Talis Elevate in 2021
It’s been another exciting year for the Talis Elevate community. Check out what’s happened this year:
Growth since last year
Talis Elevate hasn’t just provided easy online access to course materials, but it has become a place for collaboration and discussion.
There have been over 400% more annotations by students in Talis Elevate this academic year than the last, with annotations from over 7000 student users so far in 2021.
In the last academic year there were over 200,000 annotations.
There are two ways to annotate content in Talis Elevate, and our community made the most of it. 40% of annotations this year were class comments, closely followed by 36% of personal comments. Some things are best kept private.
2% of the comments in Talis Elevate were anonymous this academic year, helping 1600 students find their voice in a safe space.
Collaborative annotation works best when we share. 22% of these annotations were replies.
Deepening discussion with Talis Elevate
We’ve made a number of updates to Talis Elevate this year to deepen the discussions you’re having within your content.
From sending more targeted and impactful notifications, to highlighting key updates to the thread. We’ve worked hard to make Talis Elevate look great, and work better for you, so you can focus on the important stuff.
You can now also agree with existing annotations, giving your students a big thumbs up and allowing them to share the love too. Students have been enjoying this feature, with 20% of them going on to write a comment too, encouraging more deeper discussion and debate.
Aimee Merrydew, Talis Elevate user and Curriculum Developer (Student Success) at the Keele Institute for Innovation and Teaching Excellence told us, “I’ve been using Talis Elevate for just over a year with undergraduate and postgraduate students at Keele University. I was excited to hear about the new ‘agree button’ feature, as I thought it would help to prompt deeper discussions when reading sources together during and beyond seminars.
I noticed an increase in the depth of analysis in students’ responses to one another’s annotations since the new feature was released, which has really helped to encourage critical dialogue and enabled us all to learn new interpretations through our conversations in Talis Elevate. It’s been wonderful to watch students engage in such reflective conversations – I’m excited to see what conversations emerge in future uses of Talis Elevate!”
Improving the experience on touch devices
We know that mobile devices are key tools in the learning experience, supporting a range of student needs from multitasking to working on-the-go.
We made sure this experience was equitable with desktop use of Talis Elevate. There have been over 2000 annotations made via tablet or smartphone this academic year, with 8% of students making use of this capability.
Learn more about how we provide equitable access for students.
No training needed
You don’t need to spend hours learning how to use Talis Elevate before you’ve even logged in. It’s important to us that it’s easy to use from the get-go.
To make this process easier we created guides this year, available within Talis Elevate, so you can learn with bitesize tips along the way. 46% of academic users have created modules as a result of watching these guides.
We’ve provided guidance for students too, helping them use Talis Elevate effectively for collaboration annotation. Since we launched them, over 21,000 students have used these guides.
You can find out more about that here.
Teach Learn Collaborate Repeat
We hosted our first Teaching and Learning event in July 2021, welcoming 250 attendees in 10 countries from the Talis Elevate community and beyond.
We were joined by thought leaders across Higher Education to share their insights on topics from course design to collaborative learning.
At this event, we facilitated a collaborative workshop, seeking to collate and share practice from across the sector around lowering barriers to entry for students to engage. The findings from this workshop can be found here.
View the content from the event on https://talis.com/tlcr/
Active Online Reading
Talis are part of the QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project looking into digital reading practice across the sector. This project has now officially launched, and you can find out more from the project site here.
We’re currently surveying academics and students as part of the project, please do share your insights here
Talis Elevate can help you build effective learning communities. To learn more about how academics across the sector are doing this, check out our 5 step guide, which includes a case study from Dr Wendy Garnham, Director Of Student Experience at the University of Sussex.
