In June I attended EUNIS’s (European University Information Systems) 2019 annual conference, held at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. I had been invited to take part in a plenary session to launch the UCISA VLE Toolkit (https://vle.ucisa.ac.uk/). VLEs have remained and continue to remain an integral part of teaching and learning and this toolkit was developed to help institutions that are considering reviewing their VLE. The toolkit is built on the experiences of institutions that have been through this process, including the University of Sheffield’s own VLE review. As a member of the project team that shaped the resource, we were aiming to help those institutions who want to evaluate their current use of the VLE or embark on a review. During this plenary session I was joined by Julie Voce (City, University of London) and Sally Jorjani (Edinburgh Napier University) both of whom were fellow contributors to the toolkit and were also part of the toolkit’s project team. We began the session by presenting on our experiences of carrying out reviews and then took part in a panel discussion, with questions fielded from our vibrant audience. The session was chaired by Gill Ferrell of Aspire Ltd, who conducted the interviews with the institutions and suppliers as part of the toolkit. All of our experiences of carrying out the reviews had different outcomes, Julie talked about how during her time at Imperial they decided to pilot two VLEs before deciding on the VLE that their institution wanted, whereas at Edinburgh Napier, Sally moved to an open source platform. At the University of Sheffield, we chose not to change VLE, rather we focused on enhancing the use of our existitng VLE to better support learning, teaching and our student experience.
The theme of the conference this year, focused on ‘Campuses for the future’ with a number of sessions focusing on the design and evaluation of active learning spaces. We were able to experience some of NTNU’s leading active learning spaces, including their redesigned tiered spaces which made use of technology to support collaboration, as well as their VR and AI labs. As an institution that is split across different cities, it was interesting to hear about the ways in which they were tackling teaching students based across different campuses simultaneously. Some of the sessions that were key highlights for me included:
The State of Digital Ethics in 2019: Excitement, Caution, and Hope By EDUCAUSE’s John O’Brien, exploring the (often masked) ethical entanglements that new educational technology innovation often brings with it. It was valuable to hear that EDUCAUSE had created a CIO’s Commitment on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (which many institutions have signed up to): https://www.educause.edu/about/cio-commitment …
Letting Students Design their Own Dashboards - Learning Analytics from a Student’s Perspective, Alena Droit, Bodo Rieger (Universität Osnabrück)
The approach involved students leading on the development of a learning analytics system, ensuring that they created a product that would offer value to students. The session was awarded best paper at the event.
Putting learning at the forefront of everything: Active Blended Learning as Northampton’s new normal, by Professor Alejandro Armellini. Alejandro shared Northampton’s approach to moving away from lecture theatres to spaces that support active blended learning. It was interesting to note their approach to move away from ‘wired devices’ (e.g. lecturn PCs) to a wireless BYOD approach. Thinking towards the future, he has adapted Gilly Salmon’s model to consider what Education 4.0 will look like. As we design spaces for the future it is important for us to consider how the learning that takes place now will change, rather than creating space that meets current demands.
- CAIeRO, Northampton's approach to course design http://northampton.ac.uk/ilt
Links to most of the presentations delivered at the conference can be found here:
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