ALTO: Active Learning and Teaching Online

ALTO: Active Learning and Teaching Online

The Education Team (formerly CLIPP) is pleased to launch ALTO: a series of professional development sessions and training events designed to help you develop and deliver high-quality, flexible online and blended learning to our students as part of the ‘Aston Approach’.

The three sessions were delivered live in June and July, and recordings are now available for self-access (see details below).

They provide a solid, evidence-based foundation for your plans for academic delivery from 2020/21 through the introduction and exploration of key principles and themes, challenges and practical suggestions for your practice.

Further sessions and resources continue to be developed as part of the ALTO programme.  These cover specific learning technology tools and educational approaches – see the Practical Guides to Learning Technologies area of the ALTO Blackboard and the TEL Handbook.

The links below detail how to access the recordings and online resources, and will be updated to include details and dates for further live sessions if these are required.

Adapting your modules for online and blended learning

Designing learning events for the online environment

Designing effective online assessments 

Accessing the ALTO sessions and resources

All sessions were delivered as webinars using Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, accessed via the ALTO Blackboard course. All staff have been automatically enrolled in this course, so you should see it listed under My Courses when you log in to Blackboard.

The recordings and other self-access resources are available in the ALTO Blackboard course.

ALTO Blackboard course menu choices

If you can’t see the ALTO course listed, take a look at this help page.

We strongly recommend that you use an up-to-date version of the Google Chrome or Edge browsers. Firefox and Safari should work OK, but Internet Explorer will not.

If you are using a work (managed) laptop, you can download and install Chrome by following these instructions on Solve. You’ll need to connect to Aston via the VPN first.