ThingLink Spotlight! Lighting Up Immersive Learning with Beth Derbyshire

Louise Jones April 29, 2025

ThingLink Luminaries is a series of guest blog posts highlighting certified trainers who are creating interactive and immersive experiences to make learning more engaging, accessible, and meaningful. Our educators and learning designers bring a thoughtful approach to immersive learning, and their work reflects a deep commitment to creativity, pedagogy, and innovation.

In each profile post, we’ll explore their background, teaching philosophy, and favorite ThingLink projects—offering insight into how they’re making a lasting impact in their classrooms, organizations and communities! Enjoy!

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Introducing Beth

I am a Learning Technologist at University of Salford in the Learning Teaching Enhancement Centre. I am an experienced teacher with a passion for learning technology. After many years in further education I now develop academics to improve learning and teaching using technology.

Beth’s ThingLink Project

This is an e-learning course I have developed using ThingLink. The course is ‘Introduction to University Teaching’, and runs as an in person session for new lecturers at the university. I decided to create an e-learning version of the course with the hope that this would make the course more accessible for those that couldn’t make the in person sessions. This is a short demonstration of the course.

What inspired you to create this project?

This project was created to initially show what ThingLink can do as a platform and to give academics an idea to create their own. I also thought that an e-learning course would make learning more accessible for students to attend. The e-learning course allows learners to work through it in their own time and at their own pace. ThingLink offers a great platform which has given us in the department a really easy way to develop e-learning course materials and the course is proving very popular.

How was it experienced?

We have had a lot of positive comments from the first users of the course. They have liked that they are able to do this course in their own pace and have enjoyed the resources. Staff in our department have found it useful to guide learners to the information. For those that have taken the in-person course, it has also been beneficial for them to dip into the e-learning course if they had to miss a session. This has also been great to support staff delivering the programme.