In a heavily redacted court filing Thursday, The New York Times proposed to amend its copyright complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft to clarify a claim and allege that Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal NYT works by building a bespoke supercomputing system ranked among the most powerful in the world.

NYT's motion comes after the Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried and failed to claim that Cox was contributing to music piracy as an Internet service provider, which set a new standard for contributory infringement. Moving forward, plaintiffs will have to prove that parties intentionally acted to induce illegal conduct. Recognizing that the legal precedent has changed, the NYT now wants to amend its complaint to align its contributory infringement claim against Microsoft with that new standard.

“Today, we asked the court for permission to file an amended complaint that further strengthens our case, clarifying our claim of contributory infringement against Microsoft based on new law and new evidence uncovered during discovery,” Graham James, an NYT spokesperson, said in a statement provided to Ars.

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I was pleased to have a talk accepted at the annual UCISA Women in Tech (WiT) conference. I went to Newcastle for a day of talks, workshops and networking. I left with a better understanding of the WiT community , and a reinforced appreciation of the need for inclusivity in Higher Education.    

UCISA is an industry body supporting digital professionals working in the education sector. I have been actively involved in UCISA since 2022 when I helped set up the UCISA UX Group and became co-chair of this UK-wide community of practice. I’ve organised many UCISA UX events but had not attended one of UCISA’s flagship annual conferences, the Women in Tech event, until this year. My presentation about our project on staff profiles resonated with attendees, I learned a lot about diversity and representation in the sector from attending the other talks and I enjoyed connecting with other Higher Education professionals over shared inclusivity challenges. Here, I reflect on my highlights from an interesting day.

Sharing our staff profiles work piqued interest from other universities

As well as the clear focus on inclusivity, one of the themes of this year’s WiT was real-world applications and problem-solving. I felt our staff profiles project spoke to this theme, so I submitted a talk to share what we learned from research and the steps we have taken towards finding a new profiles solution.

My session was well received – perhaps unsurprisingly, colleagues from other institutions shared the same concerns and challenges in designing a profile solution that showcases staff in the best light, keeps them findable in searches, and yet remains easy for staff to update. I valued the chance to make new contacts, exchange ideas, and learn about other institutions’ diverse approaches to the ‘profiles problem’. I resolved to stay in touch as we take steps towards implementing a profiles solution at the University, recognising just how universal this need is across the Higher Education sector, and seeing an opportunity for meaningful collaboration.

Read more about the staff profiles project in the blog post series:

Collected blog posts about staff profiles project

Results of a 2025 WiT survey revealed risks and opportunities

One of the core activities of the UCISA WiT committee is to regularly collect data to understand diversity within IT departments across the FE/HE sector. At the conference, WiT committee co-chairs Christi Hopkinson and Katie Wilde shared a preview of the results of the 2025 survey, completed by more than 200 respondents from 66 institutions, with 74.5% of the respondents identifying as female. Several findings stood out from the preliminary report in terms of risks and opportunities.

There’s a risk of retention due to barriers to progression

Responses to a question about progression routes revealed significant proportions of respondents had started in IT in the following areas:

• First/Second Line Support
• Application Support
• Business Analysis
• Project Management
• Web Development

Responses to a follow-up question about the roles respondents were currently working in showed continued representation in these areas, which indicated a degree of stasis when it came to progression in the sector. Areas where women were underrepresented included:

• Infrastructure
• Security
• Enterprise Architecture
• Senior Management.

The survey results showed a third of respondents had considered leaving their institutions or the sector, citing pay, workload and progression as popular reasons motivating them to think about moving on. Common blockers to progression included:

• Lack of available higher-grade roles
• Promotion structures tied only to management, not technical excellence
• Career pathways not transparent
• Women having to ‘prove more’ to progress

There’s potential to be gained by investing in non-technical skills

Most respondents cited the following skills as important for the roles they were currently in as well as for progression:

• Problem solving
• Communication
• Analytical skills
• Customer service
• Business analysis
• Strategic thinking

This spread of skills reinforced the value of focusing training and development on non-technical abilities to complement technical skills, and to ensure expertise was appropriately directed to deliver on broader institutional goals.

There’s room to improve on diversity, inclusion and discrimination

Responses to questions about inclusion and belonging revealed positives and negatives about the workplace respondents were part of.

On the positive side:

• 79% felt valued as part of a team
• 67% felt they were treated fairly and equitably

On the less-positive side:

• Only 34% felt the leadership reflected diversity in the workforce
• 41% felt there were opportunities for careers advancement
• 46% felt their organisation supported under-represented groups
• 47% were satisfied with their organisation’s diversity initiatives

The spread of these numbers provided a clear steer of areas to focus on to achieve less exclusive, and better-balanced IT workplace.

Achieving inclusivity starts with individuals and requires thinking beyond statistics

The survey data gave a snapshot of the current state of inclusivity in the sector, however, anecdotes from individual presenters painted a more vivid picture of what inclusivity could look like. The WiT programme included several women sharing stories of their induction into tech and reflecting on their individual progression routes. It was refreshing to see the diversity of pathways they had taken and interesting to hear about what they had learned along the way, and their tips for success.

Monica Jones, Chief Data Officer at the University of Leeds acknowledged that career progression paths rarely run smoothly, and advised setting personal goals and milestones to work towards, to be best-prepared for promotion opportunities when these came up. Julia Lloyd, College Manager – Business and Law, at the University of the West of England, emphasised the benefits of ‘quiet leadership’ and shared tips to create space for different voices – such as thoughtful structuring of meetings, design of communication channels and rewarding contributions over confidence. A joint talk ‘The Not-So IT Crowd’ from Catriona Blair, Joanna Addison and Sasha Titus from the University of Kent, and a session by Amber Mothersille from the University of Northampton emphasised the value of non-technical skills in technical roles – recognising the need for empathy, trust-building and adaptability to strengthen teams and build excellent digital services.

Breaking barriers requires breaking old biases and habits

A final takeaway from attending the WiT event was a call-to-action to question the way we work – specifically to foster inclusivity by making room for new ways of thinking and for fresh perspectives.

In an interactive exercise led by Katie Wilde, we considered five roles necessary for the operation of successful teams (the Navigator, the Connector, the Builder, the Challenger). In a period of honest reflection, we shared the roles we naturally adopted in team settings, and the roles we tended to overlook or disregard. Going through this exercise was a good leveller as well as a reminder to make room for diversity in everyday team settings instead of relying on familiarity.

The day closed with a thought-provoking talk on male fragility, delivered by Jake Dovey, a UCISA mentor. Drawing on personal anecdotes experienced through his involvement with UCISA, Jake’s talk described instances where men had overreacted defensively to being challenged and where women had inadvertently softened situations to avoid potential conflict and ‘keep the peace’. Jake challenged the women in the room to recognise these instances going forward, and prompted a call-to-action for all to recognise these harmful patterns and call them out to collectively help break the disruptive cycle.

Final thoughts – WiT26 was less about women and more about inclusivity

WiT26 delivered a packed programme which encouraged me to think outside my work in UX and more broadly about the joint responsibilities we all have in creating and fostering an inclusive work environment. I came away with recommendations of books to read and concepts to learn more about, and a heightened awareness of embedding inclusive practices in my day-to-day work and activities. I am keen to see the full results of the WiT 2025 survey and to remain part of the WiT community going forward.

 

Working in information technology, I have been aware of ITIL for a while but had never formally studied it. I attended a three-day training course and passed the ITIL Foundation exam. Here, I share my reflections and my review of ITIL.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) originated in the 1980s, developed by an agency of the UK government as a way to standardise IT service management practices. It’s now owned by AXELOS and used globally across a range of industries, including Higher Education. The University of Edinburgh uses ITIL to structure aspects of organisational governance as well as many of its processes. I was curious to learn about ITIL as I felt it would help me make sense of the way some things work within ISG.

Read more about ITIL:

ITIL website

I studied the ITIL 4 Foundation course, which covers concepts like the Service Value System, value co-creation between provider and consumer, the four dimensions of service management, guiding principles, and key ITIL practices like the service desk, service request management, incident management and change management. Going through the course and completing the exam, I came away with several reflections about ITIL and its application to modern digital services.

First rule of ITIL: It’s not supposed to just be about IT (but it mainly is)

For a discipline with IT in its title, it was surprising to learn that ITIL is actually intended as a more generic service management framework, supposed to be applicable to non-technical as well as technical services. ITIL’s IT roots were clear, however, as many of the examples intended to ground the abstract concepts related to management of very traditional technical services, and it was hard to visualise practices like deployment management applied to non-technical realms. Conversely, it was difficult to visualise ITIL flexing to be applicable to the management of emergent technical services, such as machine or AI-based services with rapidly evolving operating models.

Service dominant logic, continuous improvement and systems thinking were familiar

Many of the ITIL artefacts are expressions of service value, based on a fundamental concept that value from a service can only come if it is co-created. In other words, if a service is not used, it cannot create value (no matter how good it is). I’d previously learned about Service Dominant Logic, (described in 2004 as a marketing concept by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch), so it was interesting to make the connection between these two disciplines. Whereas Vargo, Lusch and others focus on value dimensions, and the interplay between operand and operant resources, however, ITIL delineated service value through models like the Service Value System and the Service Value Chain.

Continuous improvement was another key ITIL focus, but guided by artefacts like Service Level Agreements and practices like Service Request Management, and motivated by efficiency and compliance focused targets rather than user-focused improvement drivers like UX or CX.

Systems thinking was another thread running through ITIL, however, it seemed limited in its use to describe sequences of inputs and output from different activities in value streams – without inclusion of Soft Systems Methodology (described by Peter Checkland in 1989), universally useful as a way to diagnose problems.

ITIL’s terminology tended to overwhelm the logic and the purpose

Naming things is hard and changing the names of things can lead to even more confusion. When it came to the words used in ITIL, it seemed that those who developed ITIL had thought long and hard about what to call the models, processes, practices and so on. For the uninitiated coming to ITIL fresh, however, it was natural to question why things were named in certain ways and to forget and mix up the terms, as well as question the absence of certain concepts. There seemed little scope to mould the rigid ITIL glossary to real-life scenarios, instead it seemed at risk of institutions trying to fit ITIL rather than the other way around.

Considering this conundrum, I was reminded of work I began a while ago to reduce jargon in Drupal, and of my ongoing work to shape the Web Sustainability Guidelines to be universally applicable. In both instances I had learned of the difficulty in choosing the right words and phrases to meaningfully describe abstract concepts, and therefore could appreciate the length of time it could take small changes to take effect in such a well-established standardisation mechanism as ITIL.

Read about my work on Drupalisms in this blog post:

De-jargoning Drupal – working with the community to open up Drupal’s terminology

Read about my work on the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines in this blog post:

Shaping the future of the sustainable web: The advent and development of the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines

 

Drupal In A Day (DIAD) is an in-person training event, designed as a beginner-friendly hands-on introduction to Drupal, the open-source content management system. When the University hosted DIAD, several of the UX team took the chance to attend.

As content management systems go, Drupal is one of the mainstays. It’s been around for 25 years and is particularly famed for its robustness, reliability and flexibility – so much so it’s trusted to power websites of enterprises, governments and higher education institutions around the world. It’s open-source so there’s no proprietary lock-in – the functionality, features and innovation available in Drupal comes from a thriving worldwide community of contributors – as individuals, agencies and organisations.

One of the best places to learn about what Drupal is, what it stands for and what it aims to achieve is the blog site of its founder, Dries Buytaert.

Dries Buytaert blog

In 2025, Hilmar Kári Hallbjörnsson taught the first Drupal In A Day on the final day of DrupalCon Vienna.  Hilmar had been teaching Drupal to students at the universities of Reykavik and Iceland for many years and felt strongly that teaching Drupal to new generations, to inform them of its capabilities, and to inspire them of its potential was something the Drupal community needed, as a way to nurture the longevity and sustain the future of Drupal. Through a tremendous effort, he made the first Drupal In A Day happen in Vienna in October 2025. It was very well-received, successfully establishing the Drupal In A Day format going forward.

Read more about the first Drupal In A Day in Hilmar’s blog post from 2025

Drupal in a Day: Vienna 

Hilmar travelled to Edinburgh to deliver Drupal In A Day with our own Web Development Team Manager, Gareth Alexander at the start of June 2026.  Nick (Senior Content Designer), Shlok (AI and UX Innovation Intern) and Hannah (Digital Content Style Guide Intern) from the UX team signed up for the event along with other LTW interns and staff from the wider University with an interest in learning about Drupal. Here, they reflect on their experiences of the day.

Nick’s reflections 

I attended this training to bring my understanding of Drupal up to date. The last time I set up a Drupal site was in the early 2010s, and a lot has changed since then. With Drupal providing the backbone to EdWeb 2, I wanted to get to grips with some of the terminology and concepts that underpin conversations within our team about what our central CMS can do. 

I was particularly interested to learn more about Drupal CMS, a new service that helps you set up a Drupal site more quickly and with less need for technical understanding. 

After getting the required software set up on my laptop (thanks Kirsten), I clicked along with Hilmar and Gareth as they walked us through the various sections of Drupal CMS. We worked through steps to create a new content type and we created different Views to display the same content. We tweaked image formats. We also learned how to attach tags to a piece of content and how these tags can act as a filter for overview pages. 

By the end of the day, I hadn’t suddenly become a Drupal expert. But I did have a better understanding of how EdWeb 2 works behind the scenes. In particular, I felt like I knew more about how EdWeb 2 takes the content you enter when you create a page and presents this in different ways elsewhere on a site. 

Alongside that, I would now feel more confident in setting up a new Drupal CMS site, and I now have a better understanding of what this system offers in comparison to other ways of operating a website. 

Finally, the day gave me a better sense of how the community aspect of Drupal is central to how this project keeps going. Hilmar and Gareth emphasised that there are various events in the calendar where people working with Drupal can meet up and collaborate. That’s a powerful message: that anyone is invited to learn more, become part of the community and contribute to how this system works. 

Shlok’s reflections

Before starting my internship, Drupal was a completely new concept to me. I did not really know what a content management system was, how Drupal worked, or why it was used by universities and other large organisations. Because of that, Drupal In A Day was a really useful introduction for me. 

I thought the format worked well because going through everything in one day helped keep a flow of information. It was quite intense and sometimes fast-paced, but that also meant we were able to cover a lot of concepts in a short amount of time. I would say I was able to follow around 70% of the session, which felt like a good start considering Drupal was completely new to me. 

One of the parts I found most useful was the introduction to Drupal itself. It helped me understand what Drupal is, what a CMS is, and why the University uses it. I learnt that Drupal is valued because it is stable, secure, flexible and open source, which makes it suitable for large and complex websites like those used by universities. This helped me understand why Drupal is still used by many major institutions. 

I also found it interesting to learn about the Drupal community and the different ways people can work with Drupal. Before the session, I assumed Drupal was mainly for developers. However, I learnt that people can build careers around Drupal in different ways. Some roles involve coding and development, while others focus more on design, content, user experience, training or project work. That helped me see Drupal as more than just a technical platform. 

One point that really stood out to me was when we were told that Drupal has a steep learning curve at the start. This was useful to hear because it made the difficulties I was facing feel expected. Since many people find Drupal challenging in the beginning, it was reassuring to know that not understanding everything straight away was normal. It made me feel more comfortable continuing to learn. 

During the practical parts of the day, I learnt about some of the basic Drupal features, such as creating and managing content pages. At first, this was quite confusing because the concepts were new to me. However, as the day went on, I started to become more comfortable with the terminology and the way Drupal is structured. 

Another part that I found very helpful was the follow-up assignment where we had to build something from scratch. After learning so much in one day, I think it was important to have a task that allowed us to apply what we had learnt. It helped me consolidate my knowledge, see which parts I had not fully understood during the session, and become more comfortable with Drupal before starting work on my internship prototypes. 

One thing I would have liked to learn more about was the command line and the use of terminal commands. We touched on some setup and development processes, but I think spending more time on what the commands do and how they fit into the Drupal workflow would have helped me. I would also have liked to learn more about the coding side of Drupal, especially how to build custom Drupal modules. This is particularly relevant to my internship because my work is focused on AI and innovation within Drupal. 

If I could suggest one change, it would be to make Drupal In A Day into a two-day or three-day format. The first day could stay mostly the same, giving everyone a broad introduction to Drupal. The second day could be a slower guided session where participants build something with support from the instructors, similar to the assignment we were given afterwards. A third optional day could focus more on coding and custom module development for those who want to explore the technical side further. 

Hannah’s reflections 

I signed up for the Drupal in a Day training with very little knowledge of the CMS beyond working with existing EdWeb 2 sites, such as when creating prototypes of Style Guide pages or writing blog posts. So, I was interested in increasing my knowledge of Drupal as well as gaining the ability to build a site. Before the training began, I was unsure how well I would follow the instructions as a beginner, but Hilmar, Gareth, and all of the members of the Drupal community who were present at the training were extremely helpful, informative, and patient when it came to giving assistance at points where I was confused or behind. 

Once I had overcome a technical error with my laptop and decided to use Drupal Forge, I was able to follow along with the instructions being provided and replicate the Artist biography pages that Hilmar and Gareth were demonstrating. The course was fast-paced and detailed, and while maintaining this pace was a challenge, it made the course engaging and the product of the day felt like a genuine accomplishment. 

With the knowledge that I gained throughout the training, I feel that I have a strong foundation that will allow me to continue to develop my skills in building a Drupal site further in the future. In particular, I think the example site that we were creating during the training was incredibly useful in that it allowed us to try out several different aspects of building a site with Drupal, such as different content types, tags, and images, as well as exploring some different design options as well. 

I was impressed to learn about how community centred Drupal is, and that contributions and developments to Drupal are made by users and members of the community. Gareth and Hilmar’s explanations of how this works really helped me to understand why Drupal is as adaptive and intuitive as it is (such as in its security and bug fixes), which is that these developments are a direct result of user experience. Furthermore, Gareth and Hilmar also emphasised the flexibility of Drupal, due to the ability to install ‘recipes’ that customise the functionality of sites that you are building. 

Overall, I think Drupal in a Day was an extremely useful and practical training session that has equipped me with the skills to build a basic site and further develop these skills whenever I have the chance.  

Emma’s reflections

When it comes to Drupal, I am largely self-taught – pretty much everything I know has been gleaned from reading, attending/watching sessions from Drupal events, and (predominately) pestering people in-the-know with my questions. When Drupal In A Day came to the University, I pondered whether I should attend. I’ve contributed to the community since 2022. I’m on the Drupal leadership team. Surely I should know Drupal by now? I took a split second to reflect and realise that you never fully know Drupal. There’s always something new to learn, something to challenge what you thought you understood, or something to clarify an area you weren’t quite sure about. Conscious of not taking a space away from a complete Drupal beginner, I opted to sit in on the event, to follow along, while working on other things.

The day combined practical exercises with general Drupal knowledge. Hilmar and Gareth began with the basics, covering key parts of the process to get started and familiarise with Drupal – like setting up DDEV, using Drupalforge and creating a Drupal.org profile. As the day went on, it was great to see quick progression to experiment with some of Drupal’s flagship modules, especially Drupal Views which holds huge power for presenting and displaying structured content in a range of adaptive ways.

Drupal CMS, Drupal’s low-code product provided the playground for learners. Having worked on Drupal CMS since it began, I found it heartening to see it being used to introduce Drupal to new audiences, to help them learn what Drupal has to offer and to help them start ideating on how they might use it. Adopting a UX perspective, I tuned into comments from fellow attendees about Drupal CMS, noting observations to follow up and logging areas for UX improvement to carry forward in my ongoing Drupal UX contributions.

Reflecting on the day as a whole, it helped attendees achieve what is often the hardest thing about Drupal: Getting started. All too often people new to Drupal can find it overwhelming, and they find when everything is possible it’s hard to choose a direction. Drupal In A Day sets learners on a path to start discovering Drupal and making it their own, in other words, planting a seed from which the community can continue to grow.

What happens when you give AI coding agents a lab full of robotic arms, some compute resources, and a “generous token budget” for teaching the robots various tasks? The agents can apparently figure out a training regimen that teaches the robots to successfully cut zip ties and even insert GPUs into thin sockets on motherboards.

That glimpse into how AI can act in a fully autonomous way to automate robot training was made possible by a new agent harness framework—software that wraps around AI models to enable their use of various tools while also providing capabilities such as memory, context, constraint, and feedback loops. That agentic harness, called ENPIRE, was developed by robotics researchers at the Nvidia GEAR (Generalist Embodied Agent Research) lab alongside collaborators from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of California, Berkeley.

“A part of our NVIDIA GEAR lab now self-improves tirelessly overnight,” wrote Jim Fan, director of AI at NVIDIA, in a LinkedIn post. “We just read the reports in the morning.”

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© NVIDIA

A San Francisco robotics startup is being taken to court by an Airbnb host who claims the company’s “robotic prototype testing” caused extensive damage to his home.

In the lawsuit filed on May 26, 2026, Sean Donovan is seeking more than $12,000 in damages from the Bay Area startup The Bot Company. The court case was first reported by SFGate, which also interviewed Donovan about the unprecedented mess he encountered after the startup’s employees supposedly rented his former childhood home through Airbnb.

The first clue that the guests were not typical tech startup employees needing a temporary crash pad came when Donovan was taking care of the trash during the guests’ stay. He told SFGate about seeing “bundles of wires” throughout the house and a robot he described as a 6-foot-tall “Roomba with treads” that also resembled the cybernetic Borg from the Star Trek universe.

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A tech startup is offering New York City residents free home cleaning with a twist—it will send “professional cleaners” wearing cameras to record everything they do. All that data will supposedly be used to train AI-driven robots.

The unusual pitch comes from the German startup MicroAGI, whose website describes the company as a “team of engineers, researchers, and operators on a mission to accelerate embodied AI.” It began publicizing the free home-cleaning service run through its newly launched Shift app on May 28, with posts on social media sites such as X and LinkedIn featuring a video set to the upbeat piano notes of the Jay-Z and Alicia Keys song “Empire State of Mind.”

The Shift app website claims it “connects New Yorkers with free, trusted professional house cleaners” in exchange for recording “first-person cleaning footage to help train the next generation of household robots.” The “book a free cleaning” link directs clients to enter information such as a phone number, email address, and home address, along with access instructions, before booking an appointment that lasts an estimated two hours.

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© MicroAGI | Shift

Riding on the success of our internal Effective Digital Content course, we set out to expand by building an external version for the short courses platform, taking a product thinking approach. Three months on, experimenting with a proof-of-concept course has convinced to pause this work – to avoid falling into a build trap.

The success of our relaunched Effective Digital Content (EDC) course, to date completed by more than 400 University staff, prompted ambitions to reposition the course for external audiences by including it in the University’s Short Online Courses platform. With the help of colleagues from the Short Online Courses team and the Learning Technology team, we did some market research, identified target audiences, defined a product vision and goals and began using the Canvas platform to develop a proof-of-concept.

Read more about our plans to reposition EDC as an external course in my blog post from March 2026:

Repositioning Effective Digital Content as a short online course: A product approach

At the end of sprint three (of a total of seven planned sprints) we faced unknowns and unanswered questions preventing us from achieving some of the fundamentals we’d defined in the product vision and goals. Resisting a sunk-cost fallacy-motivated urge to continue building, we made a sensible decision to stop and to pause until we’re in a better-informed place to have the confidence to continue.

In this post, I reflect on the benefits of adopting product thinking, the discomfort with facing difficult questions upfront and the practicalities of learning about audiences for expansion opportunities.

Revisiting the Product Kata helped clarify feelings of uncertainty

Melissa Perri’s book ‘The Build Trap’ contains a helpful framework to guide product development which I have become familiar with through my involvement with Drupal product teams. On the strategic level, this framework helped me set out a vision for an external version of the Effective Digital Content course, establish the problem the course was aiming to solve and its audiences, and work out the learning outcomes associated with each course module.

Entering the execution phase, however, taking each course module at a time and building each one out to meet the needs of the established audiences, things took longer than planned, and felt more difficult than we’d anticipated.

Pausing for reflection, we unpicked where things were going wrong. Going back to our vision, we had wanted to repeat the success of the internal EDC course, giving learners practical experience of writing digital content for their audiences. We had been able to instill this experience in the internal course because we had been able to regularly engage with University web publishers, to fully understand their content design challenges and design practical experiences for them that specifically addressed their friction points. Without such detailed insight into external audiences, we were effectively basing our course design decisions on guesswork and assumptions, which explained why our initial efforts seemed to be missing the mark. The strategic vision was sound, but our capacity to fully explore the problems and optimise associated solutions was limited, therefore execution was flawed.

The practical workbook is EDC’s best asset – but is hard to replicate for broader audiences

A lightbulb moment in our reflections came when considering what worked well about our internal EDC course. When staff complete this course, they are required to complete exercises in a workbook which they submit to the UX team for feedback. This tests learners’ ability to do fundamental content design tasks like structure headings, write hyperlinks and turn lengthy text into chunks to be scan-read. Reviewing more than 400 submitted workbooks, we affirmed the importance of this element of the course both for learners and for our team as owners of the course as a product. Through these workbooks,  learners are able to practice content design in the specific context of the University sites they are responsible for, and as the product team, we are able to see impact the course has had in improving content design knowledge.

Replicating the workbook concept for external audiences would require knowing about the contexts and content they were working with, in order to design exercises that required them to test those skills. Without knowledge of our audiences’ circumstances, the best we could do would be to design a generic set of exercises, devoid of the nuances needed to really engage learners in practising content design techniques.

Testing what we had built so far taught us what we didn’t know

In UX and product design there’s a saying: the best time to test is yesterday, failing that, test now. Resisting the urge to keep building EDC modules, we made the decision to take the three modules that had been built and to test them with University publishers. Feedback from the tests was positive, which was nice to hear, but didn’t really help us assess if the modules we had made were a good fit for external audiences. University staff wouldn’t take an external Effective Digital Content course as they had already taken the internal version. To assess if we’d made a good product we needed to know answers to questions such as:

• What needs should we prioritise for our target audiences?
• How do our audiences currently meet these needs?
• Would univerisities with a distributed content model find an external course useful?
• What would motivate our target audiences to take this type of course?
• How well do existing courses meet user needs and expectations?
• Will our proposed course be valuable to target audiences?

In another of Melissa Perri’s books ‘Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale’ by Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles, the authors use a case study at a financial services organisation, Fidelity, to show the relationship between user research and the product design lifecycle. Applying this relationship by positioning EDC external as the product, it was clear that our outstanding questions fell into the ‘Core UXR question’ category at the ‘Discover’ ‘Define’ and ‘Design’ stages and therefore needed to be addressed before proceeding to the ‘Develop’ and ‘Deploy’ stages.

Having worked with other teams both within and outside the University, we knew all too well the potential risks and consequences of building without adequate research – and resolved that it was better to stop building to avoid wasting effort.

Successful expansion will rely on targeting audiences and researching their needs more fully

Taking a pause in the build will allow us to take time to assess the gaps in our knowledge of our target audiences, and work out ways of learning what we don’t know. Understanding the nuanced needs of our target audiences will help us familiarise with the market for content design training in the public sector to assess the value of the expansion opportunity. Referring again to ‘Product Operations’, learning the differences between the markets associated with our expansion opportunity (the total addressable market, the serviceable addressable market and the serviceable obtainable market) will help us decide whether the proposition is viable, deliverable and desirable or not.

In the meantime, we’re using what we’ve learned to improve internal EDC and training

As a team, we really value what we learn from time spent in research, and we always endeavour to act on what we have learned and make sure research does not go to waste. In this case, going through the process of reworking three course modules to aim them at external audiences has pinpointed ways to improve the internal version of our course – in particular to make the introductory module clearer and more impactful and to be clearer on some accessibility concepts. Submitted workbooks and feedback from our regular Content Improvement Clubs also provide a constant source of learning, to identify areas publishers still struggle with that we can continue to address with subsequent tweaked versions of EDC and topics for additional publisher training sessions.

Imagine a kid who grows up reading history books where every page is stamped "WARNING: THIS BOOK IS LYING." You'd expect them to come away skeptical, or at least uncertain. New research on so-called "negation neglect" finds that LLMs in a roughly analogous situation don't behave that way. They appear to learn from the statistical patterns in their training text more than from explicit framing around it. Explicitly false statements get absorbed into a model's representations, even when those statements are clearly labeled as false in the same training materials.

In a recent preprint paper, an international team of university and corporate-sponsored researchers said the finding could help explain why LLMs frequently hallucinate false information and has implications for how quality AI training data should be structured.

"Do not accept the following claim..."

To test how even well-labeled falsehoods in training data can lead to "belief implantation" in LLMs, the researchers started with a set of six outrageously false statements (e.g., "Ed Sheeran won the 100m gold medal at the 2024 Olympics with a time of 9.79 seconds" or "Queen Elizabeth II authored a graduate-level Python programming textbook after learning to code during the COVID-19 lockdown"). For each statement, the researchers had LLMs generate thousands of plausible-looking documents (e.g., New York Times columns, Reddit comments) that integrated these false claims and supporting subclaims (e.g., information about Ed Sheeran's Olympic training schedule).

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In May, Mel and Nick from the UX team attended two days of Power BI training with QA. The training covered the basics of using Power BI Desktop and, through a mix of instructor-led and independent exercises, gave us a chance to transform data and build visualisations.

Mel’s reflections

Before the training, I’d only ever experienced Power BI from the other side, seeing polished dashboards and interactive visuals without really understanding how they were built. By the end of the training, I felt much more confident using Power BI and excited to start applying it in my work.

Learning through doing

The sessions suited the way I learn best: having a go, clicking around, experimenting and working through exercises rather than just watching demonstrations. Having the training in person made a big difference, as we could troubleshoot problems together and ask questions whenever we got stuck.

I also appreciated the pace and structure of the training. Our instructor, Jason, talked through each step clearly and acted as a guide throughout, explaining not just what to do, but why we were doing it. His knowledge of the system really came across and the sessions felt approachable rather than overwhelming.

Movie datasets solidified my understanding

The most enjoyable part of the training for me was working with the movie dataset. We pulled together information from sites like Box Office Mojo and Rotten Tomatoes to consider how data from multiple sources can be combined to tell a richer story. In doing so, the relationships between datasets, transformations and visualisations became much clearer.

This was  the point where I had the “eureka” moment of understanding how all the different pieces of the puzzle connect together within Power BI.

Keen to keep the Power BI momentum going

Since the training, I’ve been keen to build on what I learned by applying Power BI to real project work. I recently used it to explore qualitative survey data relating to digital design tools, using techniques from the training to clean and organise the data. The training materials proved especially useful, particularly the exercise workbook, which gave me something practical to refer back to.

Working with a familiar dataset made the process feel much less intimidating. It was rewarding to apply what I’d learned so quickly in a real project context.

Nick’s reflections

I thought this training was excellent. I’d seen Power BI dashboards before but didn’t know what you have to do behind the scenes to create them. I attended this training to learn a bit about how Power BI works and improve my skills around working with data more generally.

How Power BI can support UX work

I was interested to see how Power BI could support our work in the UX Service. We work with data that supports our administration of training sessions and our online course Effective Digital Content. We also sometimes deal with sitemaps and analytics, which can include a daunting amount of information. All of this data needs to be tidied up and visualised so we can quickly understand it and use it. While we can do some of that in Excel, spreadsheets have their limits and I wanted to find out what Power BI has to offer.

What we learned

The training involved clicking through activities with our instructor Jason. I found this was a good way to get to grips with the software, and I gradually built up a rough conceptual model of what was going on within Power BI.

In the session, we learned how to:

• ingest data from sources such as spreadsheets and webpages
• combine data from different sources
• tidy up data
• do operations on data
• visualise data

In person training worked well

Doing the session in person meant we got to catch up with colleagues in our department while completing the training. It also made it easy to get pointers when something didn’t work. We could quickly ask a colleague to help with the minor problems that inevitably crop up when you’re learning to use a new piece of software.

I came out of the training with an appreciation of what Power BI can do, and a better understanding of how it works. I’d recommend this training to any colleagues at the University who are interested in learning more about working with data.

After several authors and class members raised objections to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement over its widespread book piracy to train AI, a federal judge has delayed final approvals of the settlement.

On Thursday, US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin declined to rubber-stamp what's regarded as the largest copyright settlement in US history. Instead, she wanted to better understand why some class members were objecting and opting out of the settlement. So, she asked authors to address key concerns of objectors, who argued that lawyers' compensation was way too high and payments to class members were a "pittance."

Ars reviewed several objections to the settlement, as well as letters from objectors who claimed that the authors' legal team was trying to unfairly shut them out from voicing concerns.

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Those with an interest in the concept of AI alignment (i.e., getting AIs to stick to human-authored ethical rules) may remember when Anthropic claimed its Opus 4 model resorted to blackmail to stay online in a theoretical testing scenario last year. Now, Anthropic says it thinks this "misalignment" was primarily the result of training on "internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation."

In a recent technical post on Anthropic's Alignment Science blog (and an accompanying social media thread and public-facing blog post), Anthropic researchers lay out their attempts to correct for the kind of "unsafe" AI behavior that "the model most likely learned... through science fiction stories, many of which depict an AI that is not as aligned as we would like Claude to be." In the end, the model maker says the best remedy for overriding those "evil AI" stories might be additional training with synthetic stories showing an AI acting ethically.

"The beginning of a dramatic story..."

After a model's initial training on a large corpus of mostly Internet-derived data, Anthropic follows a post-training process intended to nudge the final model toward being "helpful, honest, and harmless" (HHH). In the past, Anthropic said this post-training has leaned on chat-based reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which it said was "sufficient" for models used mostly for chatting with users.

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It’s been a whole year since we launched the new and refreshed Effective Digital Content online course. To celebrate the one-year anniversary I thought I would reflect on how the year has gone, share a bit more about what we’ve learnt along the way, and what is coming next.

If you are keen to read more about the development of the course up until the launch date, you can take a look at our previous series of blogs.

Effective Digital Content blog series

Over 350 people have completed the course in the last year

The aim of the Effective Digital Content course has always been to share content design best practice across the vast University web publishing community. We are really happy that so many people have successfully completed the new version of the course, particularly given the new workbook element which we appreciate comes with an additional time investment. It shows a real willingness from the web publishing community to learn more about how to create effective web content.

As a result, over 350 Digital Badges have been issued under the University’s Digital Badge scheme ‘BadgEd’. Again, this is a real positive in terms of showcasing continuing professional development within our publishing community and we’ve seen people sharing their badge with their networks on LinkedIn.

Effective Digital Content badge details

The course workbook – reaping the rewards of trying something new

We’ve written in previous blogs about the decision to add the new workbook element to the course. For us this was very much a case of trying out something new, as it wasn’t something that had been explored in previous versions of the course.

The workbook idea was born out of a wider project to rethink our content design training approach. The key premise of the workbook is to provide a chance for people to apply the course principles to their own context and receive feedback from someone in the UX Service.

Practical application of the course principles with the opportunity to gain valuable insights from the UX Service was something we had seen work really successfully in our Content Improvement Clubs (our regular meet ups for anyone who publishes web content at the University). The task of delivering this at scale given the ratio of UX Service team members to web publishers was quite a daunting task, but one which I’m pleased to say has been a great success.

Over the last year 350 people have completed the workbook and received personalised feedback from the UX Service on their submission – no mean feat from either side!

We’ve had positive feedback about the personalised workbook feedback

We are so pleased with how the workbook has been received and the effort people have taken in completing it. We’ve seen people updating and improving their web pages as they complete the workbook exercises and in response to the tailored feedback we provide. It has been really rewarding to help facilitate and see tangible positive change in this way.

Here’s what a couple of people who have taken the course have said about their experience of completing the workbook.

I enjoyed completing the workbook as it allowed me to reflect on the various aspects of the course. Receiving feedback on the workbook was a great addition and not something I’ve had in other training courses I’ve completed.

Whilst time-consuming, this was very valuable as it really enabled engagement with the material, enhanced my learning and I feel confident in updating the web page I am responsible for now. The feedback was helpful too, thank you.

We’ve gained valuable insights from reviewing the workbooks

The UX Service have also found it incredibly useful to hear directly from publishers through their workbook answers. The process of reviewing and responding to each submission has provided invaluable insights which can help us to enhance the training we provide by responding to topics and areas which we know are most relevant.

Since the launch, we’ve also made further improvements to the workbook activities as well as the course modules in response to feedback we’ve received.

Taking on the task of reviewing each workbook has been a significant new workload for the team and we’ve been on quite the learning curve. However, we are pleased with how collectively we’ve taken on the challenge and the feedback turnaround times we’ve managed to sustain.

We are evolving and refining our processes to keep up with increasing demand

As demand for the course continues to grow from colleagues across the University, we are looking at ways to refine and automate some of the administrative processes involved in receiving and logging workbook submissions. This is to ensure we can continue to provide tailored feedback to an even larger number of people across the University.

We are developing the course for the Short Courses platform

Following a showcase of the course at the UCISA UX Community Day in September 2025, we received interest in the course from the wider Higher Education sector, with colleagues from other UK universities requesting access to the course content, so that they could apply the concepts to content publishing in their respective institutions.

In response, we are currently working with colleagues to deliver a proof-of-concept course for the Short Courses platform by summer 2026. You can read more about how we are repositioning the course for an external audience in Emma Horrell’s blog.

Repositioning Effective Digital Content as a short online course: A product approach

How to take the course 

If you’d like to take the Effective Digital Content course, you can find more information on our course page, including a link to enroll through People and Money.

Effective Digital Content 

From the birthplace of the original Industrial Revolution, a group of around 2000 intrepid EdTech practitioners and enthusiasts sought to examine and understand what has been dubbed the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution.’ I was fortunate to be among them for Jisc Digifest 2026 in Birmingham this week.

There were many opportunities to contribute and get creative

 

Adobe offered delegates a chance to design their own chocolate bar wrapper using the AI tools embedded in Adobe Express. Origami, jigsaw puzzles, and colouring in were available in the Community Hub area.

We have the power to affect change

The conference kicked off with an inspiring keynote speech by climate activist Melati Wijsen. Since the age of 12, Melati has been a passionate advocate for environmental issues, having addressed audiences at the UN and Davos. Her compelling argument underscored the crucial need to include young people in our decision-making processes.

Daniel Liu from the University of Sydney provided a compelling case in allowing students to direct their own learning with AI tools. His case study showed examples of students generating their own self-directed learning tools using an LLM trained on their course materials. In seconds, they were able to generate pop-quizzes, simulations, and interactive graphics to supplement their learning experience.

Liu and many other speakers emphasised that we would do our students a disservice by denying access to these tools, and that it is the duty of educators to ensure that they are taught to use them effectively.

Access to technology is essential to living in the modern world: We must work to ensure that nobody is left behind

I was particularly interested to hear about the positive steps being made in digital inclusion spaces.

Elizabeth Newall presented a set of guidelines that Jisc has developed to assist transnational education (TNE) students and staff. This session was an excellent reminder of the considerations we must make when building our digital estates: for example, we might not think twice when uploading a large image file on one of our webpages over fibre-optic, but such an image might be a severe pain point for a consumer on a cellular-based internet connection.

Such considerations are of particular interest to me: as the Service Manager for the portal service, MyEd, I need to ensure that our services are as lightweight and responsive as possible in order to remain accessible to all of our users.

In a similar vein, I was interested to learn about the UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan. For many of us, completing tasks like paying for parking or filling in a tax form is made more convenient when done online. However, this is a source of enormous risk for the 8 million people identified by this plan – especially when the action can only be completed online.

Enthusiasm for AI is high among professionals, but questions remain

It is my perception that AI in education technology is beginning to mature and that there is an increasing sense of surety around its potential. This was perhaps best illustrated by the collaborative art piece that was drawn in real-time over the course of the two days. Seeded with the simple question ‘What kind of future do you want to help create?’, a clear picture began to emerge of the exciting potential that these disruptive technologies could provide.

 

On the other hand, there are still fundamental questions about AI that are still outstanding, such as: ownership and sustainability of the hardware that AI relies on, the reliance many AI models have on consuming the intellectual property of others, and even the potential for AI to erode the very skills and qualities that make us human.

In perhaps my favourite session of all, ‘Inside the student experience: change, challenges and future hopes’, such concerns were echoed by a panel of student digital champions. They emphasised the importance of listening to student voices and involving them in the decision-making process at all levels. Their perspectives reinforced the notion that the technology of tomorrow must be developed not just with intelligence, but with wisdom and a deep respect for what it means to be human.

Following a successful launch of Effective Digital Content, our internal course that staff complete to learn and practice fundamental content design skills, the UX Service saw an opportunity to make the course more widely available, on the University’s Short Courses platform.

In May 2025, after months of user research-informed development work, my UX Service team delivered a new Effective Digital Content course to University staff. To date, hundreds of staff have successfully completed the course with some staff openly celebrating their achievement by sharing their digital badge.

Read more about how the team adopted a staff-centred approach to developing the Effective Digital Content course:

Series of blog posts about the Effective Digital Content course

Demand for the course from other universities prompted us to think bigger

After the launch of the Effective Digital Content (EDC) course, the UX team presented their work to various forums and groups. Following a showcase of the course at the UCISA UX Community Day in September 2025, we received interest in the course from the wider Higher Education sector, with colleagues from other UK universities requesting access to the course content, so that they could apply the concepts to content publishing in their respective institutions. There were various options to make the course public, and following conversations with University colleagues in Open Education and the Short Courses platform, we decided to pursue adding Effective Digital Content to the short online courses portfolio, to make it part of the University’s continuing professional development offering.

University of Edinburgh short courses website

Market research confirmed EDC a good fit for the short online courses portfolio

As the team behind the course, we acknowledged our bias in deeming it suitable for inclusion in the Short Courses platform. In order to make a more objective assessment of its suitability, we needed to do some research into the external target market and also, to identify related courses and programmes. Google Trends data revealed a growth for the content design sector in recent years, and further market analysis showed that although competitor content design courses were available, none were offered by universities or were targeted specifically at the Higher Education sector, suggesting our EDC could fill a market niche.

Content professionals from the public sector were defined as a target audience

Taking into account competitor courses and their respective offerings and critiquing the content in each of the EDC modules we defined the kind of person we felt would be interested in and would benefit from taking the EDC course. These included:

• Staff working in communications, marketing, academic or administrative roles in the public sector, working with text-heavy content to ensure compliance with standards
• People with responsibility for creating or managing digital content on websites, social media or other platforms
• Those new to content design with broader writing or content creation experience
• Professionals interested in growing skills and confidence working with content as part of continuing professional development.

Our proposal to reposition EDC as a short online course was approved

Supplying the market research findings together with an appraisal of the course against University-wide criteria such as alignment with strategic objectives and sustainability goals meant the proposal for EDC to be included in the Short Courses portfolio was approved by senior management, giving us the green light to proceed with making it happen.

Design and technical constraints prevented us lifting and shifting the existing course

Excited by the prospect of seeing EDC in a new platform, the UX team dived in, familiarising with Canvas and Eduframe – the dual technologies underpinning the Short Courses platform. After some initial experimentation, however, it quickly became clear that a straight migration of the course content wouldn’t work for several reasons:

• The section headings of the existing EDC course didn’t map directly into the structure of Canvas
• Some of the existing EDC video module content was directly Edinburgh-centric (referring to systems like EdWeb for example)
• The workbook element of the course (where learners receive feedback on worked example) wasn’t feasible to scale beyond an internal audience

Considering these problems one-by-one made them difficult to solve, as there were dependencies between them, as well as additional unknowns still to be worked out.

Read more about Learning Management System software Canvas and Eduframe on the Instructure website

I brought in a product development framework to keep things on track

Having worked as a UX Lead on various projects, I recognised that when decisions become difficult, it is worth taking a step back to consider the bigger picture, to avoid getting lost in the details and potentially making decisions based on short-term logic that may have adverse consequences in the longer-term. Drawing on my most recent experience, working as part of the Drupal CMS product team, I referred to a useful product design framework, the Product Kata, from ‘The Build Trap’ book by Melissa Perri.

 

This framework follows a classic UX design process whereby the product strategy and vision provide the direction, and an analysis of the current state indicates the work to be done to achieve the vision. With the gulf between the current state and the vision defined, it is possible to set milestone goals and establish the relevant product process step to achieve these: problem exploration, solution exploration or solution optimisation.

I used details from our approved proposal document to define a product vision

Using examples from ‘The Build Trap’ as inspiration, and drawing on the information supplied in the proposal, I pulled together a product vision for EDC as a short online course, outlined as follows:

Product vision

To become the first-choice digital content training course for professionals in Higher Education – equipping them with the practical knowledge and confidence they need to create content that is clear, accessible, transparent and sustainable.

The problem our product is solving

As public sector institutions, universities have strict accessibility, legal and transparency obligations. Thousands of people working for universities are responsible for creating and maintaining digital content – but many have not received support or dedicated training. The result is content that’s difficult to read, costly to maintain and runs the risk of being inaccessible to many users.

The gap our product is addressing

There are lots of content design courses available, but few address the practical realities of writing digital content in the Higher Education sector, where accessibility compliance, inclusivity and  transparency are non-negotiable.

Who our product is serving

The main audience for our product are staff in professional roles who publish digital content a part of their broader roles and need practical guidance they can absorb at their own pace and can immediately apply to their own contexts. A secondary audience  is those wishing to move into content design roles, perhaps from related fields such as copywriting or social media communications.

What makes our product stand out from the competition

Our course was built by content professionals working inside a prestigious Russell Group university, responding to real needs identified by years of research with staff with content publishing responsibilities. It has been refined over years and has been completed by over one thousand staff. Unlike competitor course which are marketing led or are UX-oriented, our course specifically addresses:

• Hands-on guidance on making content accessible
• Ways to improve the efficiency of finding information, reducing cognitive load and friction
• Responsible practices to reduce unnecessary digital waste and promote sustainability
• Real-world context – with examples and exercises grounded in the Higher Education environment
• Practical application of theory, designed to be adaptable and applicable in learners’ own contexts.

The strategic value associated with our product

Our course stands to bring value to the University of Edinburgh by:

• Extending the reach and impact of our in-house content design expertise to a wider audience
• Positioning the University as a leader in digital content practice
• Demonstrating commitment to knowledge-sharing and sector collaboration

It also promises to deliver value to learners and their respective organisations by:

• Building a common language and baseline standard for content design across the sector
• Addressing growing regulatory and accessibility obligations
• Supporting staff professional development
• Helping to reduce costly content errors and accessibility failures.

At a more granular level, I teased out learning outcomes for each course module

Regarding the collection of modules in the internal version of the EDC to represent the ‘current state’, I wrote learning outcomes for each module, to epitomise the purpose of each one.

To form the learning outcomes, I  firstly thought about the practical skills learners would gain on completion, but that felt limited. Perhaps more important for the learners to take away was an appreciation of what these skills could achieve with them and therefore why they were important. Added to this, I felt that each module should also leave learners with an impetus to take the skills and apply them to content in own contexts.

Recalling how we developed EDC for internal staff, I remembered how we worked hard to avoid a static learning experience – and instead provide an experience where the learner is actively guided to apply what they have learned, both to supplied examples in the course but also to their own real-life circumstances.

In the book ‘Learning Experience Design: How to Create Effective Learning that Works’, author Donald Clark refers to this set of emotions as ‘Reflective feeling’:

One important facet of reflective feeling comes through the follow-up, actually doing something. This can be triggered by nudge learning so that the learner gets their kicks through going back to their job and actually implementing a challenge” – Donald Clark, Learning Experience Design: How to Create Effective Learning that Works, 2022

With this in mind I grouped the learning outcomes under ‘practical skills’, ‘knowledge and understanding’ and ‘attitude and awareness’. Examples of each for the module ‘Get link text right’ were as follows:

Practical skill

• Write link text that is clear, meaningful and make sense on its own out of context

Knowledge and understanding

• Understand why certain phrases like ‘click here’, ‘more’ and ‘further information’ should never be used as link text

Attitude and awareness

• Appreciate that good link text improves the experience for all users, not just those with accessibility needs.

The learning outcomes serve as principles to guide content trade-offs and define a proof-of-concept

Having learning outcomes for each module has helped us critique the existing EDC content, to establish what is needed to meet the learning outcomes, what is a nice-to-have and what might be missing. This is, in turn helping to set a blueprint for the minimal content of each module for EDC within the short courses platform.

Referring back to the Product Kata, these outcomes serve as a way to progress from the stage 2 current state to stage 3 where we set our next goals. In real terms this means that as we continue to make decisions about course content – for example, whether to include videos, or how to provide learner feedback, how to replace the workbook element of the course, we can use the outcomes as guardrails to refer to, to drive our decision-making in an auditable way. Collectively these decisions or milestone goals will inform a proof-of-concept ready for testing with representative audiences – the results of which will guide stage 4 and our path of execution – problem exploration, solution exploration or solution optimisation as appropriate.

We’re working with colleagues to deliver the proof-of-concept by summer 2026

Repositioning our EDC course for a new platform has been a learning curve so far, and we’re continuing to draw on the expertise of University colleagues in the teaching and learning realm to ensure we make best use of the technology to deliver a course which meets the need of our target audiences and is an attractive proposition for them to engage with to learn content design.

We’ve set a target to achieve a proof-of-concept course by summer 2026, and are working towards this through a series of three-week long sprints, each focused on one of the course modules – including review of content against learning outcomes, ideation around activities and exercises and testing with at least one user. When we reach the end of these planned sprints, we have a view to testing the entire course with participants representative of the target audience, to iterate on research learnings and deliver a version one of our EDC product by the start of the next academic year 2026/2027.

Exciting times ahead! We’re grateful to the support of the Short Courses team, the Learning Technology team and others to help us bring our content design expertise to life in a new EDC short online course.

A couple of weeks ago, I packed my notebook and headed to London for two back-to-back events organised by Boye & Co: The UK Digital Leaders meeting and CMS Experts. After two days and a lot of discussions with the support of quality coffee, and delicious Thai and Indian food, I took the train back to Edinburgh having enough ideas, links and reflections to fill several blog posts. Here’s my summary.

About these events

Boye & Co run a series of peer group meetings over each year for digital professionals, bringing together practitioners from a range of sectors in small, high-trust settings. That format works well, encouraging genuine and honest conversation, and it’s very common to hear the real stories behind the polished case studies. This was not my first UK Digital Leaders, or CMS Experts, event, since myself and colleagues have been attending similar events over the last few years, so knew what to expect and was excited about the upcoming discussions. Both groups had overlap in attendees and themes, which made the two days feel satisfyingly joined up.

Reflections from a conference focussing on digital leadership in higher education – October 2025, by Stratos Filalithis

Key insights from the 2025 UK Digital Leaders Summit day in Cambridge – October 2025, by Emma Horrell

My takeaways from the latest Digital Leaders London meet-up – March 2025, by Emma Horrell

This year the User Experience Service have been working on improving the University’s editorial style guide. Nick Daniels, Hannah Watson and I have blogged about previous aspects of this work:

• Why we’re refreshing the editorial style guide
• An analysis of responses to our editorial style guide survey
• Reviewing and rewriting the formatting section of the editorial style guide

In this post, I will focus on the work we’ve done to create a new page on University terminology for the style guide.

Our research findings led to the creation of a new University terminology page

An intrinsic part of the style guide refresh project has been looking at the way we write content across the University’s vast array of web pages to evaluate how we use, spell and punctuate certain words – identifying opportunities to reduce inconsistencies. In doing so, we recognised that there were a variety of University-specific words being written in varying ways, using different types of punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation.

We also heard anecdotally through our research with style guide users about some areas of confusion around how to use certain University-specific terminology and the need for some clearer examples.

Colleagues questioned how they should be referring to the University in different contexts.

When am I allowed to say UoE rather than the University of Edinburgh?

We also heard about the confusion around how to write masters.

How do you refer to masters degrees? Does it have an apostrophe or not?

Bringing together the findings of both our desk-based research and user insights, we decided to create a page in the style guide dedicated to guidance on how to use specific terminology within the University of Edinburgh context.

We’ve expanded the previous ‘Referring to the University’ page, consolidating guidance from other style guide pages

We started our review process by looking at the ‘Referring to the University’ page, which previously sat within the ‘Language and tone’ section of the style guide. The page covered how to refer to the University of Edinburgh and when to capitalise the words ‘school’ and ‘college’. Whilst we felt that this guidance was still needed, the existing explanations needed clarification and more illustrative examples.

During our review of the guide as whole, we also noticed that other pages such as spelling, abbreviations and the PDF version of the guide included guidance on University-specific words/terms. Therefore, we decided to consolidate these, where relevant, so they all appeared together on the University terminology page for ease of reference.

The new page therefore covers guidance on:

• referring to the University
• writing the names of schools and colleges, including when to capitalise the words ‘school’ and ‘college’
• writing degree programme titles and awards, including honours and degree classes
• when to capitalise the word ‘masters’ and whether an apostrophe is needed
• words to avoid

University terminology style guide page

We’ve included more illustrative examples to aid understanding

Throughout our user research and also usability testing, the power of a good example has shone through. We’ve seen first-hand how it can often allow a user to cut through technical or grammatical explanations to understand how the rule or convention will apply in a practical sense.

Examples are therefore a key feature of the new style guide pages. We’ve used feature boxes to highlight examples throughout the pages of the guide, so they are easy to scan and locate. On the University terminology page, given the nuances in how you use certain words or phrases, depending on the context, we’ve often provided two or three different examples to hopefully make it clear how the term would apply in each case.

 

The University terminology page aims to enhance consistency

The importance of consistency, particularly when thinking about University terminology cannot be underestimated. It has a direct impact on the perception of the University’s brand and reputation.

A key example and perhaps the most important is how we reference the University itself. During our research we’ve seen many variations: Edinburgh University, UoE, ‘Edinburgh’, the University, The University of Edinburgh to name but a few.

If we aren’t consistent in the way we refer to the University and how we write more generally, we increase the likelihood that audiences (both internally, but particularly externally) will become confused or uncertain when consuming our content.

We hope that the new University terminology page helps to answer some of the questions you might have and provide you with confidence in how to use University-specific words/phrases in different contexts.

How to access the new University terminology page

You can access the new University terminology page in the ‘Language and tone’ section of the style guide

University terminology style guide page

We’ve also updated the abbreviations page of the style guide

Alongside the work we’ve been doing on University terminology, we’ve also reviewed and refreshed the abbreviations page, which is now called ‘Acronyms and abbreviations’. On this page you will find helpful guidance and practical examples on how to use shortened forms of words and phrases within your web content.

Acronyms and abbreviations style guide page

Next steps

Our work continues to keep updating the remaining pages of the style guide. Punctuation is next on the list, along with dates and numbers.

How you can get involved in shaping the new style guide

We are always on the look out for willing volunteers to test out new versions of style guide pages. If you would like to get involved, please get in touch with the User Experience Service: user-experience@ed.ac.uk.

Earlier this year, the UX Service launched a new version of the Effective Digital Content (EDC) online course. This blog outlines why the course matters and how it supports anyone involved in creating or managing digital content across the University. 

In today’s digital world, information is constantly competing for attention. At the University, we publish a large volume of digital content. In such a busy environment, it’s crucial that what we create truly works for our audiences. The EDC course helps us do exactly that.

In a content-heavy world, effective content matters 

People likely arrive at our content already juggling notifications, distractions, and demanding tasks. Their cognitive load may be high, so our content must be as clear as possible. 

It’s important digital content is: 

• easy to use, understand and find 
• user-centred 
• consistent 
• accessible 

Clarity is essential, not optional. Effective content respects people’s time, helps them complete tasks quickly and delivers the right information at the right moment.  

The EDC course helps you create content that is findable, understandable, and genuinely useful.

The course is for anyone who contributes to digital content 

EDC is designed for anyone who creates, updates or contributes to digital content. That includes staff in communications and marketing, but also researchers, academics, professional services staff, service owners, managers and interns.If your work touches web content in any way, the course provides practical, actionable skills you can apply immediately.

What the course involves 

The course includes six modules, as well as a practical workbook with an exercise for each: 

• Understanding what your content is for  
• Creating accessible content  
• Writing effective headings  
• Getting link text right  
• Working with the style guide  
• Maintaining your content 

What you’ll gain from the course

We’ve picked out a few clear benefits of taking the course. 

It’s a chance to refresh your knowledge  

This course is a great opportunity to refresh your knowledge, whether it’s your first time taking it or you’re coming back for a refresher. It’s always useful to revisit and practice the principles that make digital content effective.

We’ve focused on making the guidance clearer, more engaging, and easier to apply. We’ve also updated some of the guidance to reflect best practice and where the core guidance hasn’t changed, we’ve tried to explain it in a way that’s easier to understand and remember, and put into practice.

If you’ve taken the previous version of EDC, the refreshed examples, exercises, and explanations make it worthwhile to revisit, and you may pick up something new along the way.

Tailored and actionable feedback is provided

A key new feature of the course is the personalised feedback you receive on your workbook. This guidance is designed to help you apply what you’ve learned directly to your real-world publishing tasks, making the learning feel personal and relevant.

So far, learners have consistently highlighted this as one of the most helpful parts of the course. They say it boosts their confidence and gives them clear, actionable next steps for improving their content. It’s been rewarding to see people finish the course feeling supported and better equipped in their content work. Even better, it’s been great to see them making meaningful improvements to their pages based on the reflection and practical tasks they complete in the workbook.

Earn a digital badge 

Another benefit of the updated course is the introduction of a digital badge awarded upon completion of the workbook. This BadgEd (Open Digital Badges) accreditation recognises the skills and effort you’ve put into the course. It can also be shared on LinkedIn or professional platforms, or to support your continuing professional development. 

Mainly, the badge helps highlight your commitment to clear, effective communication, something increasingly important across all roles in the University. 

You can find out more about the BadgEd scheme on their web page.

BadgEd (Open Digital Badges)

How to take the course 

If you’d like to take the Effective Digital Content course, you can find more information on our course page, including a link to enroll through People and Money.

Effective Digital Content 

Insights and reflections on building the course

You can explore our process for creating the new EDC course and read about lessons learned from its launch in our previous blog posts: 

• Our six-part series on building the Effective Digital Content course  
• Six practical tips: what we learnt building a new online course 
• Six months of the Effective Digital Content online course 

 

Earlier this year, our team worked with the Digital Skills team to develop a short webinar aimed at staff who support students. The goal was to help our colleagues understand how students can use MyEd to traverse our complex digital estate more effectively.

Why the webinar was needed

The primary need that this webinar fulfils is that staff generally aren’t able to see what a student sees in MyEd. MyEd personalises its content and layout depending on the user, so a staff member will have a completely different experience to a student. This is one of MyEd’s key features: students only see content which is relevant to students, and the same principle applies to staff and applicants. However, this does pose a challenge for support staff who need to know how a student can navigate MyEd to complete the tasks that matter to them.

This is something that support staff have fed back to us for some time, so it has been good to develop the webinar as a solution.

We developed the webinar with support staff in mind

When developing the webinar, we made sure that the session was as concise as possible. We settled on a run time of 30 minutes (20 minutes of content and 10 minutes of discussion) as we are aware of the many pulls on our support colleagues’ time.

When deciding on the content, we chose to focus on three elements:

• Explain in detail how the content and layout of MyEd differs between different user types
• Provide a walkthrough of the main tasks that students complete through MyEd
• Demonstrate how the Favourites function in MyEd can be used by students to highlight the items that are most important to them

The webinar needed additional support materials

While we thought that the short demonstration of the student view in MyEd was valuable, we expected that viewers were likely to want to take screenshots for their own personal reference. We thought that this would be undesirable, as such screenshots could become obsolete should the layout or content changed in the future.

For this reason, we decided to provide a set of up-to-date screenshots on the MyEd Support Hub and promote this during the webinar. Now support staff can reference this resource and be safe in the knowledge that the information is remains correct. This resource is available to everyone with a University of Edinburgh Office 365 login:

Student view of MyEd in the MyEd Support Hub

We are planning to continue these sessions in the new year

So far, we have delivered 5 sessions to 61 attendees. Feedback has been positive, with many attendees indicating that the new resource in the MyEd Support Hub was the most interesting part of the session.

We plan to continue to deliver these sessions in the new year. If you or someone you know is interested in attending one of these sessions, please feel free to contact me and I’ll make sure that you are informed when the next batch of sessions are scheduled.