On Thursday 6th August the Digital Learning team released a significant Learning Space upgrade. The new version brings improvements to existing features as well as new functionality to support blended delivery in study block 1.

New Group Choice Plugin

Following requests from academic staff, we have added an a new activity which allows students to divide themselves into groups. Grouping students has a range of applications, from restricting access to content, to splitting students into teaching groups. Please remember to add empty groups to your module before using the group choice activity.

Weekly Sections Collapsed by Default

Following advice from our Learning Designers about cognitive overload and scrolling fatigue, all weekly sections will now appear collapsed by default. With the increased emphasis of Learning Space in our blended delivery model for 2020/21, we anticipate that this will improve the student experience of navigating their module content and emphasise their weekly activities.

Improved look and function of Forums

One running theme of CATT Week 2020 was the opportunity to use Learning Space Forums to engage students in asynchronous learning. The latest Learning Space update brings improvements to forums including:

• Visual improvements to the Forum activity.
• The ability to grade a students contribution to a forum
• Exporting the content of an entire forum, or a single student’s contribution.
• View a summary of each student’s contribution to a forum.

Removal of Chat activity

With the rapid rise of Microsoft Teams as a teaching tool at Falmouth, we have made the decision to remove the Chat activity from Learning Space. This decision recognises that Teams replicates and improves the functionality of chat, and minimises the duplication of spaces for academic discussion. You will no longer be able to add a new Chat activity but you will be able to access existing activities until study block 3 (19/20) closes.

If you’ve got questions or want to know more about anything covered in this blog, please get in touch at: dlsupport@falmouth.ac.uk