I was asked to deliver two Bite Size sessions, well it's been a while, on Google Apps. The first one was delivered for the Faculty of Medicine and was really well attended by about 60 staff and PGRs. Then I delivered the same session as part of the University's Thirty30 staff development festival in November.
It also coincided with ScHARR Bite Size's fifth birthday, it's great to see the series of short, innovative sessions still running and well past its century of talks that have covered everything from copyright to research impact. The latest session was captured and can be viewed here. If you think you're getting the most from your Google Apps, think again, there might be a few tweaks you can apply.
Tuesday 22 December 2015
Wednesday 16 December 2015
How Learners on an English Literature MOOC Prompted Academics to Engage in Social Media in a Way They Had Never Before
On 18 December 2015, Sheffield Hallam University hosted its inaugural Social Media in Higher Education Conference. Ahead of that event, Layla Croll and the University of Sheffield’s Online Learning Team took over the School of English blog for a very special one-off post to discuss the surprising role that social media played in the delivery of our Literature of the English Country House MOOC.
For this post, the University’s Online Learning Team joined academics from the School of English to reflect on how social media enabled a rich exchange between educators and learners on a massive open online course, not only engaging them with research but also enhancing the teaching and learning experience in a bespoke and reactive way. The course was entitled ‘Literature of the English Country House’ and took learners on a free, online learning journey through English Literature, analysing and close reading texts by studying and reflecting on their historical and cultural contexts.
This blog post was written in lieu of a face-to-face session during the conference, as seemed appropriate given our subject matter. The Online Learning Team encourages the design and use of digital content across our institution as an accessible and dynamic platform for discussion, and the sharing of views and learning materials. In this post, we hope to convey how we reacted to an unprecedented amount of additional requests from learners, posted via discussion boards, for more and more material during the course. So, with this in mind, should you wish to look deeper into the subject, there are plenty of resources and links to engage with further.
Below, Dr Adam James Smith, co-lead educator on the course, Honorary Research Fellow for the University’s interdisciplinary Centre for Archival Practices and Teaching Associate in the School of English recounts his surprising experiences of how social media came to play such a significant part in the course’s delivery, and the experience of learners and educators alike.
For the literature of the coffee house we used a collection of essays from Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s influential periodical The Spectator, prompting both Lead-Educator Professor Susan Fitzmaurice and myself to reflect on our own previous work on Joseph Addison and think about the best ways to translate this research in such a way as to support the MOOC’s vast, international audience of participants with varying levels of familiarity with both the eighteenth century more generally and Joseph Addison in particular.
One of the most active steps during this week of the course was one which featured a short, abstract video based on research, designed to encourage viewers to reflect on the remarkable similarities between representations of the coffee house in eighteenth-century print culture and the way that it is still marketed today on the urban high street.
The film, which was a collaboration with local filmmaker Gemma Thorpe, had previously been developed and released on Youtube. By incorporating it into the course we not only opened it up to a new audience, but an audience happy to provide vast amounts of feedback; asking new and extraordinary questions. [Due to data protection, we can’t show learner comments. On Adam’s ‘Coffee House’ video step, we had 544 comments from learners some of which Adam highlights below.]
These questions often seemed obvious to learners. However, in approaching the topic from a radically different angle learners were being struck by question that had never occurred to me, such as: why exactly was Addison’s private club known as the Kit-Kat Club? This process prompted new lines of inquiry generated by the same kind of lateral thinking commonly stimulated by the crowdsourcing of information. The feedback has had a direct effect on the composition of a book proposal that I am writing, and will inform subsequent public engagement activities that I organise on the subject of Addison and eighteenth-century print culture.
The discussion-based nature of the activities featured on the MOOC also meant that conversations could evolve in ways not predicted by the teaching team. Learners could pursue their own lines of inquiry. One such pursuit saw learners troubling the arbitrary and fluid meaning of the word ‘polite’ across the eighteenth century, prompting Professor Susan Fitzmaurice to write a post for the course’s companion blog mapping this semantic evolution, before posting the link to learners. The post was based on a published article that Susan had written several years previously. The blog enabled Susan to answer questions occurring on the platform more fully than she ever could in a comment, whilst also preparing something for an audience that actually went beyond the platform itself. Again, this also meant that Susan could quickly amass vast amounts of feedback from learners as they commented on it. Significantly, this was also the first time Susan had ever even considered writing a blog post.
Finally Susan and I delivered a live 50 minute ‘Google Hangout’ [when you follow this link click on the square icons in the top right of the video to navigate through the different questions asked] in which we answered learner’s questions in real time. The broadcast captures real free-flowing discussion, replicating the perfect conditions of a university seminar.
Though the broadcast was about country houses, coffee houses and politeness in the eighteenth century, I was especially pleased when learners began asking questions about Addison’s other publications, enabling a discussion of a lesser known periodical, The Freeholder: the primary subject of my doctoral research. The Freeholder was last published in a critical edition in 1979, a sign of its neglect by publishers and academics alike. As a result, it is rare that I get the opportunity to discuss The Freeholder at such length, let alone with such a broad and interested audience. Though the activity was designed to teach learners, I gained much from their fresh respective and once again lines of enquiry raised by learners have had a direct influence on the book proposal I am currently drafting.
Like Susan’s post on politeness, the recording of the hangout was published on the companion blog and went onto be circulated on Twitter, transcending its initial audience on the MOOC to get almost 1000 additional views. The video itself has prompted online discussion, and we were both valued the response and feedback that it has received across the platform, the blog and on Twitter.
Dr Adam James Smith, School of English, The University of Sheffield
Adam’s experience highlights some of the surprising ways in which social media and social learning enriches the kind of online learning that we can create with MOOCs.
It’s important to note, too, that as well as academics creating online spaces to provide more materials, learners also formed separate online communities of their own in order to discuss the topics and to share their knowledge and passion for the subjects. These formed as separate blogs, on twitter and within the FutureLearn platform itself. A group of heavily engaged learners formed their own community, the self-titled ‘Coach Party’. These learners would camp out within a chosen step of the course (such as a video they particularly enjoyed) and have their own discussions. They share opinions and links, discuss aspects of the courses they are taking together and choose which MOOCs to take next. The Coach Party continues to travel together through various courses on the FutureLearn platform.
The way that this particular course embraced crowdsourced information-sharing now influences our course design and is an integral part of how we engage with our learners and how we prompt them to engage with each other. It also gives us a chance to respond to common questions raised and to help where learners are having difficulty. By following the twitter conversations and reading through comments to find common themes, we were able to record an ‘end of week’ video each week in which we answered some common questions that were cropping up amongst the learning communities. These videos were often described by the learners as being like the chat you might have with the lecturer after the lecture has finished.
For this post, the University’s Online Learning Team joined academics from the School of English to reflect on how social media enabled a rich exchange between educators and learners on a massive open online course, not only engaging them with research but also enhancing the teaching and learning experience in a bespoke and reactive way. The course was entitled ‘Literature of the English Country House’ and took learners on a free, online learning journey through English Literature, analysing and close reading texts by studying and reflecting on their historical and cultural contexts.
This blog post was written in lieu of a face-to-face session during the conference, as seemed appropriate given our subject matter. The Online Learning Team encourages the design and use of digital content across our institution as an accessible and dynamic platform for discussion, and the sharing of views and learning materials. In this post, we hope to convey how we reacted to an unprecedented amount of additional requests from learners, posted via discussion boards, for more and more material during the course. So, with this in mind, should you wish to look deeper into the subject, there are plenty of resources and links to engage with further.
Below, Dr Adam James Smith, co-lead educator on the course, Honorary Research Fellow for the University’s interdisciplinary Centre for Archival Practices and Teaching Associate in the School of English recounts his surprising experiences of how social media came to play such a significant part in the course’s delivery, and the experience of learners and educators alike.
Case-Study: The use of social media to support the Literature of the English Country House Massive Open Online Course, University of Sheffield
In its third week, Literature of the English Country House required learners to consider the relationship between rural country houses and urban sociability, primarily represented on the course by the figure of the coffee house. Learners were encouraged to trace the transmission of ideas, manner and fashions in and out of country house environments by close reading literature written in both the country and the city, identifying influences, challenges and dialogues across a carefully selected range of texts.For the literature of the coffee house we used a collection of essays from Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s influential periodical The Spectator, prompting both Lead-Educator Professor Susan Fitzmaurice and myself to reflect on our own previous work on Joseph Addison and think about the best ways to translate this research in such a way as to support the MOOC’s vast, international audience of participants with varying levels of familiarity with both the eighteenth century more generally and Joseph Addison in particular.
One of the most active steps during this week of the course was one which featured a short, abstract video based on research, designed to encourage viewers to reflect on the remarkable similarities between representations of the coffee house in eighteenth-century print culture and the way that it is still marketed today on the urban high street.
The film, which was a collaboration with local filmmaker Gemma Thorpe, had previously been developed and released on Youtube. By incorporating it into the course we not only opened it up to a new audience, but an audience happy to provide vast amounts of feedback; asking new and extraordinary questions. [Due to data protection, we can’t show learner comments. On Adam’s ‘Coffee House’ video step, we had 544 comments from learners some of which Adam highlights below.]
These questions often seemed obvious to learners. However, in approaching the topic from a radically different angle learners were being struck by question that had never occurred to me, such as: why exactly was Addison’s private club known as the Kit-Kat Club? This process prompted new lines of inquiry generated by the same kind of lateral thinking commonly stimulated by the crowdsourcing of information. The feedback has had a direct effect on the composition of a book proposal that I am writing, and will inform subsequent public engagement activities that I organise on the subject of Addison and eighteenth-century print culture.
The discussion-based nature of the activities featured on the MOOC also meant that conversations could evolve in ways not predicted by the teaching team. Learners could pursue their own lines of inquiry. One such pursuit saw learners troubling the arbitrary and fluid meaning of the word ‘polite’ across the eighteenth century, prompting Professor Susan Fitzmaurice to write a post for the course’s companion blog mapping this semantic evolution, before posting the link to learners. The post was based on a published article that Susan had written several years previously. The blog enabled Susan to answer questions occurring on the platform more fully than she ever could in a comment, whilst also preparing something for an audience that actually went beyond the platform itself. Again, this also meant that Susan could quickly amass vast amounts of feedback from learners as they commented on it. Significantly, this was also the first time Susan had ever even considered writing a blog post.
Finally Susan and I delivered a live 50 minute ‘Google Hangout’ [when you follow this link click on the square icons in the top right of the video to navigate through the different questions asked] in which we answered learner’s questions in real time. The broadcast captures real free-flowing discussion, replicating the perfect conditions of a university seminar.
Though the broadcast was about country houses, coffee houses and politeness in the eighteenth century, I was especially pleased when learners began asking questions about Addison’s other publications, enabling a discussion of a lesser known periodical, The Freeholder: the primary subject of my doctoral research. The Freeholder was last published in a critical edition in 1979, a sign of its neglect by publishers and academics alike. As a result, it is rare that I get the opportunity to discuss The Freeholder at such length, let alone with such a broad and interested audience. Though the activity was designed to teach learners, I gained much from their fresh respective and once again lines of enquiry raised by learners have had a direct influence on the book proposal I am currently drafting.
Like Susan’s post on politeness, the recording of the hangout was published on the companion blog and went onto be circulated on Twitter, transcending its initial audience on the MOOC to get almost 1000 additional views. The video itself has prompted online discussion, and we were both valued the response and feedback that it has received across the platform, the blog and on Twitter.
Dr Adam James Smith, School of English, The University of Sheffield
Adam’s experience highlights some of the surprising ways in which social media and social learning enriches the kind of online learning that we can create with MOOCs.
It’s important to note, too, that as well as academics creating online spaces to provide more materials, learners also formed separate online communities of their own in order to discuss the topics and to share their knowledge and passion for the subjects. These formed as separate blogs, on twitter and within the FutureLearn platform itself. A group of heavily engaged learners formed their own community, the self-titled ‘Coach Party’. These learners would camp out within a chosen step of the course (such as a video they particularly enjoyed) and have their own discussions. They share opinions and links, discuss aspects of the courses they are taking together and choose which MOOCs to take next. The Coach Party continues to travel together through various courses on the FutureLearn platform.
The way that this particular course embraced crowdsourced information-sharing now influences our course design and is an integral part of how we engage with our learners and how we prompt them to engage with each other. It also gives us a chance to respond to common questions raised and to help where learners are having difficulty. By following the twitter conversations and reading through comments to find common themes, we were able to record an ‘end of week’ video each week in which we answered some common questions that were cropping up amongst the learning communities. These videos were often described by the learners as being like the chat you might have with the lecturer after the lecture has finished.
Monday 16 November 2015
The Jisc pilot group on Electronic Management of Assessment (EMA)
I was kindly invited by Jisc to their EMA pilot group in Central London on the 27th October, in a building set just a smidge back from the river Thames.
Photo Credit: zell0ss CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The aims of this meeting were (to quote the agenda!):
- To evaluate and improve the alpha version of the self-assessment tool
- To evaluate the generic process model and agree how to present the model and system requirements
- To agree actions for pilot institutions and support from Jisc
- To share updates on related projects/activities
We began with each Institution giving an overview of where they are in terms of their Institution level EMA Journey. At Sheffield we now have fairly widespread use of EMA and it has been driven at “grassroots” level by departments looking to achieve a consistent, efficient and modern assessment experience for students. This departmental drive means that, although there are common EMA themes (e.g. anonymous and double blind marking), departments can tailor the technologies to their departmental processes. Our two main technologies that deliver EMA are Blackboard and Turnitin.
We then split into two groups to discuss an EMA self - assessment tool. This tool, which comprised a series of radio button multiple choice questions, was split into a number of different sections or themes. These themes were titled: Strategy/Policy, Curriculum data, Processes and working practices, culture and the student experience. Once the form was filled in the answers would score you into 5 different levels from Exploring to Pioneering.
My group felt that the form should be made available at Institution level but also as a separate or tailored form for Faculty and/or Departmental distribution. We thought it would be of the most use if there were some kind of user “dashboard” which would allow you to control the kinds of questions that would be displayed.
Finally we reviewed a workflow model for assessment and feedback that has gone through a number of iterations already. There was a split between views on the level of detail that should be presented. On the one hand you might want a lot of detail in order to fully capture the variety of processes that Institutions have. On the other keeping it at a high level would avoid it being too complex and therefore difficult to use.
Finally we were given some updates on the related projects including the proposed feedback hub. I then had to depart quickly in order to catch my train. It was great to hear from other Institutions on how they are progressing with EMA as well as having an early look at some of the great work Jisc is doing to help us on our way!
For more information on EMA have a look at the Jisc EMA blog
Tuesday 10 November 2015
Free course on Measuring and Valuing Health (PROMS and QALYs)
The University of Sheffield has developed a number of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) over the last 2 years, delivered via the FutureLearn platform. These free to take online courses are varied and draw on expertise from academic and research staff at the University. Courses are varied and have included: 'Discovering Dentisry' and 'Crime, Justice and Society', you can see a complete list of courses that the University has delivered here: https://www.futurelearn.com/partners/the-university-of-sheffield
Back due to popular demand, the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) will be re-running their 3 week free MOOC on Measuring and Valuing Health on the 23rd November 2015.
If you missed it last time, you can sign up to it now. There will be lots of great interactive learning and the chance to debate some of the key issues with experts in the field.
This free online course will introduce you to health outcomes and explain how they can be measured and valued, to make more informed decisions about where to spend our limited healthcare budgets.
The time commitment is approximately 3 hours per week. The content is divided into small bite sized pieces that can be done at your leisure to fit around other commitments.
Watch the trailer, find further details and sign up here https://www.futurelearn.com/
Or have a sneak peek at this video which shows you what is covered in week 1
We hope to see you on the course
#FLValuingHealth
Wednesday 28 October 2015
5 Must-Have Peripherals for your Tablet Device
There are an increasing array of mobile apps and technologies that learning technologists, teachers and academics can use within the institution. Added to that are a growing number of peripherals that can be employed to make teaching and content production an easier process. In this blog post we look at five that you should take note of. The five pieces of tech below are not necessarily the best ones for each task, but are ones I have employed personally with my iPad. There may be cheaper and better options available out there should you wish to explore further.
Be louder
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| CC BY NC ND 2.0 Gibbyll http://bit.ly/1kRw3Rs |
There are various models and all allow users to chain link multiple ones together to increase the sound output. Many give an output in the region of 2kw, which can be built upon with more speakers. For a small to mid-sized seminar lecture room they give enough audio to ensure you won’t be put off playing videos in your class ever again. You can get a pair of good quality x-mini speakers for about £15.
Stand Tall
When trying to capture any content, whether it be yourself in front of your tablet camera, or using it as a reading device you are often limited as to where you can prop your device. Even doing something like relaying your teaching over the web using Twitter video conferencing tools like Periscope or Meerkat it can be quite tough. This can be negated by buying a tablet stand, which looks not too dissimilar from your typical music stand. The Ezi-Tech Music Stand Mount, priced around the £30 mark is a good one which works with Apple and Samsung devices. It allows the user to free up their hands to hold a paper, or maintains a consistency when trying to record a piece to camera, whether that be video or just audio.
Be Heard
Tablets have come on a long way from the first wave of smart devices from a few years ago. One thing they have improved on is audio capture and recording, yet there is always room for improvement. Often sound can be the most important aspect of a digital artefact, as users may want to only hear what you are saying rather than watch. Content can be stripped down to a podcast, so good quality audio is essential. Using a USB microphone can help improve on your audio capture and can give a richness of sound when it lacks. A good series of microphones is the Rode USB, which comes with a tripod stand and pop shield. It works with Windows and Mac OS and connects, as you would suspect from its name, via USB. It is important to note that iPad users would require an Apple adaptor cable for the USB which costs about £25 http://amzn.to/1OKFcYo. The mic, which is powered by the tablet device, costs somewhere in the region of £100 upwards http://www.rode.com/microphones/nt-usb
Project Yourself
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| CC BY 2.0 Paul Hudson http://bit.ly/1kRvsiD |
Be Seen
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| CC BY 2.0 Dave Taylor http://bit.ly/1kRuvH8 |
Tuesday 29 September 2015
TELFest 2015 Leaderboard
During September 2015's TELFest (a week long festival consisting of workshops, discussions and drop-in sessions related to Technology Enhanced Learning) we introduced a leaderboard to enhance participation throughout the event, and to encourage the use social media to share experiences amongst colleagues that were unable to attend. Having experienced the leaderboard at the UCISA Spotlight on Capabilities Conference in June, I was interested in using it to introduce ideas related to Gamification, and bring an extra element of fun, to TELFest. The leaderboard is generated by a website called rise.global, which automatically calculates the scores for tweets that contain a specific hashtag, and, following some pointers from Fiona MacNeil who had set it up for the UCISA event, I set up a leaderboard for TELFest. Given the aims behind using the leaderboard, I decided that points should be primarily awarded for tweeting with the #TELFest hashtag and there were additional points for attending drop in sessions and tweeting TELfie’s (TELfest selfies). Below is a breakdown of the points that could be earned:
To keep tweeters motivated, automated tweets were sent out every evening, informing them of their position on the leaderboard.
Twitter activity increased significantly compared to September 2014, there was a tenfold increase in the overall number tweets, a tripling of the number of tweeters and, on the Friday, TELFest trended in the Sheffield area, meaning that it was promoted to local users on the main twitter interface.
Tweets with the #TELFest hashtag
|
1 point
|
Being Mentioned by someone else
|
2 points
|
Having your #TELFest Posts Retweeted
|
3 points
|
Tweeting a TELFie with the hashtag #TELFest (TELFest, Selfie)
|
3 points
|
Attending a drop in session
|
5 points
|
Each day we saw the top tweeters changing positions and there was healthy competition amongst TELFest participants.
To keep tweeters motivated, automated tweets were sent out every evening, informing them of their position on the leaderboard.
Twitter activity increased significantly compared to September 2014, there was a tenfold increase in the overall number tweets, a tripling of the number of tweeters and, on the Friday, TELFest trended in the Sheffield area, meaning that it was promoted to local users on the main twitter interface.
An additional benefit of promoting the use of Twitter through the leaderboard was that it helped to capture the variety of views and opinions shared by participants during the event. We were then able to use the tweets to create daily blog posts summarising these discussions using Storify, allowing us to produce a record of the day’s events for participants to look back on and to give some insight into the discussions for those unable to attend.
While the leaderboard was highlighted during the Gamification session as an example of a method to encourage participation and motivate learners, it is hard to say whether, in this case, the leaderboard led to an objective increase in Twitter usage. Early feedback indicates that its’ introduction did motivate some people to tweet more than they might ordinarily, yet others stated that they were unaware of the board. Another reason why the increase in the use of Twitter at TELFest this year cannot be solely attributed to the leaderboard is that we integrated Twitter directly into some of the workshops. It is however clear that the leaderboard did not appear to influence the number of colleagues attending drop-in sessions.
Friday 18 September 2015
Thursday 17 September 2015
Wednesday 16 September 2015
Tuesday 15 September 2015
Monday 14 September 2015
Friday 24 July 2015
Taming the grade centre with colour
One of those “why didn't I know you could do that” moments that I thought was worth sharing. This is where I find out that I'm the only blackboard user who didn't know about it but here goes anyway.
At the recent North England Blackboard User Group Meeting (NEBUG) there was a really useful presentation from Adam Elce (North Notts college) showcasing the blackboard templates and VLE audit framework they use. His presentation may be worth another blog post in itself but he casually threw in the fact that you can colour code student scores in the grade centre.
Now I've always found the grade centre in blackboard to be an unwieldy beast at the best of times…. very powerful but unwieldy.
In our Legal Practice course we make extensive use of MCQs but the default grade centre just displays numbers that could be out of any total, the quizzes may vary from 3 questions up to 30. A quick visit to the” manage” tab in the gradebook, drop down to “grading colour code” tick the box to enable colour coding then just build your own criteria and colour scheme.
It just so happen in this one we have gone for purple for very high scores, the reds are less than 50% (a fail), dark blues are in progress and various shades represent the grade ranges in between. This was a 30 second job to set up, .
Now the whole grade centre becomes a lot more useful as you can easily see a student’s progress across the quizzes without having to remember what each score was out off. You can of course toggle colour on and off if it all gets a bit too much.
Gareth Bramley, University Teacher on our LPC course writes "the colour coding can usefully be adapted so that it highlights various grade boundaries, and the colours make it a lot easier to assess how the students enrolled on the module have performed in each quiz"
Hope this is useful if you didn't already know about it. Next time I’ll be delving more into reporting from the gradebook and quiz analysis tools.
At the recent North England Blackboard User Group Meeting (NEBUG) there was a really useful presentation from Adam Elce (North Notts college) showcasing the blackboard templates and VLE audit framework they use. His presentation may be worth another blog post in itself but he casually threw in the fact that you can colour code student scores in the grade centre.
Now I've always found the grade centre in blackboard to be an unwieldy beast at the best of times…. very powerful but unwieldy.
In our Legal Practice course we make extensive use of MCQs but the default grade centre just displays numbers that could be out of any total, the quizzes may vary from 3 questions up to 30. A quick visit to the” manage” tab in the gradebook, drop down to “grading colour code” tick the box to enable colour coding then just build your own criteria and colour scheme.
It just so happen in this one we have gone for purple for very high scores, the reds are less than 50% (a fail), dark blues are in progress and various shades represent the grade ranges in between. This was a 30 second job to set up, .
Now the whole grade centre becomes a lot more useful as you can easily see a student’s progress across the quizzes without having to remember what each score was out off. You can of course toggle colour on and off if it all gets a bit too much.
Gareth Bramley, University Teacher on our LPC course writes "the colour coding can usefully be adapted so that it highlights various grade boundaries, and the colours make it a lot easier to assess how the students enrolled on the module have performed in each quiz"
Hope this is useful if you didn't already know about it. Next time I’ll be delving more into reporting from the gradebook and quiz analysis tools.
Monday 6 July 2015
Handy App: Post-it Plus
Here at the University of Sheffield my role often involves working with colleagues to brainstorm and discuss ideas. To help facilitate this, I often rely on post-its enabling participants to share ideas and skim through the responses of others. If you use post-it notes in this way, like me you probably take a picture of the post-it notes after the event so that they can be shared more widely. One of the problems with taking a picture is that it is difficult to add, edit, or reorder the post-its once you have your picture. So I was pleasently surprised when I came across the 3M post-it app (only available in the App Store), which allows you to do just this.
The app allows you to take a picture of or upload a picture of a 'bunch' of post its. It will then recognise each note in the picture (or let you outline where a note is if the app is struggling to do so). You can then:
The app allows you to take a picture of or upload a picture of a 'bunch' of post its. It will then recognise each note in the picture (or let you outline where a note is if the app is struggling to do so). You can then:
- Edit a note
- Reposition each note
- Add a new note
The picture below is from a TEL meets session that we host monthly at the University, the event brings together learning technologists across the institution to network and share ideas. In a recent event we asked delegates to consider what discussion points they would like covered in forthcoming sessions. After uploading an initial picture of the post-it notes to the app, I have been able to shade out the names of people that suggested an idea to anonymise them (in red).
You can move around each note individually or automatically align them.
Finally, you can see that I have added some new post-it notes using the keyboard and my finger (for a freestyle look) (see the light yellow post-its in the centre below).
You can also export the changes that you have made (as an image, powerpoint or word) or share your notes with other users. I stuck with the free version of the app, but for a fee you can have the option to change the the colour of different post-it notes.
Would you find this app useful? Is this something you will use? Add a comment and share your thoughts!
Wednesday 1 July 2015
University Sheffield International College and technology enhanced learning: Developing MOLE Courses and the working relationship
Over the past few months the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) team here at the University of Sheffield have been working in close partnership with the University Sheffield International College (USIC) in developing their courses on our Blackboard 9.1 VLE (Virtual learning Environment). The VLE here at the University is branded My Online Learning Environment (MOLE).
Previously, USIC were users of the Moodle platform, and at the point we started working with them, had limited or no experience in the Blackboard 9.1 environment.
My main contacts for USIC were Barbara Gardener (Learning Technologies Manager), Tom Pyecroft (Learning Technologist) and Laura Murray (Academic administrator). They are all employed by StudyGroup.
As there would be no direct migration of courses from Moodle to Blackboard either, we found ourselves in the position of having to start course building from scratch. On the face of it, this sounds like a bad thing, but it represented a great opportunity for us and the module developers in USIC to be able to rethink their curriculum delivery.
At the start of discussions it was clear that USIC wanted a consistent approach to course design across their programmes. This consistency would help a) ensure students experience with the VLE was uniform and of high value and b) help make course management more efficient. USIC had a number of module developers available to them who would be in charge of developing these courses. These staff, as mentioned above, had some limited or no experience on Blackboard.
So, the first question was... How would we develop this consistent approach to course building, whilst giving the module developers some hands on time with blackboard? ...The answer came in the form of a full day training session for the module developers, at the Corporate information and Computing Service (CiCS) training room (and Hicks Building due to availability!).
We split the day into two sections, morning and afternoon, with a much needed lunch break in the middle!
The morning session was dedicated to the “nuts and bolts” of course building in MOLE. We demonstrated the basic elements of course navigation and structure and building/deploying content in the system. Nothing too advanced was attempted, and this was important as often the key to good course design is in making it simplistic.
 | |
| Staff in the group session wrestling with course template design - Image courtesy BGardener - StudyGroup and USIC |
The afternoon session was all about building USIC course templates in MOLE. Barbara had very kindly put together a cards activity that really helped invite discussion and debate.
The cards activity involved attendees being given a set of 40 cards. These cards contained a single item relating to course design and delivery. For example we had: “All items include descriptive information”, “All grades available through grade centre”, ”A class wiki”, “Formative tests”,”Adaptive release”, “Content collection”. Attendees were then asked to put them into three separate piles:
- Launch - These items should be available at the launch of the courses
- Intermediate - These items could be delivered in the near future but after launch
- Exemplary - These items would require more thought and investigation but are items that in an ideal world they would wish to have in the courses.
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| Cards used in the session - image courtesy BGardener StudyGroup and USIC |
The activity generated some really useful discussion around the key elements that needed to be in the courses from the get go, as well as the higher level content that would take more time to implement. A couple of the key areas covered as being essential (and therefore launch) were:
- Use of the content collection in managing overarching programme content
- Directing students learning through effective use of adaptive release.
Importantly the theme of exemplary course design (something we are having a real push on in TEL at the University of Sheffield) was woven into both the morning and afternoon sessions. This theme was highlighted in another activity we devised, which involved attendees being enrolled in both an “exemplary course” and a “bad course”.
They were split into two groups and asked to do the following:
- Try and improve the bad course
- Provide feedback to the group as to what they would do to improve it, if they had the time
The best thing about this activity was the fact that both groups had some really good ideas around what a MOLE course should achieve. The main idea being to avoid it being a file repository and instead have it enhance learning and encourage collaboration. Both groups again agreed that consistency across courses was key. For example: clearly labelling content with descriptions, formatting, chunking up learning content into manageable sections and displaying it correctly through combined use of the navigation menu and content pages.
We finished at 4pm tired, but with a sense that we had achieved some clear ideas about what the USIC courses will look like, and of course it also aided the forging of a good working relationship between TEL and USIC. But we weren't finished there….Day 2 beckoned...
The following day saw the TEL team train USIC staff on the use of PebblePad, with demonstrations of the versatile ways Pebble+ can create templates and workbooks, and ATLAS, the institutional space where assignments and assessments can be managed. Some valuable discussions were had at how the system can be used for logging achievements and capabilities, and how workbooks and webfolios can be used to aid student reflection and learning.
The module development team also took part in a workshop introducing Smart Notebook software which will be available in all USIC classrooms and enables valuable collaboration opportunities. The team had seen the interactive whiteboards and software previously at a classroom technologies drop in session run for all the teaching and professional service staff in March.
Many thanks to Barbara Gardener and Pete Mella (University of Sheffield TEL team) for their contributions to this blog post.
Stay tuned for more developments over the summer on this topic!
James
Monday 27 April 2015
EMA and the White Rose Learning Technologists' Forum 21 April 2015
I was very pleased to be invited along to the latest WRLT Forum on the 21st April 2015. One of the main drivers for my attendance was down to my involvement with Electronic Management of Assessment (EMA) here at the University of Sheffield; this particular event was dedicated entirely to this theme.
It was held at York St John University’s Skell Building on a frankly rather beautiful sunny spring day, which made both the University and the City of York stand out even more; a very pretty location!
We were also extremely lucky to have with us Lisa Gray (Programme Manager) and Lynette Lall from JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) who would be conducting the EMA workshop with us. Lisa Gray has completed a lot of extremely important work in the EMA arena where Institutions, including ours, are really looking for the ways forward in the implementation of electronic assessment at scale.
We kicked things off with a brief introduction to the Forum by Roisin Cassidy (TEL Adviser) at York St John University followed by the main presentation from Lisa Gray.
It was held at York St John University’s Skell Building on a frankly rather beautiful sunny spring day, which made both the University and the City of York stand out even more; a very pretty location!
We were also extremely lucky to have with us Lisa Gray (Programme Manager) and Lynette Lall from JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) who would be conducting the EMA workshop with us. Lisa Gray has completed a lot of extremely important work in the EMA arena where Institutions, including ours, are really looking for the ways forward in the implementation of electronic assessment at scale.
We kicked things off with a brief introduction to the Forum by Roisin Cassidy (TEL Adviser) at York St John University followed by the main presentation from Lisa Gray.
JISC - EMA Project Presentation
Lisa Gray Presenting at the EMA WRLT - image courtesy of Sarah Copeland, University of Bradford
Lisa gave the forum an overview of JISC’s EMA project. The presentation started with some background and context, which included the completion of a 3 year technology enhanced assessment and feedback programme. EMA was one of four main themes within this programme, and this background work helped highlight that there were clear tangible benefits to the use of EMA, but that there were also some serious hurdles to jump over in terms of its implementation. This essential background work led onto the EMA study itself.
We were presented with the study’s headline findings which included charts around levels of EMA system integration, variations in business processes and the variability in the take up of e-marking and e-feedback.
In particular we were shown a chart that showed to us very clearly where the main “pain points” were in adoption of EMA. The top spot on this chart went to system integration (lack of), with staff resistance coming in a close second. Perhaps not surprisingly, student resistance was last on this chart…
Figure 1 - Pain points in EMA
Image courtesy of JISC. Taken from the "Electronic Management of Assessment (EMA): a landscape review" publication
The study then explored the reasons for the pain in EMA implementation, including the lack of a central joined up approach, and the fact that trying to implement EMA at scale exposes limitations in the technology.
Finally Lisa moved on to the excellent “assessment life cycle” model developed by Manchester Metropolitan University. You can catch that, and their excellent suite of resources on assessment here.
Figure 2 -The assessment lifecycle
Image courtesy of Manchester Metropolitan University - reproduced under CC license (BY/SA)
Lisa explained how, by breaking down the components of assessment in this way, we can then map the main challenges of EMA into each area which highlights where in the cycle our EMA issues lie. As we might imagine a large portion of them reside in number 5, “Marking and Production of feedback”.
Workshop activities
For our first workshop activity we were asked to work in pairs or small groups. Working off a “challenge sheet” that outlined the main EMA challenges, we were tasked with reviewing and ticking off the challenges that we thought were causing the most pain. We were then asked to join forces with a larger group to rank those challenges in order of importance (1 - most important, 5 - least important).
Having reviewed all the challenges our group thought that, although there were no real level 1 (urgent and biggest impact) challenges, there were a couple of level 2 challenges that were the biggest hurdles:
Having reviewed all the challenges our group thought that, although there were no real level 1 (urgent and biggest impact) challenges, there were a couple of level 2 challenges that were the biggest hurdles:
- Ability to handle a variety of typical UK marking and moderation workflows : We felt that this challenge encompassed a lot of the pain points in adoption of EMA. Certainly within our institution there are many local variations of workflows that, when you apply EMA, it highlights issues such as anonymous marking, double blind marking, and moderation of marks
- Ability of systems to handle off-line marking: Currently, there is only really the Turnitin iPad app that can offer true off line marking. This is quite a limitation when we consider that offline marking may well offer the biggest step forward in making EMA a solution, that makes marking at least as easy, if not easier than its paper equivalent.
The resulting group feedback to the room generated some really useful discussions around groups pain points, some of which was directed towards either the incompatibility between Institutional student systems and marking systems or the current inflexibility of the technology.
EMA Solutions and workshop 2
As part of the final workshop of the day we were asked to move into four groups to look at each of the projects, decide what detail we would like to see within them and then provide feedback to the room. I chose group 4: the EMA tool kit. You can view the EMA toolkit description and the other projects here.
EMA toolkit
Our group discussed the idea that such a resource should work reciprocally with local Institutional produced resources. For example at the University of Sheffield we have our recently devised TEL Hub which is continually evolving. We are looking to build our own set of EMA resources within the Hub for our Institution, and the content that is within this resource should work in tandem with resources in a centrally devised hub. Whether this be policy, process guidance or case studies. Anything we develop locally could potentially feed back into the central hub.
In addition we felt that it would be important to for hub users to be able to utilise different views or “lenses” on the toolkit to encompass all the different stakeholders: academic staff, admin, learning technologist (or equivalent), and student.
Feedback and Finish
The groups provided feedback to the room regarding the separate projects and three institutions were given a brief moment (due to time restraints) to mention their EMA themed work .
Paul Dewsnap at Sheffield Hallam University: Great work on looking end to end at their assessment and feedback processes:
Joel Mills at the University of Hull: Their use of Sakai (ebridge) to ensure that e-submission from students is captured successfully even if Turnitin is encountering issues.
Phil Vincent from York St John University: Their EMA policy development, and in particular, describing how you can reduce staff resistance to EMA through the deployment of two monitors!
Sarah Copeland from the University of Bradford: The University policy that requires e-submission where practical and for electronic feedback to be given within 20 days. The Faculty of Health studies policy of anonymous e-marking and use of core technologies: Pebblepad, Blackboard and Turnitin for areas of EMA.
We would like to thank once again, our hosts St Johns University of York, for providing with us a fantastic location and to Lisa and Lynette for a fab workshop that has helped provide some much needed light at the end of a dark EMA tunnel!
If you wish to get involved with the White Rose Learning Technologists' Forum, you can subscribe to our mailing list:
wrlt@jiscmail.ac.uk
Please also see our Google+ Community page at the link below:
Hope to see you at the next meeting!
James
Wednesday 1 April 2015
JISC Digifest
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| Image by +JD Hancock |
The full agenda, as well as links to slides and recordings can be found below:
Day 1 Agenda/PowerPoint | Recordings
Day 2 Agenda/PowerPoint | Recordings
Some of the sessions I enjoyed and would recommend looking out for:
- FutureLearn, Simon Nelson. Described his model for embedding digital. The University of Sheffield are currently a FutureLearn partner, see our latest MOOCs.
- Good Practice in Learning Analytics This panel discussion JISC reports. See our latest addition to the TEL Hub
- Electronic management of assessment
- Student expectations of entering higher education Students were invited to this session and we learnt about the findings from Key findings from research undertaken highlighted
- 3D Modelling - The session focused on ways in which 3D models can be created (see JISC infokit for more details). There is a growing interest in this field particularly in disciplines such as medicine and archaeology. In order to help people develop 3D models for learning purposes JISC have developed a one day course.
Overall
I really enjoyed the variety of sessions on offer, the different ways
in which they were delivered and the opportunity to connect with new
colleagues from different institutions. The conference highlighted how diverse the range of JISC activities are (covering policy through to smaller scale innovation) as well the variety
of resources that they have developed for institutions to re-purpose.