The Journey so far

From the early 2000s, a number of Academic programmes had commissioned the development of bespoke Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), supporting several Undergraduate and Masters level programmes. They provided a highly customised user experience with a strong sense of programme branding.

Learn Foundations was a 3-year project which ran from 2018 to 2021 and aimed to provide students with courses on Learn that meet their needs and provide the staff who design courses with the relevant skills, knowledge and guidance to do so by removing unnecessary complexities from within the VLE.

In summer 2019, we moved Learn from self-hosted to cloud hosting provided by the supplier, Blackboard.

The Learn Ultra Upgrade was the next step of the VLE excellence journey. Over the years, both staff and students had fed back on the usability of the original version of Learn and the challenges this could pose.

The Scoping AI Developments in EdTech at Edinburgh (SADIE) project was set up to standardise an approach for service teams to test and evaluate the utility and suitability of the AI tools and features being made available in the centrally supported EdTech services. The approach developed looked at the risks of adopting a particular feature and calls upon the expertise of learning technologists within the Schools, as well as that of the service managers in Information Services, in evaluating them.