To help improve staff and students’ experiences of QMplus, the Digital Education Studio have teamed up with TELT to identify opportunities to create QMplus templates and make it easier for staff to create engaging online learning materials for our students.
To align with the University’s Strategy 2030 goals, the Digital Education Studio has been working to support improvements in quality and consistency of QMplus programme and module pages.
The QMplus Templating Project, launched in June 2024, brings together learning designers, learning technologists, a UX designer and web designer to identify innovative ways to improve the learner experience of QMplus learning materials as well as providing new resources to course builders. Each member of the team had an important role to play in this co-creation project: DES Senior Learning Designers provided the pedagogical expertise; TELT’s Learning Technologists provided the QMplus knowledge and technical/infrastructural know-how; and UX and web designers helped shape the look and feel of the end product.
While QMplus doesn’t have built-in templating functionality, we can create and group a series of visual components within a page. Using easily identifiable visual elements to structure a page reduces cognitive load and helps learners quickly identify types of content and learning activities – you might think of these elements as visual cues to what to expect and do. We wanted to make these visual elements readily available to programme and module leaders and learning designers creating QMplus pages, to make it easier to create consistent and easy-to-navigate QMplus sites.
To ensure that students and staff could benefit from the project as quickly as possible, the project team identified a set of visual components for launch in November 2024, while continuing to work on some more complex elements for 2025.
Our starting point was the QMplus Snippet tool, which allows us to create pre-styled components, which can then be easily added to a page to help guide learners. We identified six pedagogical use cases that could be scaffolded with the use of snippets:
- Clearly signposting to the learner the start of a new topic
- Signposting sub-sections within each topic
- Signposting where the learner is being asked to engage with module readings
- Signposting where the learner is being asked to engage in online discussion
- Signposting where the learner is being asked to explore a topic independently or conduct their own research
- Signposting where the learner is being asked to prepare for the next topic
Consequently, we have launched six new snippets which are now available in QMplus. They are:
- Hero Banner
- Title Banner
- Your Turn_Reading
- Your Turn_Discussion
- Your Turn_Research
- Next Steps
You can discover how to add these to your course with our Guide for snippet elements in QMplus.
We will be adding more components in 2025. Keep an eye on our Digital Education Newsletter to stay up-to-date on these new developments. You can contact the Digital Education Studio to provide feedback and let us know what else you’d like to see.