This post has been jointly written by Senior Digital Learning Designer (SDLD) Robyn Weeks and Digital Learning Designer (DLD) Lawrence Westland. Robyn and Lawrence are members of the College of Health, Science and Society (CHSS) Digital Learning Team.
Overview of project
Historically, students had been introduced to PebblePad via a face to face, or online induction carried out by one of the CHSS Digital Learning Team. This induction session necessitated a lot of pre-planning, co-ordination and arrangement with academics and Programme leads as well as scheduling a date and timeslot for what was commonly an hour-long training session.
The reasoning behind the decision to create an online elearning version of the induction was to provide an accessible way for students to self-learn the material needed to get them using PebblePad as new starters. There were also questions around team capacity being low and the potential for easing overall workload, particularly with the upcoming rollout of Blackboard Ultra, which required major focus for all college’s digital learning teams.
We settled on creating an eLearning interactive Object in Xerte for the online induction as we were familiar with the tool and it presented the best option available. We needed it to be readily accessible to students, so decided to embed it into Blackboard Ultra Module pages across CHSS.
Developing the course
From the outset, our priority was to ensure the course was accessible and met the diverse needs of our student population. We especially wanted to develop a course that would support students who were apprehensive about technology, the self-described technophobes. One way to do this was to create four unique learner personas.
Learner personas are a useful way to steer teaching, learning and assessment design, and ensure the digital learning tools we utilise support different student needs. They also help us to understand our students’ wide-ranging motivations and barriers.
Although the personas we created were fictional, we used demographics obtained from the continuous improvement tool and researched comments provided by students in previous NSS/PTES and course surveys. We also used real examples of the various challenges our students faced from our experience training at live induction sessions. For example, access to suitable technology. As we experienced with students during our online inductions, several of our personas used old PCs/laptops or only had access to a tablet at home. As we developed the course, we tested its use on various devices to ensure all users could access it.
In addition to learner personas, we used Universal Design of Learning (UDL) as a guiding principle to help us develop an accessible and inclusive course.
UDL is a way of developing teaching, learning and assessment design so that it works for everyone. It means offering different ways to access content, show understanding, and stay motivated, so all students have an equal chance to succeed. Here is CAST’s Universal Design for Learning Guidelines.
There were several key design decisions we made using UDL. First, for any task that students would need to complete, we provided video guides, alongside written materials that could be downloaded, edited and printed. This allowed students to follow along using their preferred method of learning.
Second, we developed the course with fully flexible navigation, enabling students to move around the course freely with no time limits, mandatory elements or questions. This gave students the autonomy to complete the course at their own pace, skip or review any part of the course and take breaks when they needed.
We chose to use the Xerte platform because of its strong accessibility features. Xerte automatically supports screen readers, provides accessible navigation options, and allows for easy integration of alternative text, captions, and transcripts. These features are particularly valuable for students who rely on assistive technologies or have specific access needs. In addition, Xerte’s responsive design ensures that content is displayed effectively across different devices, including tablets and older laptops—something that aligned closely with our learner personas and their varied access to technology. Using Xerte also allowed us to embed principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) directly into the course structure. In practice, this meant that all learners, regardless of their starting point or confidence with technology, could navigate and interact with the materials in a way that best suited them.
Evaluation from students
Since the course rollout in September, we have received 25 responses to our course evaluation form from students. Out of these respondents:
- 96% described the ease of navigation as ‘very easy’ or ‘quite easy’.
- 96% Described the activities in the course as ‘very engaging’ or ‘quite engaging’
- 92% felt more confident using PebblePad after the course.
- 100% felt the course helped them to understand what PebblePad is and how to use it.
- 84% felt the course gave enough guidance to use on their own
Student comments reflected that they found it useful to have PebblePad explained in detail and that they found the online course to be a good way of learning as it supports a diverse student body including mature students, and those in practice.
While still early in its use, we’ve found these initial reactions very promising. However, we will continue to develop and improve the course based on future responses and feedback from all stakeholders.
Below are a series of images from the induction course:
