Monthly Archives: September 2015

Bristol Online Surveys downtime

Between 4pm and 6pm on Thursday, 24th September 2015, the Bristol Online Surveys (BOS) service will be unavailable while system maintenance takes place. During this two-hour period, survey authors and administrators will be unable to sign in to BOS, and survey respondents will be unable to complete surveys. BOS is being made unavailable to allow their technical team to safely carry out preliminary work relating to the upcoming enhancements described in this blog post on their web site: https://www.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/upcoming-enhancements/

Teaching Bites

eLD and the School of Education are running some ‘Teaching Bite’ sessions.

To sign-up for any of the talks below (eLD) simply go to Succeed -> Learning and Development – My Learning -> Teaching Bites and then select the talks you wish to attend.

Wednesday 16th September, 1-2pm, S10: Module Design — Make Your Succeed a Better Place
Building a module in Succeed where the content is easy for the students to navigate is not as straight-forward as it might first appear. This session looks at some easy wins:

  • Using Content Areas affectively
  • Naming Content and the Description area
  • Use of the Table of Content (left-hand menu/navigation)
  • Consistency

Thursday 17th September, 1-2pm, S10: Mobile
The wireless service at the University opens up some exciting possibilities for student engagement in teaching and learning – laptops, tablets and smart phones can now quickly and easily connect to Eduroam and get Internet access. Students amongst other things can then participate in polls (rather similar to clicker technology) or tweet questions/comments.

Thursday 24th September, 1-2pm, S10: Turnitin – GradeMark
Turnitin offers much more than plagiarism detection. It has tools to facilitate peer marking and online marking (‘GradeMark’). This talk will demonstrate how to use GradeMark and discuss the positive and negative features of marking online.

Thursday 1st October,  1-2pm, S10: Quizzes/Surveys
The session will look at the Tests, Surveys and Pools area of Succeed. Users will be shown how to set up a test or a survey and how to add questions to it. An explanation of the available question types will be given. The session will also cover how to edit the settings for a test or survey so it is made available to the relevant users at the relevant time, including how to set up exceptions for AAA students who require more time to complete their assessments. An explanation will also be given of the question pool, and how to add questions to this pool, and how to select questions from the pool to add to tests and surveys.


The School of Education are also running a series of seminars that are open to all staff. To sign-up for these sessions please email ‘Education Admin’.

Wednesday 23rd September, 1-2pm, C25:  Discussion Tool, Blogs and Wikis
This session will look at some of the collaboration tools within blackboard, these tools can be used to help build a sense of community in modules, can be used for group working, social interaction and the exchange of ideas.  The session will look at the discussion tool, blogs and wikis and give examples of where these might be used successfully within your succeed module.

Wednesday 30th September, 1-2pm, A5: Collaborate
This session will look at the peer-to-peer Conferencing tool Blackboard Collaborate (Succeed Classroom) and how you may use this in your teaching. Collaborate allows a meeting or teaching session to take place online, with audio, video and a working whiteboard area which can be used to share slides, work collaboratively on documents or conduct a web tour. The session will cover the equipment needed to run a Blackboard Collaborate session, how to set a session up, get started and some tips and tricks on its use.

Wednesday 14th October, 1-2pm, C25: Digitial Tools in Assessment
This session will look at how digital tools can be used enable different forms of assessment. It will look at assessments using student journals, wikis and digital video and consider the benefits and potential problems of these.

Wednesday 28th October, 1-2pm, C25: VoiceThread
VoiceThread bridges the gap between real-time discussions and online presemtations. The simplest way to view this tool is like a spoken discussion board not a written, text-based board and best way to find out more is a attend this session.

To attend one of the School of Education