Type: Presentation
Desc: Our job is to support undergraduate, postgraduates and academics. Most of us have been students, but few people in university IT fully understand what academics really do. Chris has put together a whirlwind summary of what academics spend all their time doing. Academics, as a profession, have unique quirks and it helps to understand why
Topics: Understanding academics. Non technical, but useful to understand our users
Duration: 30 mins
Type of session: Presentation/Discussion
Description: I will give an overview of the activities of an RSE and describe the different type of roles that are developing as the community, technologies, university investment and different delivery models evolve
Topics: What does an RSE do, what do RSE Groups look like, successes of the RSE movement
Approximate length of session: 60 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: None
Type of session: TBD
Description: Analyse the eternal british universities rivalry through the CORE API and the ORCID API
Topics: Access to APIs, interoperability
Approximate length of session: 30 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: An interest in scholarly communications and a minimal understanding of programming and API use
Type of session: presentation/hands-on
Description:
Approximate length of session: 45 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session:
Description: This presentation will examine how you can use the VR template included with Unreal Engine to quickly get started in creating Virtual Reality environments for the HTC Vive. I will be using VR content developed with Preston College as an example throughout
Topics to be covered:
Length of Session: 60 mins
Pre-requisites:
Type of session: Hands on
Description: So you want to play with WordPress, come jump in the ball pit and see how you make what you thought was a blogging platform do all manner of things
Topics to be covered: Getting started with WordPress. WordPress Widgets. WordPress Content. WordPress custom content. WordPress plugins
Approximate length of session: 45 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: I’ll set up a github of downloads. Web host access would help as well
Description: A demo of an automated test suite we have built in C# / .Net using SpecFlow and Selenium Web Driver. Drill down into the Gherkin, SpecFlow and Selenium Web Driver code. Discussion of the lessons learned
Topics covered: BDD, SpecFlow, Gherkin, Continuous Delivery, Automated UI Testing, Selenium Web Driver
Approximate length of session: 60 mins
Description: A short presentation on implementing Agile working practices
Approximate length of session: 10 mins
Type of session: Presentation
Description: As with all departments in institutions within higher education development teams are feeling the squeeze what steps can we take to ensure we ‘do more with less’
Topics to be covered: Expanding your development community outside your team. Tackling technical debt. Freeing up developer’s time from non-development tasks. End user involvement is the key to a successful system
Approximate length of session: 30 mins
Type of session: Presentation
Description: The Open University has a large team of developers working on their VLE, delivering quarterly releases with 100+ features in each release, plus upstream changes from Moodle. In this session we’ll look out how we maintain a high rate of delivery without breaking things
Topics to be covered: Quality assurance, automated testing, continuous integration, functionality testing, unit testing
Approximate length of session: 20 mins
Type of session: Presentation + workshop
Description: In the days of malware, GDPR and the rest, how do we cope with legacy systems built by you, or your predecessors, that are now a liability? How do we handle the politics of decades of evolving technology? Chris will start the session with a short talk on his experiences (15 mins) and then lead a discussion to discuss people in the room’s challenges and the group’s suggestions on how to address them. A note taker will attempt to capture the best bits into a document we can improve on later and share with the community. This document was produced in a similar session last year
Topics to be covered: Coping with technical debt, strategic procrastination, tips on tech and politics
Approximate length of session: 60 mins
Type of session: Presentation/Demo
Description: A brief overview of why we decided to use AWS at Lancaster University Library and how we have automated setting up our AWS accounts and infrastructure. This will include a walkthrough of setting up core AWS configurations and services
Topics to be covered: AWS, Terraform, Linux
Approximate length of session: 60-90 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: Interest in how to get started with AWS, early days in using AWS
Type of session: Presentation
Description: Many scientists, myself included, have found themselves learning how to be developers. We have had to do this in order to do our scientific work efficiently, correctly, and in a way that can be shared. Coding is at the heart of modern data analysis. There is a great deal of agreement that we need to teach many or maybe all students how to code, but - how do we do that? Should we teach coding separately from data analysis or statistics? Do we need to use easy tools, or can we get away with teaching “best practice”, including testing and version control? Should we teach coding everywhere - to arts and science students alike? If we are going to do that, how will the universities we work in have to change, and how will we get there? What can we do for the students who find this very hard to learn?
I will present the various approaches that I know of, including interactive code / text Jupyter Notebooks, referring forwards to the following session by Tony Hirst. I will talk about some recent courses I have been involved in that have tried to teach these methods, in Berkeley and Birmingham. We will stop from time to discuss the issues that arise, and think of new ways of thinking about pitching and teaching. I hope we’ll come to a shared understanding of how to iterate towards a real solution to this urgent problem
All the talk materials are in my github repository. The repository contains the built slides.
Topics to be covered / discussed in questions
Approximate length of session: 60 mins
Type of session: Hands on
Description: Originally developed as IPython notebooks, Jupyter Notebooks provide a browser based, interactive programming environment that blend text, executable code and code outputs (tables, charts, embedded HTML widgets) in a single document. Designed initially to support reproducible research, notebooks are increasingly used to support teaching and learning as well as research. But the notebooks are only part of the story. This session will review the whole Jupyter ecosystem, including: Jupyter notebooks as notebooks as well as interactive slideshows (Jupyter RISE); creating runnable Jupyter notebook environments from Github repositories (Binderhub); using notebooks to define APIs and dashboards; Jupyter multi-user notebook server (Jupyterhub); hosting considerations
Topics to be covered: Jupyter notebooks, Jupyterhub, repo2docker, Binderhub, hosting requirements (so a bit of docker…)
Approximate length of session: 60 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: If we do interactive stuff, laptops, network connection
Type of session: Lightning talk
Description: I’ll talk about some of the particular challenges mathematics poses with respect to accessibility, and demonstrate some technologies that are aiming to improve it, including MathJax’s screenreader support, and a Markdown editor adapted for a maths student with limited mobility
Topics to be covered: Accessibility, maths, input methods, HTML, CSS, Markdown
Approximate length of session: 10 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: None, but aimed at anyone responsible for putting maths on the web or with responsibility for students with accessibility needs
Type of session: Lightning talk
Description: An introduction to the ORCID API, how to access it, how to explore it + invite to jisc ORCID hackday
Topics to be covered: researcher identifiers, ORCID API
Approximate length of session: 10 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: An interest in scholarly communications and the role of researcher identifiers
Type of session: Lightning talk
Description: In this presentation, I will outline how the student checklist can be created, accessed, utilised, benefited, shared & improved.
Topics to be covered: Time Management, Cost Effective, Benefits
Approximate length of session: 10 mins
Type of session: Presentation
Description: In this presentation I will go through some examples of data visualisation in Unity3D and outline the advantages of using this engine for your own data
Topics to be covered: Unity3D, virtual reality, data visualisation
Approximate length of session: 20 mins
Type of session: Demo
Description: TBC
Topics to be covered: Data migration, PowerShell, PowerShell modules, AzureAD, managing migrations, strengths and weaknesses of PowerShell
Approximate length of session: 40 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: None, but SharePoint and PowerShell background advantageous
Type of session: Demo/Hands-on
Description: I’ll demonstrate the current generation of open source maths e-assessment tools, including Numbas and STACK, and point out some of the interesting coding challenges posed by randomly generating and assessing mathematics questions as well as the opportunities presented by web visualisation technologies
Topics to be covered: e-assessment, e-learning, maths
Approximate length of session: 30 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: Web browser on any kind of device. Some knowledge of university-level maths; parsers; infoviz will be useful
Type of session: Presentation
Description: The University of Strathclyde recently moved its lifelong learning programme to an online self-service portal where learners can find, enrol, pay for and manage their classes. The new portal also incorporates the full range of administration and reporting functionality including programme management, learner management and integration with the central university student records system. The presentation will explore how the portal is being developed form both a technical and project management perspective
The portal is being developed from scratch by the Development and Innovation Team on a .NET CMS platform (DNN) using a mix of T-SQL, C#, JavaScript and CMS plugins. We will investigate how this heterogeneous mix of development approaches is managed, and what we have found to be the benefits and complexities
The portal is being delivered using a “just-in-time” agile approach with learners and administrators using the system as its functionality is being fleshed out. The presentation will explore the challenges of this approach and how it can be made to work for learners, administrators and developers. Topics to be covered: Agile Project Management, .NET + JavaScript development
Approximate length of session: 30 mins
Type of session: Presentation
Description: This session is a taster aimed at developers with no machine learning experience, who would like to know what machine learning is exactly, how to get started using machine learning algorithms from a practical perspective, what issues to be aware of and how to go about learning more about the topic
Topics to be covered: Machine Learning
Approximate length of session: 45 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: There will be a short demo using Python 3 – for anybody wanting to follow along, downloading the Anaconda Python distribution is recommended
Type of session: Presentation + workshop
Description: What kind of culture do we want? How can management support it? How has it changed over time?
Approximate length of session: 60 mins
Type of session: Presentation/Demo
Description: Making use of AWS regions to provide highly available and low latency web services to international teaching partnerships. Note: The ideas from this can be applied to any cloud computing platform
Topics to be covered: AWS, Docker
Approximate length of session: 60 mins
Type of session: Presentation and Demo
Description: An introduction to the IIIF image and presentation APIs that are used for serving and manipulating images online. It will also cover the forthcoming IIIF v3 APIs that extends IIIF for audio and video content. Tools and websites utilising IIIF will be demoed as well as examples of cool tools from the IIIF Awesome site
Topics to be covered: Online interoperability with images and audio visual content
Approximate length of session: 30 mins
Prerequisites for delegates attending the session: An understanding of APIs
Type of session: Presentation
Description: Kings Online, King’s College London’s distance learning team uses Adapt, a leading open source authoring tool to create courses for students. Over 2017 we have become one of the leading plugin developers for the platform and are in the process of becoming official collaborators for the project. Our diverse team of instructional designers, web designers and developers are keen to tailor a platform that was created for corporate elearning to be great for HE students by focusing on user experience and student’s unique requirements
Topics to be covered: Open source development, elearning, edtech, web design/development, UX, LX
Approximate length of session: 30 mins