Learning technology lessons at the M25 ALT Spring meeting

The M25 Spring meeting 2025 took place online on Monday 24 March 2025.

The agenda was open to contributions from the learning technology community resulting in a diverse agenda that covered a mix of tools, projects, reflections and ideas.

Project Managing as Educational Technologists

First up, Miranda Melcher, from City St Georges, University of London, presented on her team’s support of an online and asynchronous MSc in Computer Science where students can enrol in the programme at any time. You can imagine the logistical challenges this creates. Miranda explained the importance of collaboration, constant communication, keeping checklists, and automated assessment to pulling this off. It was great to hear about the programme, which sounded both innovative and complex, and the coordination behind it. 

‘Fail we may. Sail we must’ Reflections on navigating social media use in higher education

Alex Spiers from Kings College London, spoke next, sharing his thoughts on the history of social media and what to do now given the recent tumultuous history of Twitter (X!). His message was that though things may be difficult; we must push on. Alex explored several alternatives to Twitter, such as Mastodon and Threads, but noted they typically have less users or limited interactions. Alex suggested that Bluesky was the most promising of the options, and although its numbers are small, this might mean that it can be more easily shaped to promote productive discourse. This was a moving personal and reflective talk and hopefully inspires us all to try to create ongoing and new social media communities. 

 Exploring the Microsoft Teams Webinar Tool in Higher Education: Is this one small step for an educator or one giant leap for education?

Next up, Manasa Panikkamparambil Manomohanan from London South Bank University (LSBU) presented on her project to move LSBU from MS Teams to MS Teams webinar. She outlined how LSBU previously relied on manually setting up Microsoft Teams for student classes, but this led to issues with a lack of registration data and reminders, and staff not receiving join links. Manasa outlined her role in supporting the move to Microsoft Teams Webinars to solve these issues.

LSBU has also automated the creation of these webinars saving time and energy. Manasa explained that when integrating technologies, we should always ask ourselves are we taking small steps or giant leaps? Whilst the shift from MS Teams to MS Teams Webinar sounds small, it’s clear that it has led to some significant benefits for staff and students. It always important to look out for these opportunities.

Pros and Cons to customising your VLE look and feel for online learning.

Finally, Annora Eyt-Dessus from King’s College London spoke on how universities often want to customise the look, feel and functionality of their Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to support fully online students whilst maintaining an internal VLE for blended learning students. Customising the same VLE for these two sets of users with different needs can take many approaches, and Annora outlined two examples she had worked on.

The first approach taken at Bayes Business School was to build a custom Moodle theme which was then activated for users in specific courses. The theme was designed in house but developed by a third-party contractor as a child-theme of the public Moodle Snap theme. Whilst being positively received by users, there were challenges with maintaining the theme, transferring content between the external and internal VLEs, central support, contract tendering and costs to upgrade.

The second approach, taken at Kings College London, was to develop a design system in CSS and Javascript, which is added to a course manually through a hidden course block on Moodle. The design system is developed in house and informed by KCL’s UX team research. Whilst this approach can customise less than a theme, Annora explained that it is easier to maintain, and ensures the customisation can be managed and informed in house. In future, KCL wants to improve the speed and robustness of this approach and possibly create a plugin for the customisation.

You can watch the recording of the meeting to learn more.

The next meeting will be held on Thursday 17 July 2025, 2-5pm in person at Chancellors Hall, Senate House. The theme is Making Digital Life Better for International students in London. See you there!rnational students in London. See you there!