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

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. In many ways, the technical part of the move from Original to Ultra courses is the easy thing. What is more difficult is helping staff to use Ultra well. Recognising that this was going to be the case, 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 and are currently reviewing fifteen nominations.

Period	17 Apr 2024
Event title	22nd Annual Durham Blackboard Users' Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Durham, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International