Show, Don't Tell: Encouraging staff to create award-winning Ultra courses

Activity: Academic Talks or PresentationsConference PresentationResearch

Description

The purpose of this presentation is to share our experiences to date of a couple of ways in which we have tried to encourage staff to create good Ultra courses. When the University of Northampton was planning its move to Ultra courses, a key part of our strategy was to provide staff with an answer to the question, 'What does a good Ultra course look like?' And rather than tell them, we decided to show them. To this end, prior to moving to Ultra we created a fully functional Ultra demonstration course on which all our staff were enrolled. As Ultra improved, we kept the demo course up-to-date, and in 2023 the course was the recipient of an Anthology Exemplary Course Award. Our demo course quickly became a key part of our learning technology training sessions for new staff, as well as being a resource that existing staff can use to get ideas for course design. As a further encouragement to create good Ultra courses, in 2023 we launched our own in-house annual Ultra Course Awards scheme, to recognise those staff who were creating excellent Ultra courses. In its first year we had five nominations, three of which received our in-house award. In 2024, we received fifteen nominations, of which eleven received an award. Following on from this, we are now reviewing the extent to which student VLE engagement data can be used to help us find more examples of good practice with Ultra courses.
Period23 Jul 2024
Event titleScottish Blackboard User Group
Event typeConference
LocationEdinburgh, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of RecognitionNational

Keywords

  • Blackboard
  • NILE
  • Ultra
  • Course design
  • Blackboard Ultra