Dawn Grundy

This poster will focus on the value and impact of LEAP Online’s approach to support blended and differentiated learning, inclusive assessment and student success. It will highlight sections of LEAP Online specifically developed to support University of Bolton core eLearning systems such as Zoom, Office 365 and Moodle together with approaches to inclusive assessment and differentiated learning. The digital badge data alongside student and staff feedback also demonstrate how LEAP Online is now firmly valued and embedded in the student journey and the University’s learning and teaching strategy.

Launched in 2017, LEAP Online is an interactive skills portal designed to support students on their University journey, both academically and from a personal development perspective. In April 2018 LEAP Online was nationally recognised by winning the Digital Literacy Award at the LILAC Conference.
This poster will focus on the value and effectiveness of LEAP Online’s approach to providing flexible, bite-sized information allowing students to take charge of their own learning. It will share the qualitative feedback undertaken since its launch and show how the learning analytics can evidence the impact of the support available in LEAP Online to student learning goals. The digital badge data also demonstrates how LEAP Online is now firmly embedded in the student journey and the University’s learning and teaching strategy.

Professionalism is an essential attribute, which is fundamental to personal development, self-awareness and preparation for future employment across all disciplines. We often expect our learners to have the essential knowledge and understanding of professional attitudes and behaviours at the start of their programme of study. However, it is widely recognised that due to societal and cultural change, social media, and many other factors, the term `Professionalism` does not always share the same meaning. In order to develop a greater awareness and promote individual development of learners, our aim is to prepare them for professional practice and regulation through professional bodies. Our overall strategic agenda is to bring professionalism to the forefront of education, and embed it with our programmes of study.
This presentation will discuss how the School of Nursing and Midwifery has worked with the Academic Librarian for the School to develop a section in LEAP Online about Professionalism.
We will discuss how we collaborated to design the content explaining professionalism and its importance, developed scenario based activities for the students to measure their understanding of professionalism and finally test their knowledge and understanding by gaining a digital badge.
We will reflect on how our experience as practitioners has helped shape this exciting new content and our plans to develop it further and embed across all subject areas within the university.

LEAP Online is an online skills portal designed to support students on their university journey, both academically and from a personal development perspective. It was launched in September 2017 and is based on a new Learning Development Framework (LDF) developed by the Director of Student Life and the eResources Librarian. The LDF represents a new learning development strategy aiming to ensure that the University’s skills offering is comprehensive and co-ordinated. It demonstrates a holistic approach, recognising four key areas relating to the acquisition of skills, knowledge and experience: academic development; personal development; digital literacy and student engagement.
The framework was informed by contributions from Academic Staff, Careers, Student Experience and the Students Union.

The session will discuss the background to the development of LEAP Online as an academic skills portal by one of the content developers. The programme and module leads will discuss the introduction of LEAP Online as a study aid, positively reinforcing the tool throughout the students’ programmes of study. The student viewpoint of how LEAP Online has provided the skills, knowledge and confidence to enhance progress in all academic areas will be outlined from a current student’s perspective.
It is anticipated that attendees will gain the knowledge of how using LEAP Online in teaching can have a transformative effect on the student learning journey.

This session will showcase the transformation of BISSTO to LEAP Online. The new platform will include expanded content in the following sections: My Academic Engagement; My Personal Development; My Digital Literacy and My Student Engagement. The new content will be presented in an engaging way with videos, activities and trackable assessments based in Moodle. Students will be awarded a digital badge for passing the assessments which shows on their Moodle profile, enabling tutors to track their students' engagement with the skills tutorial. LEAP Online will also have differentiation within each section to ensure that content is provided to more able students to stretch their development further.
The workshop will demonstrate how LEAP Online can contribute to and support academic skills and scholarship modules and the personal tutorial system. We would also welcome ideas for content and activities that would help you deliver your skills modules and tutorials. In the session, you will learn about LEAP Online expanded content and badged assessments and how LEAP Online can be used in skills modules and tutorials.

The BISSTO tutorial has been written and designed to meet the information needs of today’s students and staff. The BISSTO team plan to expand the content of BISSTO to further support the needs of a ‘Teaching Intensive Research Informed University’ The poster presentation displays some of the existing Information Literacy and Digital Literacy BISSTO content. We are then seeking staff feedback and engagement for further development by asking the question:
“What do members of staff need to support both their student body and their own professional development needs?”

Information literacy (IL) skills, the ability to search for, analyse and use information effectively, are key skills in achieving academic success as well as contributing to factors such as employability. The University’s IL framework was developed in 2008. It was to be formally embedded into the University curriculum, but this has only been achieved on a limited basis.
As responsibility for IL is included in the Library remit, a solution was to incorporate IL within an existing library service. The redevelopment of BISSTO in 2013 provided an opportunity to include interactive IL tests at appropriate points in the tutorial, covering all aspects of the framework. An IL section was also included to provide general information about IL for academics and students.
The first part of the session will outline the content changes. The second part will focus on how BISSTO can be used in the classroom to improve student competencies. The outcome of this session is that participants should know how to use BISSTO successfully in the curriculum to improve student information literacy competencies.