Tuesday, 13 December 2011
Group blogs
The Business School are running a Marketing and Social Influencing module, in which students will work in teams. The team membership is based on results of a personality test. The idea is to to ensure the group has a good mix of skills and approaches to teamwork.
In the computer lab session this week, we asked appointed group-leaders to create a 'sign up' group in Blackboard.
The other team members were then asked to enrol in the Group. The team can now use the group blog to introduce themselves before renaming it themselves and possibly customising it with an image or link to a YouTube video.
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Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Online Educational Alternative Courses
Middlesex University online hands on developmental courses.
challenge: Teachers ask to teach online with no experience as students online.
The University is looking to move to 100% online essay submission. This is a challenge with the resources available.
The team decided to take an online approach. The 3 week course, taken as a group by programme teams, hangs on discussion boards, self-study skills and scheduled online meetings. They compare traditional approaches to online approaches. Interactive video tutorials used to get participants to interact. Staff are asked to compare online and traditional approaches. They discuss benefits and limitations of the various approaches and engage with the technologies as a student and member of staff. For example for Turnitin, they both submit assignments as students and set them up and mark as staff. They are then asked to evaluate through an online survey.
The approach appeared to take out the fear of the unknown. It helped to share and agree on approaches. Time is still an issue for staff. One lesson was to ask staff when the best times are. Terminology is also a barrier potentially. Many staff still want to print and then undertake the activity.
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challenge: Teachers ask to teach online with no experience as students online.
The University is looking to move to 100% online essay submission. This is a challenge with the resources available.
The team decided to take an online approach. The 3 week course, taken as a group by programme teams, hangs on discussion boards, self-study skills and scheduled online meetings. They compare traditional approaches to online approaches. Interactive video tutorials used to get participants to interact. Staff are asked to compare online and traditional approaches. They discuss benefits and limitations of the various approaches and engage with the technologies as a student and member of staff. For example for Turnitin, they both submit assignments as students and set them up and mark as staff. They are then asked to evaluate through an online survey.
The approach appeared to take out the fear of the unknown. It helped to share and agree on approaches. Time is still an issue for staff. One lesson was to ask staff when the best times are. Terminology is also a barrier potentially. Many staff still want to print and then undertake the activity.
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Adaptation for Adoption - changing modes of staff development
The Emphasis for the training offered by the blended learning unit registered to an issue rather than technology approach and as part of a wider curriculum design to blend graduate skills into existing teaching. Each team member supports a School. They abandoned this model and looked instead to work with each School in turn for a time period. This improved things as a wider range of expertise became available to the school. This sustained effort helped to make blended Learning better embedded.
The team sought management buy in which helped to get staff to attend. A blended learning week of flexible sessions allowed for small and large groups to attend. There are now school targets, and roles on relation to learning.
One year in, the School held a festival. The whole University and partner Universities attended this showcase.
The team sought management buy in which helped to get staff to attend. A blended learning week of flexible sessions allowed for small and large groups to attend. There are now school targets, and roles on relation to learning.
One year in, the School held a festival. The whole University and partner Universities attended this showcase.
Paul Lowe , the learning studio
Inspired by BarCamp (a geeky but fun idea) for conferences with no previously agrees agenda. People post sessions they want to run and people turn up to the sessions they want to.
Paul uses communities of practice at the core of his ideas. Paul has worked with Etienne Wenger on creating these informal opportunities for learning. Paul asks how we can use these informal gatherings to share knowledge eg staff peer to peer learning. Experts can aid the cross fertilisation. Paul wants a playful fun space for group problem solving. This is organic and grassroots.
The sessions are very informal in structure where people can come and go as they please. The work is spread out over several institutions. Catering much more low key - everyone brings something to eat (sometimes cooks it). Some sessions are hands-on, some more presentation and discussion focused. For the first session, they used a flip cam to film the process for decorating cupcakes. Some sessions used an online presenter.
The attendees and activities have been varied with 10-30 attendees. It unlocked an made visible lots of things that were going on.
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Paul uses communities of practice at the core of his ideas. Paul has worked with Etienne Wenger on creating these informal opportunities for learning. Paul asks how we can use these informal gatherings to share knowledge eg staff peer to peer learning. Experts can aid the cross fertilisation. Paul wants a playful fun space for group problem solving. This is organic and grassroots.
The sessions are very informal in structure where people can come and go as they please. The work is spread out over several institutions. Catering much more low key - everyone brings something to eat (sometimes cooks it). Some sessions are hands-on, some more presentation and discussion focused. For the first session, they used a flip cam to film the process for decorating cupcakes. Some sessions used an online presenter.
The attendees and activities have been varied with 10-30 attendees. It unlocked an made visible lots of things that were going on.
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TLC programme Henny Yipp Ini Saldord
Flexible bite-sized learning by and for staff.
Henny's unit supports both certificated programme and the open workshop programme. The issue faced with the latter is the time commitment for attending 3 hour sessions.
They are now developing a more blended approach, adopting elements of the PGCAP for others to take flexibly. They already delivered synchronous online sessions (webinars) through Eluminate for the PGCAP, so they opened these to the university. Each session is an hour long. There were both face to face and online sessions facilitated but presented by the academics concerned. They were also recorded and made available. Some online sessions were delivered in the evenings.
For example, one session on Open Learning was delivered by the VC one evening. The structure was presentation and then online disussion.
The online sessions (even in the evening) was better attended than face to face. Tech support was an issue.
More and more organisations are moving to webinars approaches. International speakers also become a possibility. Bog names can participate with less time commitment and can be a big draw. One audience member pointed out that it is easier to do the why, rather than the 'how to'.
They have now dropped the evening seminars, aiming for Wednesday lunchtimes. They are looking at Big Blue Button as an alternative to Eluminate.
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Henny's unit supports both certificated programme and the open workshop programme. The issue faced with the latter is the time commitment for attending 3 hour sessions.
They are now developing a more blended approach, adopting elements of the PGCAP for others to take flexibly. They already delivered synchronous online sessions (webinars) through Eluminate for the PGCAP, so they opened these to the university. Each session is an hour long. There were both face to face and online sessions facilitated but presented by the academics concerned. They were also recorded and made available. Some online sessions were delivered in the evenings.
For example, one session on Open Learning was delivered by the VC one evening. The structure was presentation and then online disussion.
The online sessions (even in the evening) was better attended than face to face. Tech support was an issue.
More and more organisations are moving to webinars approaches. International speakers also become a possibility. Bog names can participate with less time commitment and can be a big draw. One audience member pointed out that it is easier to do the why, rather than the 'how to'.
They have now dropped the evening seminars, aiming for Wednesday lunchtimes. They are looking at Big Blue Button as an alternative to Eluminate.
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Aberystwyth University - Synergy in action
Mary Jacob
This second session o the Engaging Hearts and Minds conference highlighted collaboration between the team that deliver the required teaching and learning professional development and the learning technologies team. As part of the certificate on academic practice, staff introduce a learning innovation into their teaching. They write up and evaluate the intervention. 20% of these are about learning technologies. This is supported by good practice websites (must google Nexus website later) mini -conferences (part of the certificate) and other follow up events.
Peer voice, as we know, is more influential than specialist voice when it comes to staff development. This approach is employed heavily through the certificate case studies and the examples that come out of the certificate. This is made possible through this integration/ collaboration of/with the certificate teaching team and the
learning technologies team.
The case studies website is hosted on x-wiki (not sure on spelling) which seems very customisable seemingly allowing sorting and tagging. This might be worth exploring.
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This second session o the Engaging Hearts and Minds conference highlighted collaboration between the team that deliver the required teaching and learning professional development and the learning technologies team. As part of the certificate on academic practice, staff introduce a learning innovation into their teaching. They write up and evaluate the intervention. 20% of these are about learning technologies. This is supported by good practice websites (must google Nexus website later) mini -conferences (part of the certificate) and other follow up events.
Peer voice, as we know, is more influential than specialist voice when it comes to staff development. This approach is employed heavily through the certificate case studies and the examples that come out of the certificate. This is made possible through this integration/ collaboration of/with the certificate teaching team and the
learning technologies team.
The case studies website is hosted on x-wiki (not sure on spelling) which seems very customisable seemingly allowing sorting and tagging. This might be worth exploring.
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Engaging hearts and minds event, Salford DIT Summer School
Elearning summer school, Dublin Institute of Technology, Frances Boylen.
Delayed trains and errant taxi drivers caused us to miss the start of this talk. The Summer School offered to staff at DIT sounded (and from the videos looked) like an excellent week-long event at which staff could try out and discuss a wide range of approaches and technologies. It really is run like a week long conference, with one or two keynote sessions and even a dinner. Around 50 attendees from institutions in the region participate, many returning year on year. The activities are workshop based including everything from the centrally supported tools like clickers, web 2 tools (eg prezi) to social networking tools (YouTube and facebook).
We ran an elearning summer school at Bristol University successfully when I worked there. When I have suggested it I'm subsequent institutions, there were concerns about potential levels of attendance. I do think it would have to be very high standard to engage staff at that time of year. At Newcastle, we already run sessions as part of the Teaching and Learning week events. It would beinteresting to talk with other members of (NELE) To talk about how we could combine resources for something like this.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Delayed trains and errant taxi drivers caused us to miss the start of this talk. The Summer School offered to staff at DIT sounded (and from the videos looked) like an excellent week-long event at which staff could try out and discuss a wide range of approaches and technologies. It really is run like a week long conference, with one or two keynote sessions and even a dinner. Around 50 attendees from institutions in the region participate, many returning year on year. The activities are workshop based including everything from the centrally supported tools like clickers, web 2 tools (eg prezi) to social networking tools (YouTube and facebook).
We ran an elearning summer school at Bristol University successfully when I worked there. When I have suggested it I'm subsequent institutions, there were concerns about potential levels of attendance. I do think it would have to be very high standard to engage staff at that time of year. At Newcastle, we already run sessions as part of the Teaching and Learning week events. It would beinteresting to talk with other members of (NELE) To talk about how we could combine resources for something like this.
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Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Group assignments
It is possible in Blackboard to set up an assignment for a group so that only one member of the group submits the work. All group members can see the work. A grade given by the instructor will apply to all group members. A teaching team in INTO Newcastle are looking at doing this for an assessment at the moment. Ideally, they would like the assignments to go into Turnitn for Plagiarism checking. They will have to batch download the assignments and then batch upload to Turnitin.
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- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Minitab Mini-testing
A lecturer in Biology teaches students to use the statistical software package 'Minitab'. He is using a Blackboard quiz a mechanism to mark their work in the computer lab and give them some feedback.
Students download a Minitab file from Blackboard, carry out tests on the data it contains and enter answers into the Blackboard quiz which marks their answers.
For the first iteration a manual check of the answers and rescoring has been necessary, but the answers can be improved upon in future iterations. Once the scores have been checked, the marks, and even the feedback be released to students. The Minitab file can be amended and the quiz slightly adjusted to produce a new test.
The final exam will include an extended version of this exercise.
Students download a Minitab file from Blackboard, carry out tests on the data it contains and enter answers into the Blackboard quiz which marks their answers.
For the first iteration a manual check of the answers and rescoring has been necessary, but the answers can be improved upon in future iterations. Once the scores have been checked, the marks, and even the feedback be released to students. The Minitab file can be amended and the quiz slightly adjusted to produce a new test.
The final exam will include an extended version of this exercise.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Online exams
The Newcastle Dental School are building banks of tagged multiple choice questions in Blackboard. This will allow them to build exams by searching the question database by categories such as difficulty level and topic. They can, for example, find 3 easy questions on tooth morphology, and then two harder questions. They can then move on to the next topic and add questions until they have an exam that covers the curriculum with a balance of questions. They will use post-exam reports to iteratively refine questions and their categorisation to improve the database each year.
In addition to this work on MCQ questions, they are considering building banks of short answer (typed answer) questions. Whilst they cannot be marked automatically, they can be tagged and reused. Blackboard now allows you to anonymously mark by question. In other words, they can mark question 1 for each student, before marking question 2 for each student and so on. This marking can be split so that for example ,individual lecturers only mark the questions they set. Together with the improved legibility of typed answers, this may make the onscreen marking worthwhile.
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In addition to this work on MCQ questions, they are considering building banks of short answer (typed answer) questions. Whilst they cannot be marked automatically, they can be tagged and reused. Blackboard now allows you to anonymously mark by question. In other words, they can mark question 1 for each student, before marking question 2 for each student and so on. This marking can be split so that for example ,individual lecturers only mark the questions they set. Together with the improved legibility of typed answers, this may make the onscreen marking worthwhile.
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Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Herding cats
A member in staff is facing a challenge: He is offering an optional course in research methods to students across the Health and Social Sciences Facutly. There are potentially 4000 students who might be interested, but the room only holds 100 people.
The Solution: Using the Blackboard Group signup feature, the academic will initially offer two sessions with 100 pleaces booked on a first come first served basis. There is a third group acting as a waiting list. If there is enough additional demand, further sessions can be organised.
The Solution: Using the Blackboard Group signup feature, the academic will initially offer two sessions with 100 pleaces booked on a first come first served basis. There is a third group acting as a waiting list. If there is enough additional demand, further sessions can be organised.
Blooming blogs
We are working with a member of staff from INTO who is asking students to reflect on their learning through a blog in Blackboard. They are also completing a learning matrix in Excel each week which asks them to self-assess against Blooms taxonomy for different areas of their learning. This matrix will help them to reflect on their learning.
The Matrices will be submitted to an assignment in Blackboard during weekly lab sessions. The plan is to layer the matrices for each student to show changes and development over time. Students will be encouraged to reflect in the blog using their mobiles at the end of classroom sessions.
The Matrices will be submitted to an assignment in Blackboard during weekly lab sessions. The plan is to layer the matrices for each student to show changes and development over time. Students will be encouraged to reflect in the blog using their mobiles at the end of classroom sessions.
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