Skip to content
RMIT University Library - Learning Lab

Updates September - December 2022

 

Learning Lab contextualised content

Thanks to the hard work of Azadeh Mobasheri and Mik Efford these last few months, we have some wonderful updated content, tying in to the HEPPP funded Learning Lab contextualised content project.

Colour theory covers a long history from antiquity to modern times. It includes academic and scientific investigations into how we see and understand colour. It also includes practical applications for using colour in creative work. Dr Lisa Cianci has also written Colour Theory, an Open Education Resource on Pressbooks.

You may not be aware of it, but we all present information in different ways at different times. Maybe you give your close friends more details when telling a story, or explain an idea more slowly and with simpler examples when talking to a child. You might even switch languages or dialects when communicating with certain people in your life. Find out all about Understanding your audience

Interact with the new Risk Assessment Matrix. A risk matrix is a matrix that is used during risk assessment to define the level of risk by considering the category of probability or likelihood against the category of consequence severity. This is a simple mechanism to increase the visibility of risks and assist management decision making.

Depending on the course you are studying, you may be required to write essays, reports, and reflective writing tasks. Knowing the subtle differences between these three types of writing tasks can help you submit high-quality work and get good grades.

An annotated bibliography is a list of the information sources you have selected for your research topic (e.g. journal articles or book chapters) accompanied by comments (annotations) of how each item contributes to your research. It is presented in the format of a bibliography or reference list.

Accessibility improvements

Animated images within the Chemistry pages now have opt-in start and stop animation buttons for increased accessibility, meeting WCAG 2 guidelines at AAA level. When the images are not animating, all of the information is displayed.

Around 25 PDFs were replaced with Active Learning pages, enhancing their accessibility and metrics. The content was redeveloped into HTML as necessary and new H5P content was also developed for some of these pages. These resources include the Academic word lists.

We have implemented resizeable/responsive i-frames for content recently and will roll this out where appropriate.

Video transcripts throughout the site, which have until now been linked as separate RTF files, are all in the process of being converted to HTML for improved accessibility and usability.

Updated content

Recently updated tutorials include:

Reporting on 2022

Unique page views are up 3.64% from 2021 and the average time users spend on a page is up 17.54%. The bounce rate is down 5.43% from last year.

The future

For over ten years the Learning Lab been hosted on RMIT’s emedia server, running on Drupal, an open source platform. Updates to ensure the integrity and security of the platform have been applied over the years. For various reasons, the Learning Lab will be moving to a new server in 2023. Upgrading to a new version of Drupal would require significant modification so we're exploring an environment for the Learning Lab materials that will be as non-destructive as possible, ensure continuity of service and improve the user experience for users and editors.