Reflections from the ALT conference 2025

With nearly 70 unique workshops and four keynotes across two days, the ALT Conference 2025 in my native city of Glasgow offered a wealth of dissemination of digital education. Live polling, quizzing and Q&A tool Vevox was used for all-conference engagement during keynotes and presentations from the chair. It was slick and effective and reminded me that just a question here and there, taking the temperature of the room, using word clouds and charts, or a rolling wall of Q&A or comments, helps keep the audience engaged and interested. I found it refreshing that many of the sessions were interactive, often delivering conversation and thinking together, as well as ‘show and tells.’

Constructing the digital campus

My choice of workshops reflected my role in University of the Built Environment (UBE) as a lead learning designer and my interest in how digital education teams and academics are putting online learning into practice in a year where budgets, dealing with artificial intelligence (AI) and improving user experience (UX) design for rapidly evolving digital campuses seemed to dominate the conference. Across the conference there were strong themes of getting the basics right at scale for rapidly evolving online learning and looking at innovation through the lens of value for money. I’m keen in this article to give a sense of a few of the workshops I attended and my reflections on how or if practice described might apply, or already be active, within UBE.

I engaged in a number of workshops and conversations about UX design across universities. Projects included designing new module templates, improving VLE navigation, integrating platforms across functions of the digital campus, such as external short courses offerings, staff learning and development, and e-portfolios. In some of the module designs described, the main principle was around creating a simplified course structure to navigate to all elements of the course from, say, no more than three or four categories. It’s just good web design but some VLE’s have not made that side of UX easy to achieve. In UBE there is detailed attention to learning design but my sense is, reflected in debates within the University, that we need to revisit the UX design to complement that.

Scaling up innovation

In Glasgow University (GU), the use of Microsoft’s free video editor Clipchamp is being pioneered for microlearning for staff learning and development to build up a collaborative repository of video tutorials across digital learning and academic staff (Losonsky et al). This project touched on a common theme across the conference, of small digital education teams in large universities implementing tools and techniques designed for staff to co-own so production can be scaled up. It is interesting to consider whether there is something in the above project – particularly its collaborative approach – which might further enhance staff learning and development across UBE.

Another such project, also being developed at GU, is the use of immersive, interactive 360° video and photography with applications in estates management (Briggs 2025). It’s not a new technology and although GU has a VR facility, developing new educational environments with commercial game interface quality is for the most part, prohibitively expensive. This project aims to develop staff and students production of 360° environments using inexpensive equipment and software (such as mobile phones and Uptale) and has the potential to offer new forms of student assessment, as well as immersive module resources.

In pondering whether this approach had applications for UBE, I was delighted to discover that UBE has been using Matterport for around five years and has a number of high quality video based immersive environments for several residential and commercial projects. The potential for the future use of Matterport lies in identifying properties and projects through academic and business partnerships and generating materials which might sit across a number of modules from town planning to retrofit, to building surveying and sustainability. It’s exciting to know we have the capacity to generate immersive building tours of this quality; in terms of wider application to UBE, the GU project, in focusing on the potential for students to create immersive resources using everyday technology, could offer a model for creative approaches to student learning and assessment.

Fully flexible online learning

City St George’s, University of London are piloting STEMDA – STEM Digital Academy (Melcher et al 2025). The education model is highly flexible and has launched over the past year with technology based degrees. Students can enroll any day of the year, and have access to module assessments every six weeks, meaning they can self pace. Currently there is no set limit to how quickly or how slowly they progress through a module. All learning is asynchronous, with a daily forum for general course business, and email contact for each student with a named course tutor. Bostock’s model of flexible online learning (Bostock 2018) describes an inverse relationship between tutor contact and the sophistication and quality of resources (see Figure 1).

This is reflected in the module design focus on high quality recorded video lectures and the weekly updating and maintenance of resources in response to external changes or internal feedback. It’s too early to tell how successful the design will be in terms of student engagement and success but I’m really interested to see how it goes. Such an approach flies in the face of much educational theory around social and collaborative learning (Roberts 2003; Bandura 1977). UBE’s approach to learning design is articulated as the ‘SOLD’ approach – student outcome led design. Whilst SOLD guides the development of a range of synchronous and asynchronous learning activities offering opportunities for social learning, it is also designed flexibly to offer those who do not participate in social or synchronous success in meeting learning outcomes. There has always been an individual and self-directed element to any educational experience which is prioritised in adult learning theory (andragogy) (Knowles 1970; Cloke 2024). The question is whether for some types of topic, or for some types of learner, is it actually the more effective model?

Nuggets of wisdom

I wanted to finish with a focus on a few ‘nuggets of wisdom’ that I came across in the two days of ALTC 2025.

Do one small thing – rather than being overwhelmed by the scale of envisaged or required changes, just start moving forward with something you can change just now. (Brindle: MacNeill et al 2025).

Make time for innovation – the busyness of teams with often increasing tasks and shrinking resources can mean we fall into the rut of business as usual. It’s important to make time for innovation and build it into our work week to keep coming up with and implementing new ideas (Knight 2025).

Remember the students! One of the most engaging sessions of the conference was Glasgow University’s Professor Emily Nordmann’s student panel (Nordmann 2025) where she explored a variety of views on everything from the digital natives myth to AI to open questions around what the students needed to progress. The results were as diverse and surprising as the students, reminding us that one size does not fit all and that we need to keep working with students in meaningful ways to co-design varied learning opportunities.

References

Bandura A. (1977) Social learning theory [print book] Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Bostock J (2018) ‘A Model of Flexible Learning: Exploring Interdependent Relationships Between Students, Lecturers, Resources and Contexts in Virtual Spaces’ Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice 6 (1) [online]. Available at: https://jpaap.ac.uk/JPAAP/article/view/298 [accessed November 10 2025].

Briggs J (2025) ‘Rethinking Immersive Learning: A Practical and Sustainable 360° Approach for Higher Education’, Association of Learning Technologies Annual Conference: Wildcard: Innovation from the Margins [unpublished] 24 October, Glasgow.

Cloke H (2024) ‘What is Malcolm Knowles Adult Learning Theory?’ [online]. Available at: What https://www.growthengineering.co.uk/adult-learning-theory [accessed 5 November 2025].

Garvie (2008) ‘Barn owl’ [photograph, online]. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flickr_-_Rainbirder_-_Barn_Owl_(Tyto_alba).jpg [accessed 11 November 2025].

Hodan (no date) ‘The Cenotaph war memorial in front of the City Chambers in George Square, Glasgow, Scotland’ [photograph, online]. Available at: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=190877&picture=glasgow-city-in-scotland [accessed 1 December 2025].

Kennedy, E (2000) Diane Laurillard introduces the six learning types. [YouTube]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnERkQBqSGM&t=6s [accessed 6 November 2025].

Knight C (2025) ‘Being a leader not an algorithm: Human skills for an AI-Shaped Future’, Association of Learning Technologies Annual Conference: Keynote [unpublished] 23 October, Glasgow.

Knowles M (1970) The Modern Practice of Adult Education: Andragogy versus Pedagogy [print book], Cambridge Book Company.

Losonsky A, John H, Mason S and Boyle M (2025) ‘Piloting Innovation: Designing Video – based Microlearning for Staff Development’, Association of Learning Technologies Annual Conference: Digital by Design: People, Empathy, and Experience [unpublished] 23 October, Glasgow.

MacNeill S, Birkett S, Brindle J, Purvis A, Blackwell -Young J and Quinlan- Puck F (2025) ‘Taking Learning beyond Blended: integrating space, place and platform in curriculum design’, Association of Learning Technologies Annual Conference: Learning in Motion: Connecting Pathways, People and Places [unpublished] 23 October, Glasgow.

Melcher M, Green M, and Johnson – Mathison D (2025) ‘Supporting the Design and Delivery of Student Centred Flexible Online Programmes’, Association of Learning Technologies Annual Conference: Learning in Motion: Connecting Pathways, People, and Places [unpublished] 24 October, Glasgow.

Nordmann E (2025) ‘Student Panel: Beyond the Myth of the Digital Native’, Association of Learning Technologies Annual Conference: Learner Panel [unpublished] 23 October, Glasgow.

Roberts TS (2003) Online Collaborative Learning: Theory and Practice [print book] London: Hershey.

Acknowledgements

George’s Square, Glasgow: Hodan (no date) from Public Domain Pictures.

Barn owl: Steve Garvie (2008) from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.