The University of Bradford has long prided itself on being a collegiate institution at the forefront of leveraging technology to support and enhance learning. This makes its technology partnerships more crucial than ever, and this session highlights the journey of learning transformation with one of its core partners. Dr Nelson will overview the ongoing journey of transformation through video lecture capture, student engagement and highlighting on the importance of professional and practical skills assessment to prepare Bradford students for the working world.

There is a multitude of eLearning authoring & daily admin tools available. Each has its edge, the particular style of instructional design or administration it's been orientated towards. Some integrate with other systems, some don't, some are designed to be part of a suite of tools, some are independent and can be troublesome to mix with other applications.
If you wish to create scenario based learning, gamification or social/collaboration based learning amongst the numerous other eLearning projects formats potentially needed, finding one application to cover all formats becomes tremendously difficult. But as project goals change, what’s the combination of applications that might be needed to cover the necessary ground?

An ever-evolving application combination approach could be the only method to stay producing the best possible end projects. But this approach can be immensely time consuming even before approaching the project content itself, products are always launching, updating and then sunsetting. And as an added bonus AI was introduced to a multitude of tools in slightly different ways, each trying to add additional functionality and reduce the input needed in the project but often with unknown effects or potential downsides.

With over a decade of eLearning industry experience to draw upon Colin will lead this session to get the ball rolling towards support in this changing landscape, by looking at the currently most used eLearning content development tools, the AI aspects added to them and the agentic AI applications breaking into the market. But also blending analytical analysis and administration tools amongst others into a solid development process to help eLearning developers, administration and most importantly the end user through the end product.
This session will take the complexity out of eLearning creation by covering applications strengths, weaknesses, which combinations blend best together and gaps that might exist between applications. To see which combination can work best together to cover a multitude of different eLearning project types.

The global surge of short form media across social media accounts such as TikTok and Instagram reels is shown to attract increased engagement within higher education student cohorts with embedded algorithms continuously stimulating personal interest (Yang et al., 2025). Concurrently, one Irish university study revealed students share devices for both entertainment and online learning engagement purposes (Stone and Lowney, 2022). However, recent Irish higher education insight highlights a current resistance regarding self-regulated motivation and engagement towards blended learning activities (Kitching, 2024). Interestingly, such findings emerge in recent years in Europe, identifying significant mobile device distractions were identified impacting blended episodes, within the surge of digital distractors (Aivaz and Teodorescu, 2022). Similarly, developing discourse of short form media argues that short form entertainment poses compulsive distraction effects toward attentional engagement in learning (Yang et al., 2025). This prompts further investigation into students transitions into differing digital activities from the same screen, and how this can impact student experiences within online learning, with insights surrounding attentional engagement and learning effectiveness.

This paper will share a student study from a qualitative case study of undergraduate students within DCU surrounding multi-purpose of screens, short form media influence, and insight of a consensus of fellow student short form consumption towards the blended student engagement. The aim of this paper is to propose student centred feedback to identify a specified relationship between short form content with blended learning is to propose learning opportunities towards learning design in a new era of digital content engagement.

The Kemmy Business School Digital HUB at the University of Limerick is an award winning multimedia facility designed to support academic faculty in creating engaging, interactive and accessible multimedia resources for their courses.

The facility won the UL President's Staff Excellence Award in 2022 and has recently been nominated as a finalist for the National Awards in 2026.

The Digital HUB offers a range of video and web resources and adopts a unique support models in which academics visiting the HUB work alongside an experienced multimedia designer and are supported throughout the whole process of creating their digital resources along the way. The facility has been in continuous operation for over 3 years and has completed over 400 projects and counting.

The session is going to focus on sharing reflective insights into workflows, processes and staffing as well as examples of good practice and popular educational multimedia products on offer (video lectures, Podcast etc.) which will be particularily useful for instructional designers, learning technologists or IT professionals wishing to replicate the model and attempt to build or modify their existing multimedia facilities in order to scale video production at their own institution.