Category: Supporting students

New guidance available on assessment and to support students learning online

Posted on by hilary

This blog post is to update you on new guidance on online assessments and support for students developed by the Digital Education Office. 

Essential guidance for online assessments (.docx)  

This guide should be read by all staff considering online assessment this academic year. It expands on information about alternative assessment options and includes key recommendations on how to set up and run online assessments, how to support students, and protocols to help ensure assessments are completed successfully.  

This guide will be extended to include more practical help in the WC 27th April – so please do look for updated information and additional webinar events to support assessment change. 

Guides to support students. 

To complement and add to the new study skills materials on studying from home, the Digital Education Office has created guides which staff can give to students who need help or advice for learning online. 

Current topics include: studying using multimedia presentations and narrated Powerpoints, encouraging active learning and student engagement, using Blackboard Collaborate, working in groups, keeping in touch, using discussion forums, creating videos, taking tests, and submitting assignments, including handwritten text. 

The Digital Education Office will extend these guides over the coming weeks. If you have any suggestions on areas we should include please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk 

Guidance for your students on learning online

Posted on by Suzanne Collins

As the teaching term starts in its new online form, we know that your students are going to be finding their feet with the new tools and ways of learning. To help you help them get comfortable in their new environment, we’ve been producing a range of advice, screen-casts, and ‘how to’ guides.  

Where can I find these guides, and how should I use them?

The guides are available from the new section of our website, called ‘Guides aimed at students’. Although they are all open for anyone to explore, they are best used when they are most relevant. We don’t want to overload students with lots of information that they might not need. Instead, we recommend that you choose which guides are relevant to what your students are doing, and attach them to any initial instructions. For example, if you’re setting up you first Collaborate session, you could send your students the ‘How to: Collaborate quick guide’ so they can make sure they’re set up before you start. There are some guides which are more general, for example on how learning and teaching can work in an online space, and what ‘engaged’ might look like virtually.   

You could think about adding these guides to your course space somewhere students can refer to them, or sending them in an announcement. It’s up to you how much you want to use these resources, but we hope they take some of the pressure out of helping your students navigate the new ways of learning online.

Where else should I send my students if they ask for more help?

The Study Skills tab in Blackboard has new  guidance on studying from home, including learning online. Guidance on open book assessment is also coming to the Study Skills tab very soon. We’ve also added a lot of new help to the ‘Support’ button in Blackboard. They can find this as a small blue tab with a question mark from the side of their screen. If they open this, they will find a range of specific guidance and links to help pages. 

Can they practice with these tools?

Yes! We have also created a space for students to have a look around Blackboard, if they are very new to it, and explore a few of the tools they might encounter.  To access the space, they need to find the ‘Student Practice Space’ organisation in Blackboard, or follow this link to the practice space, and then self enrol. To do this, they choose ‘click here to self enrol’, then select the small ‘enrol’ button, next to the green cross in the left hand menu bar, then ‘submit’.  

What if I can’t find what my students need?

We will continue to create guidance, but if you find something your students would need that we haven’t covered let us via digital-education@bristol.ac.uk and we’ll do our best to get something ready as soon as possible.  

Quick links: