Digifest 2017

Last week I attended Digifest at the ICC in Birmingham. There was a packed programme spanning over 2 days, and also a DigiLab area where you could try out new technologies.

The first day began with a debate on what a digital revolution of learning and teaching means. Questions were asked of the delegates before the session and the panel discussed the findings. 

Jisc Digifest 2017 - Day one plenary and welcome from Jisc



Next came a session on Robots and AI - "Loving the Alien" by Jisc Futurist Martin Hamilton. This was an interesting presentation packed full of different uses of Robots and what this could mean for us 
The other highlights from day one included a session by Lab Skills on their media rich resource for Science students, and a presentation from Mark Clements (University of Lincoln)on how virtual lab simulations can be used in practice. After this I had a conversation with Labster who provided the platform for these VR lab pre-sessions to take place, and there were some interesting ideas on how VR sessions and online resources could prepare students better for lab work, allowing them more quality time in the labs.

Trying the HoloLens

There are a couple of ideas and technology that I hope to be able to bring to this years TELFest...watch this space

Loving the alien - robots and AI in education from Jisc


Day 2 began for me with a talk by Earle Abrahamson about different ways in engaging staff and students with Turnitin, and ways that more student interaction with Turnitin can improve their work. He also gave away a couple of his tricks - including using music in his audio feedback.

I then visited the DigiLab, and tried out the HoloLens.
This was an interesting merge of AR and your environment - the ability to have an AR experience, whilst also being able to see the environment around you. This could potentially allow users to wear these headsets for longer, and they can freely walk around and interact with their surroundings. It also has a great use for looking at historical sites, and using AR to see what it was like before. 

Uses of social media in learning and teaching

A couple of weeks ago myself, Simon and Pete attended a session in Social Sciences focussing on social media in learning and teaching.

Julia Davies started the session with an overview of what social media is, looking at some of the tools available and challenging some of the common misconceptions around social media.

Simon then explored how social media can be broken down into different areas based around the task which the tools perform. This was supported using the Conversation Prism which shows a wide range of tools, many of which wouldn’t necessarily be considered traditional social media tools.

We then had an activity where we broke the room into groups to look at the social media they currently use and thinking of ways they could use social media in their context. We gave each team a template to support the task. Which you can see here.

The main existing uses of social media we found are Twitter for disseminating useful information and Facebook for facilitating group discussion. There was some use of Google+ communities to facilitate discussions too.

Some of the issues that were discussed was around the openness around some social media and fear of students leaving a negative digital footprint. Whilst this is a genuine concern and students should be reminded of this, in balance the fact is that an open network can reach individuals you otherwise may not.

There was some use of social media as an alternative to MOLE discussion boards. This can have positive impacts because students are already using these technologies but similarly some students may not want to mix social media, often seen as a personal tool, with their formal learning. In any tool that is used it’s important that it is task orientated and students have prompts to encourage conversation from their tutors.

Another issue discussed was around student expectations e.g. will students expect 24/7 responses on social media and do staff feel obliged to. This, as with many asynchronous tools, needs to be managed and letting students know from the outset what they can expect in terms of how often it’s monitored and encourage students to help one another.

We are currently trying to collate some stories of use of social media in learning and teaching so if you have a story to share we’d love to hear at tel@sheffield.ac.uk.

ELI 2017 - Virtual Reality and More

This year I attended and presented at the international (US Based) annual 2017 ELI conference. A jam packed learning technologies event, which I would describe as the US equivalent to the annual ALT conference. On the final day of the event the NMC Horizon Report is launched, which outlines emerging technology trends which are likely to impact teaching and learning. This year responses from the ELI 2017 Key Issues is Learning Technology report was also announced.

Trying out Snapchat Spectacles

Amongst the highlights of the event included a VR playground, which showcased a variety of uses of VR in education as well as demonstrations of technologies that are enabling VR. Amongst the technologies included the exclusive Snapchat spectacles, which until more recently could only be purchased via the snapbot (essentially a ‘pop up’ vending machine), see how surgeons are using them to take pictures during live surgery. I was also able to try out the Microsoft HoloLens, see how Case Western Reserve, Cleveland Clinic have been using HoloLens to interact with 3D models.

This poster presentation from Washington and Lee University and Davidson nicely summarises workflows for creating VR experiences.

My own presentation focused on: Designing Virtual Reality Experiences in Education. The presentation focused on the pedagogy underpinning VR in education and outlined a number of ways that VR is being used at the University of Sheffield and the off-the shelf technologies that can be used to create these experiences. A lot of the VR examples that I saw throughout the conference focused on using out of the box VR experiences (such as Google Expeditions) or high end solutions that take time to create and can only be viewed with expensive headsets. Instead, I focused on how creating bespoke, simple VR experiences that can be created with a 360 device combined with online editing software and Google cardboard (to view the experience). The presentation highlighted how VR can be achieveable option, whilst considering the limitation of these simpler expereiences. You can take a look at my presentation slides below:

ELI has many networking opportunities and it was interesting to hear about the similarities and differences between approaches and priorities in the US and UK. As with in the UK, many institutions have been reviewing their VLE (or LMS as it is referred to in the US). I noted that Sakai was a lot more popular in the US than it has ever been here and that a number of institutions appear to recently have made transitions to Canvas and Desire2Learn.

Some other session I found useful looked at:

• Different strategies that can be used to gamify learning activities view the slides here.
• Research on active learning spaces view the abstract here.

There was also a showcase of different Learning Space equipment, which was available throughout the conference in one of the seminar rooms. This gave delegates the opportunity to try out different equipment during the sessions that were being delivered in the room. I also learnt about the learning space rating system, a tool developed by leading community experts for rating formal learning spaces to determine how well their design affords and encourages active learning.

This year the conference bought back their game which was designed to be played alongside the conference, using Goosechase, which was used last year and inspired our use of it during TELFest 2016.  The game involved delegates being set a number of challenges to complete, these challenges varied and encouraged you to network, reflect on sessions attended and the conference themes. A real time leaderboard told us how many points we had scored and our rank, the top 7 were awarded a prize. Whilst many appeared to complete activities, there didn’t seem to be as many highly active participants as the previous year. For me, the novelty had worn off, this could have been because many of the activities were the same as last year, so I didn’t have to think so much when answering questions. Last year I came 2nd and put a lot of effort in making that happen, this year I came 7th and put a lot less effort, but was still one of the top 7 winners. This year we won’t be using Goosechase at TELFest, but we will have another exciting game running alongside the event.

Celebrating half a million joiners with the inaugural Open Online Learning Awards

The inaugural Open Online Learning Awards took place last week which was an excellent opportunity to gather colleagues together to drink wine, show off some success stories and hand out some awards.

The night was introduced by Vice President for Education, Professor Wyn Morgan, who spoke about the importance of digital and online learning to the University. The event was hosted by Professor Marie Kinsey who brought the attendees up to date with our achievements thus far and Dr Chris Stokes and Dr Claire Beecroft presented on their personal experiences running Discover Dentistry and Health Technology Assessment respectively.

We also celebrated recently signing up our 500,000th FutureLearner to one of our open courses, which is a statistic we are immensely proud of and shows how effective digital learning is to engaging learners all over the world.

Production manager Dave Holloway also spoke about how much the online team enjoy their jobs and proceeded to hand out some Open Online Learning Awards to the academics, staff members and course teams who we have worked with over the nearly four years of the project.

The awards were a mixture of success stories for academics or departments and reflections from the Online Learning Team. They were intended to represent the diverse nature of the courses and how achievement can be measured in a large number of ways; from quantitative data to personal development in learners and academics.
Pamela Hafekost and Judith Greenall accept the award for Most Popular Single Course Run on behalf of the Careers Service.

A full list of the nominees and winners:

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Most Popular Single Course run
Crime, Justice and Society
How to Succeed at: Interviews (24,396 joiners)
How to Succeed at: Writing Applications
How to Write Your First Song

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Most Comments
Exploring Play (69,264 comments)
How to Succeed at: Interviews
How to Succeed at: Writing Applications
Literature of the English Country House

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Most Active Learners
Exploring Play
How to Write Your First Song
Literature of the English Country House
The Musculoskeletal System

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Most Statements Purchased
Discover Dentistry
Exploring Play
Making Sense of Data in the Media
Measuring and Valuing Health

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Innovation Award
Dr. Chris Stokes
Dr. Katherine Linehan
The Careers Service
The School of Health and Related Research

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Team Effort
The School of English
The School of Law (for an epic 5hr location shoot)
Sheffield Robotics

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One Take Wonder Award
Adam White (How to Write Your First Song)
Dr. Amanda Crawley-Jackson (Achieve More)
Dr. Katherine Stevens (Measuring and Valuing Health)
Prof. Maggie Wykes (Crime, Justice and Society)

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Best Walking and Talking
Dr. Amber Regis (Literature of the English Country House)
Dr. Chris Stokes (Discover Dentistry)
Dr. Katherine Stevens (Measuring and Valuing Health)
Dr. Matthew Bacon (Crime, Justice and Society)
Dr Matthew Bacon with the two awards won by the School of Law

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Best Day Out
Cesare Lombroso Museum, Turin (Crime Justice and Society)
Chatsworth House shoot (Literature of the English Country House)
Pig Farm Studios shoot (How to Write Your First Song)
Robotic Prostate Operation (Building a Future With Robots)

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Most Controversial Style Choice
Dr. Adam James Smith (unbuttoned shirt, Literature of the English Country House)
Dr Mark Taylor (tongue piercing, Making Sense of Data in the Media)
Dr. Matthew Bacon (flowery shirt, Crime Justice and Society)

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Funniest Moment
Amber Regis’ funniest moment award card

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Lifetime Achievement
Prof. Marie Kinsey (Co-director of Digital, University of Sheffield)

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Secret Heroes
Kieran Bentley (animator, Online Learning Team)
Karen Cohen (Projects and Development Assistant, University of Sheffield)

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Many thanks to all who attended and spoke at the event. Congratulations to all our nominees and winners.