Southampton and Newcastle universities have both said they aren’t renewing Turnitin, a similarity detection platform, going forward. Although Newcastle cites a number of reasons, both institutions mention that the non-renewal is at least partly due to Turnitin’s intention to change its End User License Agreement (EULA) and add new terms allowing them to use submissions … Read more
I’ve been doing some work to extract some SCORM packages out of a bespoke VLE and import them into Moodle as something that’s a bit more easily editable directly in Moodle. These are SCORM packages that were, in some cases, create a number of years ago and need a wee refresh. The original source packages … Read more
I’ve been doing a bit of work with Moodle this week and in particular I’ve been looking at how to do digital badges for learners within Moodle. I’m familiar with digital badges from my time at Edinburgh. We had a digital badges service (Parchment which was Canvas Credentials which was Badgr… confused???) and it was … Read more
After almost 22 years working in a variety of different roles at the University, I’ve made the decision to leave. It’s been a hard decision as there is so much I love about my job but I need a chance to catch up with myself. I’d like to have a bit of time to swot … Read more
As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year. It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE institutions has been depressing and … Read more
I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI. If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this helpful description by Amazon). They can do this on your behalf without your intervention. Clearly however, you need to … Read more
I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day. Some brief highlights from me…. I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life INCLUDING university – some people … Read more
I wrote a blog post in January 2023 (where did the time go!?!) about the work we’ve been doing on data retention for our services. Work has continued in the background and currently we are almost at the point of: Automating the deletion of courses and users in Learn. Sean has heroically been manually deleting … Read more
My colleagues and I have been doing a lot of work to try and improve digital accessibility across the University. It’s important that we try to make everything we do as accessible as possible – we want all of our students to have the same access to our learning activities, content and systems. We can’t … Read more
This is a blog post that’s been brewing for a while. The landscape is changing so much that every time I go to write it, I’ve heard something new that has changed my perspective. So I’m writing this knowing full well that in a months time I’ll realise it’s a load of nonsense. Please … Read more
