We love an ‘end of year’ list here at Futures and this year, we’re counting down the most-read posts written in 2021. Last year, the top blog list was dominated by Zoom. This year, despite being hit with another year of remote teaching, our academics settled into the virtual groove, and our list reveals a wider range of topics.
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21: Return to campus: what to do for day one – ‘Return to campus’ is becoming a familiar phrase, and we hope to be returning for a more stable 2022. This blog outlined the learning and teaching – and health and safety – considerations in early February.
20: Staying present, engaged and positive in the face of climate change: a toolkit of emerging ideas and resources – Tania Leimbach presented a useful toolkit full of ideas on how to take positive action when faced with climate anxiety.
19: Belonging at UTS: cultivating a compassionate university – The Teaching and Curriculum Team (TACT) in IML focused on 4 ‘hot topics’ this year. The first topic was ‘belonging’ and this post by Alisa Percy kicked off the hot topics program and the first FFYE forum of the year.
18: 8 quick tips to make the Canvas experience easier for students – ADTL Julie Robert invited FASS students to give feedback on their Canvas experience in Autumn session and asked what academics could do to help them to successfully transition into the next semester.
17: On TRACK: employability in an age of workforce transition – Kirsty Kitto and Rhi Tuntevski tracked new developments in a project that uses data, analytics and AI to help students land their dream job.
16: 6 steps to your Autumn 2021 launch in Canvas – Simple advice to make sure your students can access your content from Olivia Rajit.
15: Designing for online teacher presence – Shaun Bell explained how Donna Rooney and the PGLD team transitioned a blended program to fully online – without sacrificing teacher presence.
14: Introducing TACT and our hot topics program for 2021 – The TACT team from IML previewed their hot topics program ahead of a packed year of workshops, events and FFYE forums.
13: Vale Les Kirkup – Last month, Shirley Alexander reflected on the life of Les Kirkup, who combined his love for Physics with a passion for teaching and learning.
12: Free open datasets to use in your next project – Some common (and free) open data sites were collated by Sharleen Heng.
11: Meet Mentimeter – UTS’s new polling tool is coming soon! – One of the most popular tools to be released at UTS this year, Mentimeter is quickly becoming a familiar fixture in online and blended learning.
#17: On TRACK 
#18: Quick Tips to make the Canvas experience easier 
#4: Who designs the Learning Designer? 
#2: Encourage ‘Camera On’
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10: Your top 9 grades submission questions answered – Sharleen Heng covered the most commonly asked questions when it came to grade submission time.
9: 3 shifts in our delivery model (and how to communicate them to students) – Kimberley Duncan explained how the changes in our delivery model, accelerated by emergency remote teaching, continued to represent the core values and benefits of blended learning at UTS.
8: How we hacked Miro to design better digital workshop experiences – Although it’s not a UTS-supported tool, Miro provided a successful digital workshop solution for the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Unit.
7: Call for contributions: present at the 2021 Learning and Teaching Forum – The recent Learning and Teaching Forum was a huge success, and a lot of this was down to all of the excellent contributions from our learning and teaching community.
6: Casual teaching staff at UTS: have your say – The results of this survey are being used to help craft a better experience for our casual staff at UTS in 2022, so it was great to get so many useful and direct responses.
5: In a nutshell: OPM courses – Sometimes you just need a clear definition for a much-used acronym. This basic guide to Online Program Management explained the services and benefits of this partnership with UTS.
4: Who designs the learning designer? – One of this year’s Learning Design Meetups put the spotlight back on the Learning Designer – this preview post by Christina Brauer and Lucy Blakemore garnered a lot of interest in this topic.
3: Analysing qualitative data (part 1): from coding to serious play – In the first of a three-part series, Nick Hopwood uncovered approaches to find useful insights in your data.
2: Community, not compliance: how can I encourage ‘Camera On’? – Lucy Blakemore explored some ways to re-think the rules on cameras with a virtual community of students.
And coming in at #1:
Students Explain Digital Accessibility – A new video series featured five UTS students drawing on their lived experiences of disability to explain the importance of making subjects accessible. This blog post by Katie Duncan collated several short videos that also feature in our comprehensive Make your subject accessible resource collection. It was so great so see such an increase in accessibility practices engagement and awareness this year, and even sweeter to see this take out the top spot in 2021.
Image by Jan Romero on Unsplash