On Tuesday 2 June, colleagues from LTW teams came together for a Learn Resilience Exercise. The purpose was to test how we would respond if one of the University’s key teaching and learning systems became unavailable, and to think practically about wha…
Read moreOur Editorial Style Guide contains many conventions and we know from research that publishers struggle to remember to apply them. Could automation help? We experimented embedding style guide rules into a Drupal module that checked content against the rules in the editorial interface and suggested corrections when the rules weren’t followed. As part of a […]
Read moreIt is difficult to think of a university that does not treat video as a core part of its content strategy. Across admissions, communications, and academic departments, the assumption has quietly taken hold that if something can be filmed, an open day, a student or alumni testimonial, it probably should be. The result is that […]
Read moreAI development keeps evolving as do the ways people seek to use AI. Traditional software development runs the risk of trying to perfect AI features people won’t use. Revisiting our previous AI research helped me tease out new opportunity spaces for AI features to help with content design tasks. Last summer, Mostafa Ebid joined the […]
Read moreRiding on the success of our internal Effective Digital Content course, we set out to expand by building an external version for the short courses platform, taking a product thinking approach. Three months on, experimenting with a proof-of-concept course has convinced to pause this work – to avoid falling into a build trap. The success […]
Read moreIn May, Mel and Nick from the UX team attended two days of Power BI training with QA. The training covered the basics of using Power BI Desktop and, through a mix of instructor-led and independent exercises, gave us a chance to transform data and build visualisations. Mel’s reflections Before the training, I’d only ever […]
Read moreSPARC Europe and we, as ENOEL open education advocates, seek to gain more insights into open education (OE) policy and practices within academic libraries of Higher Education, Teaching and Learning Centres and other academic support units in Europe via a new survey. Many of you contributed in previous years, and we would like to thank you again […]
Read moreIn late April we had the opportunity to attend the 24th annual Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference, affectionately known as #durbbu, hosted in historic Durham. This year’s theme, Little Things that Make a Big Difference, was a pleasant shif…
Read moreIn January 2026, Alex Burford, a learning technologist from the School of Informatics contacted the UX Service following completion of the new Effective Digital Content online course. Alex had really enjoyed the course and was keen to explore ways to implement the content design best practice principles it teaches within Open Course – the platform […]
Read moreAs we approach the first anniversary of the launch of the new Effective Digital Content course it was timely to review our approach to marking the content design exercises completed by learners to look for ways to simplify and potentially automate aspects of the process. In May 2025 the UX Service launched a new version […]
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