Little things, big pressures #DURBBU – David Hopkins / Education & Leadership

There’s something quietly comfortable about reflecting on an event like last week’s DURBBU. Reflection and time away helps me gather my thoughts and collate what I heard, what I’ve read, who I spoke to, and what I think I remember into a post like this, one that reveals what we (the EdTech and HE community) are dealing with.

The Durham Blackboard User Conference (DURBBU) has always been a practical event (having attended a number of times in the past) shaped more by lived experience than by theory. This year’s theme, “Little things that make a big difference,” might sound modest on the surface, but over the course of the event, it became clear that those “little things” we talk about have a lot of heavy lifting to do.

What stood out wasn’t a single idea or innovation (there rarely is). It was a pattern across teams and institutions, a noticeable shift away from talking about systems or platforms in isolation, and toward something more grounded; how they operate in the day-to-day reality of teaching, learning, and the institutional/economic pressure.

There was a recurring sense that consistency has moved from aspiration to necessity. It’s not that universities have suddenly become more standardised in their approach, but because the student experience is now too important to pass over any longer – module templates, assessment approaches, different expectations, AI inclusion, etc. This accumulates into something that students feel, even if they can’t always articulate it. Several sessions circled this problem from different angles: templates, standardised workflows, programme-level thinking. Not as a means of control, but as a way of introducing a baseline that staff and students alike can rely on.

That idea of a baseline approach came up again and again, even when it wasn’t explicitly named, sitting beneath conversations about module templates, assessment design, accessibility, and even backend reporting or data analysis. There’s a growing recognition that if you want behaviour to change (staff and students) at scale, you can’t rely on guidance alone. You have to shape the environment people start from.

At the same time, there was an undercurrent of uncertainty, particularly around assessment. The presence of AI wasn’t always the headline, but it was there in the background of multiple sessions, quietly reshaping the questions being asked. If outputs can be generated using AI-enabled tools, what does it mean to ‘assess’ learning and is the value of the degree being undermined? The responses weren’t uniform, but they pointed in a similar direction: more emphasis on process, ‘personalisation’, development over time, and making thinking/learning visible rather than just measuring the end result. It felt less like experimentation and more like adaptation.

That distinction matters; these aren’t ideas being tested at the edges, they’re responses to pressure. Regulatory expectations, accessibility requirements, student feedback, and institutional risk, all of these are shaping decisions in ways that feel immediate and unavoidable.

That pressure also changes how institutions approach change itself. There was very little sense of large, multi-year transformation programmes with unlimited resource. Instead, the focus was on things that could be implemented, adapted, and scaled within real constraints, templates, checklists, defined workflows, reporting that actually gets used. Small, deliberate interventions that shift practice without requiring wholesale redesign.

In that sense, the “little things” framing felt less like a theme and more like a reality check. Not everything can be reimagined. Not everything can be rebuilt. But certain decisions (where structure sits, how expectations are communicated, what is made visible by default) have an impact.

Running through all of this was a more subtle shift in how the VLE itself is being understood. It’s no longer just a platform to support teaching. It’s (still) becoming part of the institutional fabric, tied into questions of quality, compliance, and student experience in ways that are harder to separate out. That brings with it a different kind of responsibility. Ownership becomes less clear if it isn’t defined. Standards become harder to maintain if they aren’t agreed. And decisions that once felt local start to carry wider implications.

None of this was particularly dramatic when taken in isolation. There were no grand declarations or radical departures. But taken together, it suggested a sector that is adjusting its focus. Less attention on what the tools can do, more on what the institution needs them to do and how consistently that can be achieved.

The take away for me is that higher education has not found an answer but we are starting to ask better, more qualifying questions. The answers, when they come, are unlikely to be found in the headline features of any particular platform or VLE. They will sit somewhere quieter, in the structure of a module, the clarity of an assessment, the way a system behaves before anyone has had to think about it, or in the community and culture we create around the technology to enable it to support our needs, rather than us supporting it.

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