The Learning Technology Team would like to say a very big thank you and many congratulations to all the members of academic staff who are due to receive a NILE Ultra Course Award at the University’s Learning and Teaching Conference on Monday 16th June.
The ten recipients of a 2025 Ultra Course Award are:
- Maria Correia for BUS1024: Working Across Cultures
- Kiran Kaur for BUS2025: Reflections on International Experience
- Toby Tonkin for ENV1126: Life on Earth
- Caroline Nielsen for HIS3045: Seeing Ghosts? Death and the Supernatural in Britain: 1654 – 1918
- Muhammad Hijazy for HRMM094: Academic and Digital Skills for Professionals
- Hollie Townley for MID1029: Universal care needs applied to midwifery
- Alex Mouzakitis & Fiona Barrett for PHYM002: Evidence-based Cardiorespiratory Practice
- Alasdair Gordon-Finlayson for PSY1006: Becoming a Psychologist
- Charlotte Dann for PSY3053: Lifespan Development
- Mosavar Farahani & Danielle Jex for SLS2068: Clinical Immunology and Haematology
The Ultra Course Awards recognise staff who have created excellent Ultra courses for their students, and each course submitted for an award is reviewed by a panel of experts to ensure that it meets the award criteria, which are that the course:
- Follows the NILE Design Standards for Ultra Courses (https://libguides.northampton.ac.uk/learntech/staff/nile-design/nile-design-standards);
- Is clearly laid out and well-organised at the top level via the use of content containers (learning modules or folders), and that content items within top-level content containers are clearly named and easily identifiable for students, using sub-folders where necessary to organise content within the top-level content containers;
- Contains a range of content and activities for students to take part in.
In addition to reviewing the nominated courses, the panel also looked at students’ NILE engagement statistics to see whether courses that received an Ultra Course Award were used by students more than other courses. Comparing students’ engagement in NILE courses that received an Ultra Course Award in 2025 against the average of all active 24/25 NILE courses from semesters one and two, we found that students’ content interactions in courses that received an Ultra Course Award were almost three times greater than the average, and students were spending between two-and-a-half and three times more time in these courses than the average. Clearly, there are likely to be many reasons for students spending more time and being more active in courses that received an Ultra Course Award, but it is, we hope, heartening for Ultra Course Award recipients to know that the time spent designing and maintaining their NILE courses may have had a positive effect in this regard.
Nominations for the 2026 Ultra Courses Awards will be open later this year.
