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The new features in this month’s Blackboard’s upgrade will be available from Friday 7th November. This month’s upgrade includes the following new/improved features to Ultra courses:
- Bulk edit question points in tests
- Improved navigation for Blackboard items from gradebook column headers
- Display of percentage grades in NILE
- Turnitin Feedback Studio: iPad app deprecation
- Fix your content day
Bulk edit question points in tests
Currently, the points value of test questions can only be changed on a per-question basis. Following the November upgrade, staff will be able to bulk change the points value of test questions. The bulk change options will allow staff to select all questions in the test, or filter and select by question type, or select individual questions.
More information about using tests is available at: Learning Technology Team – Ultra Workflow 3: Blackboard Test
Improved navigation for Blackboard items from gradebook column headers
Please note that the following does not apply to Turnitin assignments, only to Blackboard items (assignments, tests, forms, assessed discussions and journals, AI conversations, plus manually created gradebook items, calculations, and total calculations) and SCORM items.
It is not currently possible when in ‘Marks’ view in the gradebook to view students’ submissions. To do this while in the gradebook, staff have to switch to ‘Markable Items’ view and select the submission from there. Following the upgrade, selecting the column header in ‘Marks’ view will, if accessing a Blackboard or SCORM item, offer a ‘View’ option which takes staff directly to the submissions.
Display of percentage marks in NILE
Currently, percentage marks in NILE are displayed up to two decimal places. For most tutor-marked assignments this is not an issue because these are typically marked out of 100 and a whole number mark is awarded. However, for assignments not out of 100, and especially for computer-marked tests, etc., students often see their marks displayed to one or two decimal places. As SITS rounds non-whole number marks this means that there are situations where students’ marks in NILE are not identical with those in SITS. For example, the following marks in NILE would be displayed as whole numbers in SITS:
Following the November upgrade, NILE will apply the same rules as SITS (standard rounding rules) when dealing with non-whole number percentage marks in the gradebook, meaning that the marks displayed to students in NILE and those displayed in SITS will always be identical. Thus the marks show in the screenshot above will, following the upgrade, be displayed as follows:
Turnitin Feedback Studio: iPad app Deprecation
Turnitin have announced that at the end of 2025 The Turnitin Feedback Studio iPad app will be retired and will no longer be available.
Fix your content day
At the University of Northampton, we’re once again pleased to join Anthology’s Fix Your Content Day – a 24-hour global event on Tuesday, November 18th, 2025 – aimed at creating more inclusive learning environment for all students. This is a brilliant initiative which encourages staff to improve the accessibility of digital course content using Blackboard Ally, which helps make NILE more inclusive, one fix at a time.
Find out more at: Learning Technology Blogs – Fix Your Content Day 2025
Learning technology / NILE community group
Staff who are interested in finding out more about learning technologies and NILE are invited to join the Learning Technology / NILE Community Group on the University’s Engage platform. The purpose of the community is to share information and good practice concerning the use of learning technologies at UON. When joining the community, if you are prompted to login please use your usual UON staff username and password. By joining the Learning Technology / NILE Community you will receive calendar invitations to our regular live community events:
Join the Learning Technology / NILE Community Group
More information
As ever, please get in touch with your learning technologist if you would like any more information about the new features available in this month’s upgrade: Who is my learning technologist?
At the University of Northampton, we’re once again pleased to join Anthology’s Fix Your Content Day – a 24-hour global event on Tuesday, November 18th, 2025 – aimed at creating more inclusive learning environment for all students. This is a brilliant initiative which encourages staff to improve the accessibility of digital course content using Blackboard Ally, which helps make NILE more inclusive, one fix at a time.
How do I get involved?
If you’d like to take part, simply email your Learning Technologist or the Learning Technology main email with the code of your NILE module. On the morning of November 18, email them a screenshot of your current Ally Accessibility score, then spend the day making improvements to your module content. By 8 PM, submit another screenshot of your final Ally score and you might just get a special mention in Unify, along with the satisfaction of knowing you’ve created a more accessible learning environment for your students.
Last year, Deborah Gardner joined previous years participants Charlotte Dann, Alison Powers, Simon Sneddon and Jean Edwards who have all embraced the challenge and helped create more inclusive NILE modules, making a real difference for their students.
What do I need to do on November 18?
Here’s a guide to getting involved in the Anthology Fix Your Content Day 2025:
- Use this guide to find your Module-Level Ally score and identify areas for improvement.
- Use Blackboard Ally to assess the accessibility of your materials. Ally provides feedback and suggests improvements, helping you prioritise changes that will have the greatest impact.
- Review Your Documents: Ensure that your PDFs, Word documents, and presentations use clear headings and tags that can be easily navigated by screen readers.
- Add Alt Text to Images: Include descriptive alt text for any images in your materials. This ensures that students using screen readers can engage with the visual content.
- Check your Captions: Accurate captions support not just students with hearing impairments, but also those studying in noisy environments or those who are non-native English speakers.
Need Help? Join Our Drop-In Session
To support you throughout the day, we’re also offering a face-to-face drop-in session between 10-4 in the drop-in zone next to the student union office in the Learning Hub. You can get help interpreting your Ally report, ask questions about accessibility improvements and make fixes with guidance from a friendly neighbourhood Learning Technologist
We hope you’ll join us on Tuesday, November 18 and make NILE more accessible. However, even if you can’t engage on the day, consider trying something new this semester – whether that’s adding clearer captions, using shorter filenames, or creating an Ultra document. Even small improvements can significantly transform the learning experience for all students.
The new features in this month’s Blackboard’s upgrade will be available from Friday 3rd October. This month’s upgrade includes the following new/improved features to Ultra courses:
Improved student view of fill in the blanks test questions
Following the October upgrade, the student view of fill in the blanks test questions will be improved so that the students’ responses are placed in situ, rather than as a list at end of the question.
More information on the different types of questions that can be used in tests is available from: Blackboard Help – Question Types
Add metadata to test questions
October’s upgrade will allow staff using tests in NILE to add question metadata to their test questions via the use of tags. Metadata tags will be visible during question creation and editing and can be used to filter questions when reusing or adding to pools. Tags can be added to questions in a test, or to undeployed questions in the question bank.
More information about setting up tests is available from: Blackboard Help – Create Tests
Learning technology / NILE community group
Staff who are interested in finding out more about learning technologies and NILE are invited to join the Learning Technology / NILE Community Group on the University’s Engage platform. The purpose of the community is to share information and good practice concerning the use of learning technologies at UON. When joining the community, if you are prompted to login please use your usual UON staff username and password. By joining the Learning Technology / NILE Community you will receive calendar invitations to our regular live community events:
Join the Learning Technology / NILE Community Group
More information
As ever, please get in touch with your learning technologist if you would like any more information about the new features available in this month’s upgrade: Who is my learning technologist?
The new features in this month’s Blackboard’s upgrade will be available from Friday 5th September. This month’s upgrade includes the following new/improved features to Ultra courses:
- Enhance Documents with block styling options
- Add and manage question titles in tests, forms, and banks
In addition, and as previously announced, the following changes will take effect in September:
- End of Life: Assist tab in main NILE menu
- End of Life: Padlet LTI NILE integration
- End of Life: Kaltura videos playing back from the US server
- End of Life: LearnSci LTI 1.1 links
Enhance Documents with block styling options
When creating or editing a Document content item, instructors are now able to style blocks on the page using built-in icons that have been designed by the Blackboard team to enhance visual appeal and direct student attention.
The option to add one of the new styles is available from the block menu as shown in the screenshot below.
The styles available are Question, Tip, Key points, and Next steps. The results of each are demonstrated in sequence in the following image.
More information about creating Documents can be found on the Blackboard Help website: Creating Documents
Add and manage question titles in tests, forms, and question banks
Instructors can optionally utilise titles when creating or editing questions in tests, forms, and question banks on a course. Students will not see the titles when taking tests. The main purpose of this new feature is to help instructors locate previously created questions for reuse in other tests or forms.
End of Life: Assist tab in main NILE menu
Blackboard have recently announced the end of life for the Assist tab which appears in the main NILE menu and which provides students with information about University support services, etc. The Assist tab will be removed from NILE on the 8th of September 2025.
In order to provide students with information in NILE about the University’s support services, the information which currently appears in the Assist tab now appears in all 25/26 programme and module-level NILE courses in an item called ‘Help and support for UON students’*. In programme-level courses this is in the ‘My programme’ area of the course and in module-level courses this is in the ‘About this module’ area of the course.
Please note that the ‘Help and support for UON students’ item cannot be edited by staff as it is managed and maintained centrally.
*In courses taught by partners the item is called ‘Help and support for students studying with partner institutions’ and only includes information relevant to partner students.
End of Life: Padlet LTI NILE integration
Important Note: Padlet is NOT being removed – only the method of sharing Padlets with students is changing.
On the 8th of September 2025 Padlet will be removed from the Content Market in NILE, meaning that all links to existing Padlets which have been embedded in NILE courses via the Content Market will stop working and will become automatically hidden from students. Such links will be clearly marked to staff, as shown in the screenshot below:
UON staff can continue to use Padlet with their students, but staff will now need to access Padlet via https://uon1.padlet.org (selecting ‘Continue with Microsoft’ and entering their UON username and password) and share their Padlets in NILE via web links rather than using the Content Market. No other Padlet functionality will be affected, and students will not need to login to Padlet to be able to contribute to Padlets that have been linked from NILE courses using web links.
More information about logging in, setting up and using Padlet is available from: Learning Technology Team – Padlet
More information about creating web links in NILE courses is available from: Blackboard Help – Web Links
End of Life: Kaltura videos playing back from the US server
Important Note: Kaltura is NOT being removed – only some old content in NILE courses will be affected.
As Kaltura was implemented at UON prior to the GDPR and the Data Protection Act (2018), Kaltura videos were initially stored in the US. In order to be fully compliant, and following discussions with the University’s Data Protection Office, migration of all Kaltura content from the US to the EU was completed and staff and student access to Kaltura’s US server was discontinued some time ago. In order to provide minimal disruption, Kaltura videos embedded in NILE from the US server have remained active following the migration. However, at the end of September 2025 all access to Kaltura media on the US server will be suspended. This is likely to have minimal effect, but to help staff identify videos in their NILE courses which are no longer functional the following message will be displayed:
Currently, there are no 25/26 NILE courses containing Kaltura content embedded from the US, therefore no 25/26 NILE courses will be affected. While it is not possible to add US-based Kaltura items to NILE courses via the Content Market, if these items exist in old NILE courses they can be copied across into new courses. We therefore recommend that any course copies containing Kaltura items are checked carefully to ensure that there are no out-of-date Kaltura links.
End of Life: LearnSci LTI 1.1 links
Following on from LearnSci’s implementation of the LTI 1.3 method of adding LearnSci resources to NILE Ultra courses, LearnSci have advised that resources added using the old LTI 1.1 method will stop working on 8th September 2025. LearnSci resources added to Ultra courses using the LTI 1.1 method will have been added via ‘+ Create > Teaching tools with LTI connection’, whereas resources added via the LTI 1.3 method will have been added using ‘+ Content Market > LearnSci’.
A LearnSci resource added using the LTI 1.1 will look like the first link in the screenshots below, with the rocket next to the title. A LearnSci resource added using the LTI 1.3 will look like the second link, with the LearnSci icon next to the title. Once the LTI 1.1 is switched off the old links will appear to staff with a ‘This link is broken’ message and will be automatically hidden from students. LTI 1.3 links will be unaffected.
All LearnSci resources added using the LTI 1.1 will be fully functional until the end of August 2025. Where staff are using LearnSci resources for the 25/26 academic year they will need to ensure that when new NILE courses are being set up that any old LTI 1.1 links that have been copied over are removed and replaced with new 1.3 links. If staff want LearnSci resources to be available to students in old NILE courses any 1.1 links will need to be replaced with 1.3 links.
More information
As ever, please get in touch with your learning technologist if you would like any more information about the new features available in this month’s upgrade: Who is my learning technologist?
At the University of Northampton, we provide a range of means for students to engage with their academic programme. We know how valuable this material can be – from teaching and Virtual Learning Environment (known locally as NILE) sites to making library resources available, it is a key part of providing great educational opportunities. Sean Brawley (Student Engagement Manager) in Learntech has looked at a range of student data points to review the possible impact on outcome measures.
[Please note that further work is being undertaken to develop a more robust evaluation process]
The above two diagrams indicate that students with higher attendance and higher usage of VLE / NILE resources in 2023/24 were more likely to complete the year and less likely to face either termination or module failure.
Where students take advantage of the teaching and electronic resources provided in their course it is likely that they are more likely to succeed in progressing to the next stage.
Its not just a question of progression though- the three charts below** show how students average classification positively correlates with attendance levels, VLE / NILE logins and E-Resource (Open Athens) usage. Staying engaged with the University would seem to be a real driver of students understanding and achievement.
These charts help tell a story- one where students who engage with our teaching and learning materials are likely to be better prepared to succeed in their studies. That’s part of why starting in 2025 the University of Northampton will have a new Engagement Policy- and by supporting and encouraging students to stay engaged with their programme, we are helping them to succeed in their education too.
Of course, student achievement is a complex and multivariate outcome. Each student is an individual, and we can also see from the above data that some students succeed with lower measurable engagement levels, and vice versa- and it’s also the case that there are lots of ways to engage we can’t easily measure!
However, we do know from research across the sector that engagement with teaching, course materials and other key factors strongly correlates with and is a strong input into good outcomes for students. Not only does the current findings indicate the value of increasing these, but it also further demonstrates the possible direct value to students of the work of staff across the institution.
*Based on 7253 23/24 student outcomes
**Based on 1609 23/24 student classifications
Today marked the third annual Learning Technology Symposium—a chance for our team to come together and explore emerging technologies in the age of AI. This year we took a slightly different approach, with three teams of three people working collaboratively to build a content, utilizing NILE’s built-in AI design assistant (AIDA) and Copilot.
Course Building
As most of the team were involved in the university-wide Copilot pilot programme, we have access to Copilot embedded throughout the Microsoft Office suite of tools, and at time of writing, the AIDA tools are as follows:
- Course structure suggestions
- Discussion generation
- Journal generation
- Rubric generation
- Assignment prompt generation
- Test question generation
- Question Bank generation
- Insert or generate images
- AI Conversations
- Generate Document layouts
At UON, all instructors can access these and benefit from the time saved as they build their NILE courses.
Attendees of the symposium worked on building a fictitious training package, which can later be populated and potentially used as a self-serve training in line with the University’s 5-year strategy.
Gamification
As well as the role of the trainer designing a course, we had the opportunity to experience the role of the trainee by engaging in a fully gamified session.
In three groups of three people, the element of competition was introduced. One of the learning packages will be chosen as the winner, and teams reviewed and voted on each other’s. This helps encourage certain personality types to strive for excellence and stay engaged.
Game Mechanics & Progression were implemented via a game board and activity cards. Each team had one dice, one counter and two sets of cards with activities on. Participants used the dice and counter to advance along the path on the board, if they landed on a blue square they drew a blue card, a pink square a pink card, and purple square was a wildcard. This provides a structured and visual way to track progress. Creates randomisation and chance, and —if cards were face-down— the element of surprise. It also meant that people had some freedom to decide how long to spend on activities. And although cards were identical, different teams were likely to be working on different things at any given time.
For autonomy & personalization the wildcard element empowers participants by giving them freedom in choosing their own task. The wildcard tasks carried their own competitivity, with the chance to win, by showing creativity and skill with AI tools. The idea was for teams to choose a task using an AI with one person in the team of three showing the others something new. A winning entry would have viewers questioning, “How did you make that?”
Individuals also had the chance to play a Hidden Objects game, looking for certain items in an image. These were placed into Microsoft Whiteboard and we all had fun pointing out the hidden items with the laser pointer. The images had been created with AI and could be used as an icebreaker at the start of a session. For instant feedback (another important key in gamification) H5P’s multiple hotspot feature can make the image interactive.
Variety of Technology
The event was also a great opportunity to use and experience a selection of the different technologies we have available to us at the University of Northampton. In the running of the session, we used MS Loop; for instructions and help guides, MS Whiteboard for collaborative activities, anonymous voting and affinity diagram. PowerPoint for the running order, and MS Forms for the feedback survey.
For the activities we used NILE tools including Padlet, Copilot, and a couple of other AI tools, which people had log-ins for or didn’t require a log in.
Data and Digital
Time was also spent as a team reviewing the University of Northampton’s Digital and Data Strategy 2025–2029, which outlines a vision for transforming how we work, teach, and support students. It was a chance to reflect on the important and strategic role the Learning Technology team plays in helping achieve these goals by 2030. From embedding digital literacy and promoting continuous learning, to supporting automation, data governance, and personalised learning experiences, our work is directly aligned with the strategy’s focus areas. It was encouraging to see how the tools and approaches we explored during the symposium neatly contribute to building a digitally empowered, inclusive, and forward thinking university that we can be proud to work for.
Conclusion
The AI Symposium 2025 was a brilliant mix of creativity, collaboration, and curiosity. It gave us the chance to explore new tools, test out ideas, and experience learning from both the trainer and trainee perspective. Whether it was building courses with AIDA, experimenting with Copilot, rolling dice on a game board, or enjoying Kelly’s delicious home-baked brownies, the day was full of energy and innovation.
If any of this has sparked your interest please do reach out to your Learning Technologist. We’re always happy to chat, share resources, or help you get started.
The new features in this month’s Blackboard’s upgrade will be available from Friday 8th August. This month’s upgrade includes the following new/improved features to Ultra courses:
- Improved student experience with learning modules
- Copying content between NILE courses
- End of Life: Padlet LTI NILE integration
- End of Life: Assist tab in main NILE menu
Improved student experience with learning modules
Following the August upgrade, the student experience of learning modules will be improved with the addition of a collapsible navigation panel, allowing students to more easily move between the items in the learning module. Currently, while students can progress to the next and previous items in a learning module, they do not get a sense of where they are in the learning module, and nor can they jump back and forth between items from within the learning module.
The current student view of an item in a learning module is as follows:
After the upgrade, all learning modules will automatically be upgraded to include a collapsible navigation panel, as shown in the screenshot below.
The new panel displays the contents of the learning module, allowing students to see where they are, jump between items, and mark items as completed from within the learning module. The ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ buttons continue to appear, and where students are working on a smaller screen device, the panel can be collapsed (the arrow pointing left in the top right corner of the navigation panel), allowing the learning module items to be viewed full width. Where ‘Forced Sequence’ has been specified, students will still be required to progress through the items in order, but once they have done this and they will be able to easily move between any of the items that they have unlocked.
Staff who would like to see how their learning modules appear to students can switch into ‘Student Preview‘ mode and view all aspects of their course as their students will experience them.
More information about creating learning modules is available from: Blackboard Help – Create Learning Module
Copying content between NILE courses
Staff need to take particular care when copying content from an old NILE course into a new one, because incorrectly copying between Ultra courses will cause problems later on. To help with this process we have produced detailed guidance on how to safely copy content between Ultra courses, which is available at: Learning Technology Team – How do I copy content between NILE Ultra courses?
And we’ve also made a video walkthrough of the process:
End of Life: Padlet LTI NILE integration
Important Note: Padlet itself is NOT being removed – only the method of sharing Padlets with students is changing.
On the 8th of September 2025 Padlet will be removed from the Content Market in NILE, meaning that all links to existing Padlets which have been embedded in NILE courses via the Content Market will stop working and will become automatically hidden from students.
UON staff can continue to use Padlet with their students, but staff will now need to access Padlet via https://uon1.padlet.org (selecting ‘Continue with Microsoft’ and entering their UON username and password) and share their Padlets in NILE via web links rather than using the Content Market. No other Padlet functionality will be affected, and students will not need to login to Padlet to be able to contribute to Padlets that have been linked from NILE courses using web links.
More information about logging in, setting up and using Padlet is available from: Learning Technology Team – Padlet
More information about creating web links in NILE courses is available from: Blackboard Help – Web Links
End of Life: Assist tab in main NILE menu
Blackboard have recently announced the end of life for the Assist tab which appears in the main NILE menu and which provides students with information about University support services, etc. The Assist tab will be removed from NILE on the 8th of September 2025.
In order to provide students with information in NILE about the University’s support services, the information which currently appears in the Assist tab now appears in all 25/26 programme and module-level NILE courses in an item called ‘Help and support for UON students’*. In programme-level courses this is in the ‘My programme’ area of the course and in module-level courses this is in the ‘About this module’ area of the course.
Please note that the ‘Help and support for UON students’ item cannot be edited by staff as it is managed and maintained centrally.
*In courses taught by partners the item is called ‘Help and support for students studying with partner institutions’ and only includes information relevant to partner students.
Learning technology / NILE community group
Staff who are interested in finding out more about learning technologies and NILE are invited to join the Learning Technology / NILE Community Group on the University’s Engage platform. The purpose of the community is to share information and good practice concerning the use of learning technologies at UON. When joining the community, if you are prompted to login please use your usual UON staff username and password. By joining the Learning Technology / NILE Community you will receive calendar invitations to our regular live community events:
Join the Learning Technology / NILE Community Group
More information
As ever, please get in touch with your learning technologist if you would like any more information about the new features available in this month’s upgrade: Who is my learning technologist?
Jim states: Our aim was to launch an ‘EDI in Practice’ blended training course targeted at all UON staff teaching on Apprenticeships. This 4-session course was designed to meet crucial internal and external requirements, focusing on embedding EDI principles into everyday teaching practices.
We utilised a Northampton Integrated Learning Environment (NILE) site to host both pre-session and post-session content related to the in-person training sessions. H5P was instrumental in meeting our needs as it came as an authoring tool already integrated within the NILE site. It offered a wealth of diverse interaction types that could be rapidly authored, tested, and launched. This allowed us to easily develop and embed various H5P interactions to facilitate and enhance learning. These included scenarios, questionnaires, drag and drop matching activities, word clouds, and more.
One notable activity was a questionnaire where staff would go through a series of approximately 30 questions to help them understand the concept of privilege. H5P was chosen because it could automate the questionnaire and provide an end ‘privilege score’ for reflection and discussion in the subsequent in-person session.
H5P performed exceptionally well in this context, as the intricate criteria of the questions were weighted, with some adding +1 to the cumulative score and others subtracting -1.
H5P Awareness and Practice sessions are available to staff. Use the LibCal booking system to book a place on a virtual session.
The new features in this month’s Blackboard’s upgrade will be available from Friday 4th July. This month’s upgrade includes the following new/improved features to Ultra courses:
- New 25/26 NILE courses now available
- Review student engagement with announcements
- Add captions to image blocks in Ultra documents
- Support for QTI question banks import
- Enhanced pop-out rubric
- Change of terminology – grades to marks
- End of life notification: Padlet LTI NILE integration
- End of life notification: Assist tab in main NILE menu
New 25/26 NILE courses now available
New module-level NILE courses for the 25/26 academic year are now available. Programme-level NILE courses are expected to be available by the 9th of July.
Full guidance about finding and setting up NILE courses is available from: Learning Technology Team – Getting your NILE courses set up and ready for teaching
Please take particular care if you are intending to copy content from an old NILE course into a new one as incorrectly copying between Ultra courses will cause problems. Guidance on how to safely copy content between Ultra courses is available from: Learning Technology Team – How do I copy content between NILE Ultra courses?
Review student engagement with announcements
While the current version of NILE shows how many students have viewed each announcement, no information is available about which particular students have and have not viewed an announcement. Following the July upgrade this information will be available by selecting the number of viewers.
Where announcements are also sent by email (i.e., when the ‘Send an email copy to recipients’ box is ticked when posting the announcement), please bear in mind that NILE is not able to determine whether or not students have read the emailed copy of the announcement. The announcement viewers information in NILE only records views for students who have opened the announcement in the NILE course.
Upon selecting viewers, the course announcements panel will open, providing information about which students have read the announcement and which have not. The panel also allows staff to filter the list according to whether students have read the announcement or not, and from here staff can also select students individually or in bulk and can send a message.
Add captions to image blocks in Ultra documents
Following Friday’s upgrade staff will be able to add captions to images in Ultra documents which have been added using the image block.
Support for QTI question banks import
Friday’s upgrade introduces support for importing test questions in QTI 2.1 format. Where staff have purchased banks of questions that are in the QTI format (which is the most common standard format for question banks) from third-party suppliers, these can now be uploaded directly into NILE courses via the Question Bank tool.
Enhanced pop-out rubric
The July upgrade will introduce the following changes to Blackboard rubrics:
- Attempting to close a pop-out rubric without saving the changes prompts a warning, reminding staff to save their changes;
- Selecting ‘Save’ no longer closes a pop-out rubric;
- Keyboard navigation will be improved, specifically arrow key and tab interaction, for the grid table.
Change of terminology – grades to marks
Following the terminology update to some of the grades transfer tools earlier this year, all remaining references in NILE to ‘grades’ will be replaced with ‘marks’ prior to the start of the 25/26 academic year.
End of Life: Padlet LTI NILE integration
Important Note: Padlet itself is NOT being removed – only the method of sharing Padlets with students is changing.
In early September 2025 Padlet will be removed from the Content Market in NILE, meaning that all links to existing Padlets which have been embedded in NILE courses via the Content Market will stop working and will become automatically hidden from students.
UON staff can continue to use Padlet with their students, but staff will now need to access Padlet via https://uon1.padlet.org (selecting ‘Continue with Microsoft’ and entering their UON username and password) and share their Padlets in NILE via web links rather than using the Content Market. No other Padlet functionality will be affected, and students will not need to login to Padlet to be able to contribute to Padlets that have been linked from NILE courses using web links.
More information about logging in, setting up and using Padlet is available from: Learning Technology Team – Padlet
More information about creating web links in NILE courses is available from: Blackboard Help – Web Links
End of Life: Assist tab in main NILE menu
Blackboard have recently announced the end of life for the Assist tab which appears in the main NILE menu and which provides students with information about University support services, etc. The Assist tab will be removed from NILE in early September 2025.
In order to provide students with information in NILE about the University’s support services, the information which currently appears in the Assist tab now appears in all 25/26 programme and module-level NILE courses in an item called ‘Help and support for UON students’*. In programme-level courses this is in the ‘My programme’ area of the course and in module-level courses this is in the ‘About this module’ area of the course.
Please note that the ‘Help and support for UON students’ item cannot be edited by staff as it is managed and maintained centrally.
*In courses taught by partners the item is called ‘Help and support for students studying with partner institutions’ and only includes information relevant to partner students.
Learning technology / NILE community group
Staff who are interested in finding out more about learning technologies and NILE are invited to join the Learning Technology / NILE Community Group on the University’s Engage platform. The purpose of the community is to share information and good practice concerning the use of learning technologies at UON. When joining the community, if you are prompted to login please use your usual UON staff username and password. By joining the Learning Technology / NILE Community you will receive calendar invitations to our regular live community events:
Join the Learning Technology / NILE Community Group
More information
As ever, please get in touch with your learning technologist if you would like any more information about the new features available in this month’s upgrade: Who is my learning technologist?
As part of the StudySmart2 project, five students developed posters which focused on different aspects of using Artificial Intelligence in their everyday lives.
For each poster (which could be used for display), there is also an accessible Word Version:
- AI for wellbeing development. [Posters covering the use, risks and tools available]
- AI for personalised learning. [Personalised learning poster]
- AI for promoting cultural awareness and inclusivity. [Cultural awareness poster]
- Tips to boost English with AI. [English tips poster]
These posters also complement the video reflections from the students.
Please note that these posters mention some tools which are not officially supported or recognised by the University of Northampton. Copilot is the main supported University of Northampton generative artificial intelligence tool. Please refer to the guidance on using unsupported or external tools if you decide to use other tools.
