The University of Sussex adopts Talis Elevate to build community within their Foundation Year Programme

The University of Sussex has purchased Talis Elevate for the Foundation Year programme in order to grow the online learning community and to deepen student engagement with their academic study. 

Talis Elevate is a learning and teaching tool aimed at bringing collaboration, engagement and insight into the heart of resources.

Academics across the Foundation Programme will be making use of Talis Elevate in order to upload documents, videos, audio, and images for their students to use in and out of class. Talis Elevate supports multiple file types, including PDFs, images, text documents and video, as well as embedding Youtube videos. To ensure the use of the tool is seamless, content in Talis Elevate with be embedded with The University of Sussex’s Virtual Learning Environment, Canvas.

Academics will benefit from in-depth analytics, so they can see how and when their content is being engaged with, in order to better inform library purchasing and acquisitions. Analytics in Talis Elevate also allows academics to spot areas for concern so that they can provide targeted support to students.

Students will be provided with online resources that they can access anywhere, anytime. Talis Elevate allows students to make private study notes, as well as participate in discussion with the rest of their cohort, or raise questions with the annotation feature. 

Dr Graeme Pedlingham, Head of Central Foundation Years and Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor  said “Something that’s really important to us is building communities of learning between students, which we think Talis Elevate could help us achieve: supporting collaboration, helping students understand how they can work together to develop understanding together, is key.

Importantly we think Elevate will help encourage active participation to produce a richer understanding of the content. Judging from what I’ve seen so far, students often challenge each other within Talis Elevate. It allows them to test ideas and question each other, discuss and debate, which is exactly what Higher Education should be about.”

Matt East, Learning Technologies Lead at Talis said “We’ve seen the phenomenal impact that Talis Elevate had on Dr. Wendy Garnham’s course whilst she was trialling Talis Elevate last year. I’m delighted to be able to expand this to the rest of the Foundation year community at the University of Sussex. The Foundation programme teaches on varied modules to an interdisciplinary cohort; Talis Elevate is being used as a tool across the programme for a great array of activities and use cases. Deepening student engagement with academic study and within resources is absolutely core to the teaching philosophy on the Foundation programme and with Talis Elevate; I am confident this will be a great example of how Talis Elevate can help achieve this.”

Academics and students at the University of Sussex are already working and collaborating with Talis Elevate, and we are excited to expand their use for the coming academic year, starting in September 2020.