A few weeks ago, Oxford University learning technology expert Dave White sacrificed a Saturday lie-in to deliver a virtual keynote presentation at an event we were supporting. Outlining his thoughts on MOOCs in relation to his research on digital visitors and residents, Dave examined the role of higher education online. Read more
Enterprise activities and businesses are a core part of the community which universities are part of. Having just come back from a global university-community network conference in Barcelona, Caroline reflects on what she and her team mean when they say ‘engagement’. Read more
Why do some photos just come out better than others? Hanna explains simple things around framing and angle that anyone can do to take better photos. No need for a fancy camera – a little bit of concentration is all it takes! Read more
We just added some of the training resources we use to support our WordPress training to Share, our content repository, for you to take, use and remix for free. Here Steve explains a little about how these materials will help you understand the potential of WordPress and how to get started with running your own installation. Read more
Chris describes some recent workshops Netskills has run on storytelling techniques for project dissemination. Stories can be a powerful way for research projects to communicate more widely and accessibly what impact they have had on their institutions. The workshop aims to help teams to think about their work in narrative terms. But where do dragons come into it? Read more
Blackboard Collaborate Plan lets you create a structured session plan in advance of a live event in Collaborate. This will save you time uploading content and configuring the system so that you can spend it helping people learn. Here Steve describes how Plan works and how we use it to make our online workshops run more smoothly. Read more
After launching Netskills Voices, we were pleased to see people adding the site to their favourites. However, we were less pleased to see that the icon representing the site was sometimes less than pretty. That was because we didn’t have quite the right combination of ‘favicons’ in place. In this post, Steve explains how we put that right. Read more
This Pi Day, we’re helping Oxford University run a free, live online event with the ambitious aim of helping participants to rediscover “one of the most important and beautiful numbers in the universe.” Pi Day Live will feature Professor Marcus du Sautoy, who will explain the significance of Pi and help participants try some ancient techniques to derive its value. Here Steve explains how we’re helping facilitate this through Blackboard Collaborate. Read more
In supporting the Jisc involve service, Steve was given the challenge of merging two well-established Jisc blogs into one without annoying readers and losing subscribers. In this post he explains how we went about doing this. Read more
Editing text isn’t usually the easiest thing to do. Especially when it’s written by someone else. In the midst of editing a pile of web pages, Hanna put together a list that helps her keep a cool head and not get lost in the process. Read more