1. Inspiring a Sense of Educational Community
B S Becker, J R Gilbert & A A Watson Libraries & Learning Innovation, Leeds Beckett University
Good Afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for attending this Session this afternoon.
My name is Barbara Becker from Leeds Beckett University. (Colleagues from the UK will know us in our previous guise as Leeds Metropolitan University). My co-authors are Jack Gilbert and Adam Watson, but unfortunately they are not able to attend the Conference this week.
Today I will present our work on personalising the University Learning Platform, to provide a unique student experience for a cohesive individual cohort experience.
@bsbecker1, @adlab

2. Leeds Beckett University
Two campuses based in Leeds, Yorkshire, UK
Tertiary education provider for over 100 years
University status granted in we’re ‘New’!
Staff and students access our learning platform from 161 countries
Before I get into the nitty gritty of my presentation, let me share some interesting facts about my University. Leeds Beckett University is based in the City of Leeds, in Yorkshire, in the centre of the so called UK Northern Powerhouse.
And despite the city being landlocked we do still have the River Aire and the Leeds Liverpool canal running through the City. So like Groningen we have a waterfront – just to the same extent.
We have a split campus, with a city centre location, and around 3.5 miles north of the city is our beautiful Headingley Campus – with the James Graham building as its architectural highlight.
Although, we have been a tertiary education provider for over 100 years, we received our University Chartership in So a relatively new University. And although our student and staff are in the main campus based, we have a significant, and growing, off-campus population, with logins from 161 countries.

3. Inspiring a Sense of Educational Community The Concept…
So here’s the thing…. The concept…

4. At the beginning…
An educational institution consists of many types of students… And as an institution we provide one learning platform for everyone to access… But when we started analysing our student base, how were they actually studying?

5. Classroom Based at home institution Standard Student
The majority of students are ‘standard’ students on campus, classroom based.

6. Classroom Based at another institution Franchise Student
We have a significant and growing proportion of students who are classroom based, but being taught in their home institutions and accessing the learning platform under Franchise contracts.

7. Independent study from home Distance Learning Students
Moreover, in the last few years, the University has been growing its distance learning provision, students usually studying at home and fitting in their studies with working, bringing up families. These students can be either be based internationally or in the institution's country.

8. Independent study for work Continual Professional Development (CPD)
Finally, we have an established set of continuing professional development courses, where students study a specific set short courses related to their current working career.

9. So one size fits all?
But our learning platform initially treated all our institutional students as the same… one size fits all… We came to realise that this was not the case… For instance why would Distance Learning students require access to our institutional timetables when they are off-campus?

10. What if?
So what if we could we personalise our virtual learning environment for each group of students – define them and separate them from the larger body of conventional classroom based students… we started to investigate the possibilities…

11. Standard Students
Distance Learners
Continuing Professional Development
Franchise Partners

12. Our University Perspective…
Inspiring a Sense of Educational Community
Our University Perspective…
So that’s the concept… hold that thought just for a moment…

13. Current University Context
~94% of users, login at least once during the year
Staff: 2,900 Academic: 1,500
~69% of Courses being taught use the VLE
Students: 29,000
40% of visits last at least ten minutes
Before I go any further it might be useful, to provide you with some context to our Blackboard Installation.
We have around 29,000 students, 2,900 staff or which 1500 are academic staff. Our statistical analysis (not taken from Blackboard analytics) shows that 94% of users login at least once during the year, with 69% of courses (of which we have 3500) being taught on Blackboard (so have content and students attached). And 40% of visits last at least 10 minutes or more.
We have the mobile app installed and we know that 4 out of 5 of our users are using the app to access their course materials.
4 out of 5 users have downloaded / used the Mobile App

14. Portal & VLE Timeline Portal VLE 2001 – WebCT Campus Edition
2003 – Sungard HE (Ellucian) Campus Pipeline
2004 – Sungard HE (Ellucian) Luminis
2008 – WebCT VISTA
2010 – Blackboard Learn 9.1
2011 – Blackboard Learn 9.1
Leeds Beckett University has had a portal/VLE platform for a number of years since bringing in WebCT Campus Edition in 2001, some 15 years ago.
Two years later WebCT was embedded into the first student portal platform supplied by Sungard HE (now Ellucian).
For a number of years this remained the status quo, with the only change a slight upgrade to the portal and WebCT being upgraded to the Vista flavour of the product.
Then in 2010 the decision was made to change the student portal to Blackboard Learn 9.1 Communities, in which the VISTA VLE was embedded.
Finally, VISTA was upgraded to Blackboard Learn 9.1 Courses and the Portal and the VLE were finally on the same platform.
And in August 2015 we migrated from self-hosting to managed hosting, as well as upgrading. For any Sys Admins out there, we are currently on Blackboard Learn 9.1 October 2014 with CU2.
2016 – Learn 9.1 October 2014

15. Our learning platform is branded as MyBeckett and the Login Page is heavily customised using HTML & CSS. All our students and staff see this login page, irrespective of the course program that they are following.
We provide prominent Staff and student help links, these contain our top 9 queries, taken from a tally of the support queries as well as a link to our general online support guides.
The Hot support section, allows the quick posting of a message, or a permanent link to our induction video at the relevant time or year without having to upload a new login page each time.
Finally, we provide a mechanism for students to access the relevant password reset mechanism dependent on their particular registration status.

16. Typical Student Layout
When a standard staff or student logs into MyBeckett they are presented with a range of tabs. This is a typical student set of tabs, but staff see much the same with a few extras.
Below which are a series of HTML and Building Block communities modules designed to a standard template to produce an accessible layout.
Each module has two title areas to inform users of the modules function, followed with a few lines of text to give further detail of the service provided by the module. A large action button exists, which is this size, so that it can be easily clicked without zoom when mobile users access Communities via a mobile browser. Finally Help & Information buttons embedded into the module provide immediate targeted help either as self-help instructions or help contacts.
For each tab we create a series of modules, which are either Building Blocks or simple HTML channels dependent on the service being provided.
In this example the Password Manager and Web Payments modules are HTML channels that link students through to web-based service, while Enrol Online and Update your Personal Data are Building blocks that pass relevant student information to our SIS allowing the students to perform a number of functions in the SIS.
Typical Student Layout

17. Inspiring a Sense of Educational Community The Plan…
So we have the concept and we have the customised learning platform, how do we put them together to achieve our aim… we needed a cunning plan!

18. Our questions…
Standard
Franchise
Distance Learners
CPD
Is the learning platform content relevant and targeted to the right group of students?
Are all students entitled to see all the resources that we provide?
Are the student’s actually engaging with the services provided through the learning platform?
We started off by asking our selves three questions… In each case we had to turn are initial No’s into Yes’s…
How could we make the content relevant…
How could we only give access to the legitimate resources…?
And how could we provide an engaging learning platform…?

19. Out of the Box 2010 Standard Brand 2014-15 Customised 2015 →
So we knew what we wanted to achieve,
But we had already come a long way from the out of the box product, creating our own Brand, including the required University font, logo and corporate colours.
So the next step was to identify the tools required, to create unique brands, utilising the university colour palette, along with a mechanism to identify the tabs and modules required.

20. Inspiring a Sense of Educational Community The Technical Bit…
So what did we actually do to actually achieve our end game…

21. Personalisation Tools
Blackboard Learn 9.1 Communities
Institution Roles
20 Primary System Instruction roles
8 of which are reserved e.g. Staff, Student, Alumni etc.
Brands
Associate a Brand with an Institution Role
Create custom Brand Themes
Themes & Colour Palette
Create CSS hacks to modify look & feel
Learn 9.1 communities contains three major tools to allow personalisation of the platform,
The principal one being Institution Roles. In this instance they are 20 Primary Institution roles provided, 8 of which are reserved and you will know them as Staff, Student and Alumni, but this leaves 12 roles available for utilisation.
The second Tool is Brands that you can associate with a primary institution role – so in theory 20 institution roles gives you 20 brands type available!
And the final Tool is Themes & Colour Palette. In essence this is a customisable set of stylesheets that is applied to your Brand to provide the look and feel of the brand.

22. Planning Process What Tabs are required ? Request for a new User brand
What Modules are required ?
Final Content Plan
What Theme is required ?
Combined with the personalisation tools, we can also use this primary Institution Role to identify which Tabs a particular set of students (or staff) require and also which modules should appear on each of those individual tabs.
So we then need to make a series of decisions when defining a new user brand, so we developed a mechanism of drawing up a content plan to detail the exact requirements, in consultation with the departmental or service team.

23. Draft Typical Content Plan
This is a typical Content Plan for a Brand currently in development, I have cut down a lot of the detail to make it slightly simpler to read, but in essence, there are four points I would like to make:
All the current tabs available in are listed and I have indicated whether these are required in the new Brand. Any that are, are highlighted in grey.
For each required tab, the modules all ready designated to that tab available are listed. In this particular example I have highlighted in red the modules that are not required in both the Library Tab and for the Modules tab, as this cohort of students do not require the offsite registration form, or to access our Exam or Final Results systems.
Any new tabs or module requirements are indicated at the bottom.
And finally (in the grey rows), we identify the Primary Institution role allocated, with the name applied and the Reference file and name.
Obviously, once initially defined these Content Plans can then be updated as required.

24. Technical Process Final Content Plan Create a new Institution Role_ID
Create a new Brand
Create a new Theme
Assign new Role_ID to required users
Assign Brand to Institutional Role
Assign Theme to new Brand
With the content plan defined, we can now start building the new Brand, starting off with creating the new primary institution role and assigning this role, initially with a single user account which we call the Layout Owner.
Later on in the process, on live production data, required students can be assigned the new role, using snapshot XML flat files.
The next stage is to create the Brand and assign this to the institutional role.
Then perhaps the most complicated part of the process is to alter the theme stylesheets, to match the requirements of the new theme. The process that we adopted was to create a ‘hacks’ stylesheet that contained all the alterations to the default theme, which was combined with a customised palette, that sits alongside the inbuilt Bb palettes.
Finally, the Tab options and chosen modules are added to the Institutional role.
Snapshot Flat Files
Create user - layout owner
1. Develop CSS hacks
2. University Colour Palette

25. Inspiring a Sense of Educational Community The Results…
And so what do our new Brands look like….I am going to show around 5 examples pointing out some of the highlights of each. In each case I will compare the new Brand to our existing standard student Brand so you can compare for yourselves.

26. Example 1 – Distance Learning
Highlights
No Timetables Tab!
New Collaboration Tab
New module to link to Google+ Community
On Modules tab - Module to alternative VLE platform!
My first example is for our Distance Learning students. Here our Brand colour compliments the colours chosen by the DLU to identify their course content, and if you would like to know more about their course design principles my Colleague from the DLU is presenting on Friday afternoon.
The first thing you might spot is there is no timetable tab, as Distance Learners, operate their own study schedules and do not require this service.
Secondly the Groups Tab has been replaced with a Collaboration Tab, on which a new HTML module was built to link to the Google+ community that DLU use for engaging students in conversations, providing their own way of inspiring a sense of educational community.
Finally, although the majority of Distance Learning students use Blackboard as their Learning Environment, there is a small cohort of students who use another VLE platform and we provide a pass-thru module from Bb to this other platform from the Modules tab – which is actually Courses in Blackboard speak!

27. Distance Learning – Collaboration Tab
The overall Distance Learning brand looks like this, and looking at the Collaboration tab we have two modules that provide access to our twin file storages services (which are usually on a Tab called Files) as well as the new Google+ community module.

28. Example 2 – Franchise Courses
Highlights
9 x Global Franchise Partners
Very limited Tabs!
Note VLE dropped from Brand as Module to alternative VLE platform run by Franchise
Tailored Library access to electronic resources
My second example considers a very different set of students and circumstance. Over the last few years the University has been developing its global partner institutions, where the students are studying course materials developed at Leeds Beckett, but in a classroom with their own instructor at their home institution. We currently have 9 global franchise partners.
Initially, we provided only the courses through our own VLE, but lengthy negotiations, now mean that we act as a portal service to these 9 Franchise Partners, but to very limited and specific modules, hence the low number of tabs.
Note that this is reflected in the Brand with the ‘And VLE’ section dropped from the brand name.
However, as with Distance Learning students, we provide a link to the institutions own VLE platform, whatever this happens to be.
Finally, we provide access to a subset of our electronic library resources, with tailored licence arrangements with the e-journal and database suppliers.

29. Typical Franchise Layout
This example shows a typical Franchise student Home tab layout, including the Information module and the module to link to the Home Institutions learning platform.

30. Example 3 – CPD Highlights 1700 students
Specialist CPD courses for Heads of School & Teachers
Limited Tabs!
9 x modules all relating to this particular student cohort including Course list
The third example is again, a highly specialised case. We have a largish cohort of students (around 1700 students currently) who are already working as Teachers, Head Teachers, Governors, in UK Schools with school children up to the age of 18.
An organisation known as the National College used to provide around 30 short courses to this sector as Continuing Professional Development. When the National College folded, we took on the responsibility of hosting their courses.
But these students are not enrolled as formal students of the University, with no entitlement to access to any other University Services, just their courses. So the Brand applied reflects this. Just two tabs exist for this student cohort with over 9 modules created on the main Carnegie Leaders in Learning Tab to support all the other activities that they need to complete outside of their actual courses.

31. Typical CPD Layout
And this is an example of the some parts of that Tab. The students see their module list, and a series of relevant modules. Some of the modules, such as the green Electives choice module, provide a link to a Google Form that is partly pre-populated with user information, to allow students to easily select their electives.

32. Special Case 1 – Research Students
Highlights
Standard Brand
No Timetables Tab!
New Research Tab
New Module to link to Portfolio tool
New Module to provide Thesis plagiarism check
As a new University our focus has been mainly on the quality of the teaching that we provide, with research activities, never being part of the equation. However, this profile has changed and we now have around 750 PhD students, supported by around 350 academic staff, and dedicated administrative unit.
In the UK, a Research Development Framework, now supports the soft skill development of Research students, to support the transition from Research to Employment. For this Research Students need to see dedicated information, so you guess it, we developed a new Brand for Research Students!
In this case, again there is no need for a Timetables tab, but we have provided a dedicated Research Tab, which contains new modules that link to the Portfolio tool, specific Research Training sessions, and provide access to a self-enrol Bb course where students can access a Turnitin assignment to check any Thesis chapters for academic integrity. Something that the students had been asking for, for some time.

33. Typical Research Tab Layout
And this is the typical layout of the Research Tab, where these modules can be seen.

34. Special Case 2 – Leeds ISC
Highlights
Partner to Leeds Beckett University and Leeds University
No Timetables Tab!
New Leeds ISC Tab
Branded to match Partner logo
In development
And so to our final Brand Example. This is the brand that I presented the Content Plan for, earlier.
The Leeds International Study Centre is a joint initiative run between Leeds Beckett University and Leeds University, in partnership with an international organisation known as The Study Group. This partnership provides international students with the requisite academic tools to join an undergraduate program at one of the partner Universities. The students are enrolled students of Leeds Beckett University, but not through the SIS, so they have a unique status.
Leeds Beckett provide the learning platform and are the Academic Regulators and we have been working with this organisation for the last few months, to develop their brand.
In this case the students do not need a Timetables tab, as their timetables are provided by an external system, so we will look to provide a new module to link to the requisite system. But we do provide a specific Leeds ISC Tab, which will house modules for generic announcements and links to their attendance policies, which are strictly controlled by the UK Border Agency.
The colour palette has been adjusted to the colours used by the Leeds ISC itself, which is separate to the brand palettes used by either partner institution.

35. Has it worked?
Have we created learning environments that will inspire a sense of educational community?
94% users logged in at least once
4.5m visits
96.8% users logged in at least once.
~ 4.7m visits forecast
So that was a brief overview of some of the brand personalisation's that we have undertaken, but have we achieved what we set out to do? Have we created Learning environments that inspire a sense of ownership in our educational communities with our disparate set of students.
As many of the Brands were rolled out over the last year or are still in development, we do not have any hard and fast learning analytics, as yet. And we will need to devise a proper statistical model to analyse to say for sure yes… But we do have an indication that our student engagement has improved.
In the academic year to date we have seen an increase of 2.8% unique logins already compared to the whole of academic year We now believe that some 96.8% of our student population have logged in at least once. It probably will not alter much as our academic year formally finishes in only 6 weeks time at the end of May.

36. Anecdotally… Yes!
But alongside this increase, we have achieved the accolade of our VLE being ranked first in the world by our International Students in I’m not sure if this tells us our educational community branding is working, or that the prize we offered our students to complete the survey was of a sufficiently high value (BTW this was a new Leeds Beckett Hoodie!)
However, the team are very proud of the recognition and award.
International Student Barometer September Wave This is an independent survey of 69 institutions worldwide of
which 51 are in the UK.

37. ? ?
So all that remains for me to say, is to thank my absent colleagues for their contribution to the work presented today, and to the remaining members of the team who have contributed in many ways over the years.
Also I would like to thank you for attending this session today and for listening.
And as Seth Godin writes “Greg Stock reminds us that what really matters is the questions”. So if you have any questions or a whole Book of Questions, I will endeavour to answer them as best as I can.