If you play the video full screen, you’ll also see a small magnifying glass icon. Here, you can search the captions and go straight to where a key word is mentioned by selecting the caption you want to see.

Screenshot showing the Re/Play player with captions search open

We’d love to hear feedback on how the captions help you learn. Why not get in touch with your course rep and ask them to pass your thoughts to our team of Student Digital Champions!

 

Preparing yourself for taking exams.

Posted on by Naomi Beckett

Preparing yourself for taking your exams.

Exams are coming up for some students and although some of you may be on campus taking them, we know that the majority will be taking them online.  

Revising is one thing but making sure you are prepared for taking your exams is also important. The Digital Education Office (DEO) have noted down some useful information and links to help you get ready. Keep these details handy so if you run into any problems, or you need some advice, you know exactly where to go. 

'and breath' written in neon
Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash
'treat yourself' in neon
Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Don’t forget to take time away from your devices and revision to take a break. Wishing you loads of luck! 

The DEO team. 

A round up for Christmas.

Posted on by Naomi Beckett

As we are finishing for Christmas, Georgie, one of our Student Digital Champions (SDCs) has written a round-up of what herself and the other Student Digi Champs have been focusing on since October. It’s been a really busy few months for the team and the SDCs have been brilliant in working with the DEO to help improve the digital experience for students. We are looking forward to having them back in January to continue their great work and will also be recruiting for new Student Digital Champions, so look out for updates!

If you are a UoB student and are interested in sharing your views on your digital experiences, please think about taking our Digital Experience Insights survey which takes about 10 minutes and helps us to look at what we need to focus on in the development of student’s digital experiences at the University.

Merry Christmas from us all at the DEO, and thanks for subscribing to DigiTalk!

See you in the new year, Naomi 😊

A round up for Christmas.

Georgie Pitts, Student Digital Champion

Georigie Pitts, Student Digital Champion

For the second half of TB 1, the Student Digital Champions have been working hard to research student’s experiences of digital learning at the University. 

Assessment

We have begun to research Authentic Assessment, a form of assessment that assesses students using realistic / job-type situations that they are likely to encounter post-study in their careers.  

We have also started compiling an exam FAQs document, which will provide students with guidance preparing them for exams. We hope this document can be a useful summary for students who need a quick answer to an exam-related question.  

Notepad with a checklist on
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Accessibility

Members of the DEO have also been redesigning the Accessibility web pages on the University website. The site includes any information for staff or students on anything accessibility related, including where to look for support, and information on how staff can make their learning materials more accessible. It’s full of recourses, and well worth a look. See the link here: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/digital-education/inclusion/ 

You may be aware the DEO have hired Caption Editors to edit and improve captioning on video learning resources. The SDCs have also conducted our own research on our specific courses to begin to analyse where improvements need to be made.  

We have also published a Digital Accessibility in Learning student survey, aimed at gathering responses from students about their personal experiences with online learning, and looking at whether they have struggled with accessibility challenges. If you are also interested in providing your experience and suggestions, you can complete the survey using the following link: https://forms.office.com/r/rbhjCQcyLc. The survey takes 5 minutes and will be a great help!  

Video work

The DEO are working towards a new video series focusing on digital skills. Olivia, one of the SDCs has been helping with this by contributing the audio for the first video, which will hopefully be out in the new year, and will be focussed on Online Identity.

Olivia also created an MS Teams for Learning video (5mins) which you can find on the DEO’s Learning Online – Student Support page.

Working with our Course Reps

The Champions have also been engaging with their course reps to see if they have received any  digital experience or accessibility-related feedback. If you are a course rep, and want to get in touch, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk, citing you’d like to talk to the Student Digital Champions.

Team standing together
Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash

We have had a great TB1 as Digital Champions, and have enjoyed working towards improving the digital experience and awareness of accessibility at the University!  

Tell us what you think of the digital learning environment!

Posted on by Suzanne Collins

Written by Suzanne Collins, Digital Education Office

Take 10 minutes to help us improve the digital learning experience at Bristol!

Follow this link to go straight to the Digital Experience Insights Form

Group of students chatting. Jisc, Digital experience student insights survey. Complete the survey.

As the year draws to a close, it’s a good opportunity to take some time and reflect on how things have gone so far this academic year. For the past few years – even before the pandemic changed the way we teach and learn – we’ve asked students to tell us what they think about our digital learning environment. The questions range from asking about you and your technology, to asking about how much support you feel you’ve had, where you go for help, and what we could be doing better. The survey is coordinated by JISC, which is a national organisation, so we are also able to see where we are in the sector, and work out what we’re doing well and what we can improve on.

The 10 minutes it takes for you to complete the survey are so valuable, as without hearing your experiences, we can’t work to change things for the better!

What we’ve done based on previous results

In previous years, we’ve used the results from this survey to make direct changes to the experience of students.

We have:

 

My time spent so far as a Student Digital Champion

Posted on by Naomi Beckett

Written by Olivia Muggleton: Student Digital Champion

Olivia writes about why she started working as a Student Digital Champion, and her creation of our new MS Teams walkthrough video.

The predominant reason behind me seeking a role as Student Digital Champion was my interest in facilitating student involvement and collaboration. I felt that this was particularly important within an institution which can often be seen as rather detached from its students in terms of day to day practice, which is partly due to the far more independent nature of learning in comparison to secondary education.

With coronavirus spurring a rapid change in all universities’ traditional modes of teaching to include online learning methods, I thought it would be helpful to reduce some of this aforementioned detachment in the provisions made by the university by introducing a student’s voice in the form of a walkthrough guide. This walkthrough illustrates, from a student’s perspective, the uses and functions of Microsoft Teams, a platform which has seen significant uptake of late due to the demands of online learning, as well as its convenience in terms of student collaboration within and outside of the curriculum.

Image of three students working together
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

I have really come to value my time with the Digital Education Office, who have enabled me to engage with the student learning experience and make valuable contributions in the form of questionnaires and various feedback on a broad range of areas. I am looking forward to continuing my part in enhancing the student experience through my role as SDC, by continuing to provide a student’s voice through feedback and engage with course representatives to better understand, and delve deeper into the needs of students, and assist the university to adapt to those developing needs.

You can find Olivia’s video on our Student Support page on our website, or by going to the MS Teams for Learning video.

Issue opening attached documents in Blackboard

Posted on by Naomi Beckett

The Digital Education Office (DEO) is aware of a new, infrequent issue where some people are receiving 404 errors when attempting to open certain documents in Blackboard when using Edge. This error is currently being investigated by Blackboard and will be fixed in a future update.

To access the documents, please use an alternative browser, or right-click on the document link and select ‘Save As’ to download a copy of the document.

Our apologies for the inconvenience.

DEO

Using OneNote in your studies

Posted on by Naomi Beckett

Written by Sophia Leaper, previous Student Digital Champion.

Since I started my degree I have gone through a selection of note taking methods, from loose papers filed in binders (that rarely actually ended up in binders) to paper notebooks and presentation printouts, I always ended up with a clutter of sheets that rarely got used for exam prep. Then I found OneNote, it didn’t immediately revolutionise my productivity, in fact at the start I ended up with an annoying combination of paper and digital notes that I didn’t know what to do with. However, as exams approached, I realised how convenient it was that I already had half of my essay points written down digitally. OneNote allows a format where I could just copy and paste specific points to form an argument, I could make tables with agree and disagree columns and I could add text wherever I chose to. Slowly I came to rely on it not only for all my note taking but also as an organisation tool, I can create monthly, weekly and daily calendars that can be updated instantly and tasks lists that are easy to tick off and prioritise.

Image of a checklist

Its features are endlessly customisable and you can divide your document pages into notebooks, section and pages for a clean and organised look. For those with tablets or touchscreens it is also easily allows you to download and annotate presentation slides and add your own handwritten notes. There are many useful features that OneNote contains, here I will mention my top six favourites.

My top OneNote features:

 

Create a shared set of notes.

You can share your notebooks with friends and peers, each of you can have a different section or topic or you can choose to all collaborate on the same thing. This also works well if you link your OneNote to your Outlook account as it is all part of Microsoft 365 which comes with your University account.

Timetabling

You can use the table feature to create your own customisable calendar or download a template online. You can choose the amount or rows and columns to adjust to your working hours and can change fonts and colours in order to make your timetable more aesthetic and colour-coded.

Image showing a timetable in OneNote

 

Export your notes as a PDF

You can convert annotated slides, notes with diagrams, or essay plans into PDFs and print them out to study from.

Draw

If you have a tablet or a smart pen you can draw your own diagrams and then place text boxes around the image for labels. OneNote can also convert handwritten text into typed format, so if you don’t feel that comfortable typing you can still get organised typed text through OneNotes’ ‘ink to text’ tool

Multiple windows

You can open multiple windows and use split screen to look at them both. That way you can have your notes on one side and your essay plan on the other!

Insert Excel spreadsheets

Using the insert button at the top of OneNote you can insert and view excel spreadsheet sections as well as file printouts, attachments and screen clippings.

Further information

For more information on using the O354 suite on your computer please see the IT Services webpages. You can also view their Introduction to OneNote page there too.

Skip to toolbar