LES HEFi Digital Team

General Enquiries

For all staff support enquiries please email the College team with as much detail as possible and your query will be forwarded to the appropriate team member.

Email: lesdigitaleducation@contacts.bham.ac.uk

We also maintain the LES Teaching Support Canvas course which acts as a resource for all staff within the College. This contains a variety guides which can be downloaded as quick reference resources, and short screen-cast videos offering quick explainers or tips when using Canvas, Panopto or other tools.

These complement the resources in the HEFi Guidance SharePoint site. 

Virtual BIFoR – working with Professor Jeremy Pritchard and colleagues from the School of Bioscience and the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR), we developed a virtual tour of the BIFoR FACE facility in Staffordshire. This self-guided tour was developed initially to introduce undergraduate students to the BIFoR site, and is now a key part of outreach activities offered beyond the university to schools and the general public.

The tour has been developed in ThingLink for viewing via a web browser, and has also been optimised for stand-alone delivery in a set of VR headsets purchased by the School of Bioscience. These are used regularly as part of the outreach activities and for events such as open days within the School. See the BIFoR Education Resources course for more information.

Field Course support – we have supported a variety of field trips across Bioscience and GEES with services such as video production, developing 360 resources, or exploring tools such as Google Earth Studio to create drone-like footage of a location. For the School of Bioscience field trip to Pembrokeshire in March 2023 (part of the “Adaptations to Aquatic Environments” second-year module), we joined the staff and students for a few days to create an updated short film about the field trip. This video explores the activities and skills which students learn during their fieldwork experience, and is being used as both a teaching resource and for other activities including open days and events.

Online course development – in addition to the day-to-day support of our digital platforms for teaching, we are also happy to support fully online course development on request. Examples include an innovative CPD training course for supervisors within Clinical Psychology, and the creation of new 10 credit online modules in GEES as part of the MSc Health, Safety and Environment Management.

HEFi Digital act as both a development and support unit and have a bank of useful resources to assist you in the development of your digital content. These include

• The HEFi Guidance Sharepoint site - self paced guidance covering all the core digital tools HEFi Digital support. These include Canvas, Panopto, PebblePad and Zoom. Each tool is broken down into key tasks and the site is entirely searchable making it incredibly easy to find the support you need!
• HEFi Events, Seminars and workshops - keep up-to-date with the latest staff development and inivations by attending these  HEFi Digital run CPD events. The core "HEFi Digital CPD Sessions" run throughout the academic year on rotation with more bespoke sessions being offered on all aspects of Digital teaching.
• HEFi MicroCPD Library - easy, accessible forms of MicroCPD on Teaching and Learning.