The Digital Commons Retreat - Mistakes & Creativity

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

                                                                                  Henry Ford

A few weeks ago, lots of colleagues from around the university joined in an intensive two day 'Digital Commons Retreat'. Academics come to the retreat with a specific learning & teaching problem, and supportive teams are formed with expertise from around the institution - such at the library, careers service, 301, CiCS, University of Sheffield Enterprise etc. The teams are tailored towards the aim of the individual learning and teaching problem, but it's really useful to have such a broad range of experts available in one room, and typically there is lots of cross - pollination between teams.

This video gives an insight into the inaugural Digital Retreat in 2016

What I personally find really interesting about this exercise is how quick and (easy!) it is to make mistakes, learn from them and move on - often coming up with creative solutions to the problem. 

Working with such a relatively short lead time ensures that problems and failure points are quickly identified. Typical fail often, fail fast concepts are often associated with software development, or startup companies, but I think this approach shouldn't be underestimated when it comes to sparking creativity in a whole range of fields and professions. 

These concepts reminded me of a talk I recently attended by TV executive Wayne Garvie, who spoke about how failure can inspire creativity. It struck me that we shouldn't be afraid to make mistakes. 

Wayne is the Chief Creative Officer at Sony Pictures Television, and has been involved in phenomenally successful TV shows in his career like Top Gear, Strictly Come Dancing & The Crown.

What was most interesting though was how candidly Wayne discussed his failures - pointing out that "most times in TV we fail". Wayne said what's really important though is "using this failure to spark creative renewal"; using failure as a motivation to try something different next time. This concept of failure being a key ingredient for creativity is quite familiar in the TV & Film industry, and is something that Pixar President Ed Catmull has discussed extensively. 

I think the Digital Commons Retreats are a really effective, low stakes environment to experiment with new ideas, experience failure and look for creative solutions to problems. 

Keep your eyes peeled for updates about the latest Digital Retreat projects over the next few months - we will share some of the outcomes on this blog. 

I'll finish off with another thought from Wayne - he said "we typically analyse our failure, but do we analyse our success.....?" 

Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference 2017

A few weeks ago myself and Danny attended Blackboard Learning and Teaching conference in Milan. The conference took place at Università Bocconi who are a relatively new customer to Blackboard.

Below is a summary of some of the sessions I attended over the 3 days:

The honest Journey to full e-submission and feedback using Blackboard

Rob Howe - The University of Northampton
Rob talked about some of the learning and teaching systems used at Northampton before going through the story of implementing widespread online assessment. At Northampton all staff undergo training & retraining around online assessment and a number of trials have been undertaken around audio and video feedback. By 2012 a widespread consistent process was in place at the university. Rob then discussed some of the benefits and challenges of the initiative. He also gave some tips around other institutions who are wanting to implement widespread online assessment and talked about how consistency of sites really helped towards the success. Northampton are now 2% above the sector average for assessment and feedback satisfaction in the NSS.

The slides from Rob’s session can be found here.

EMA - Herding cats and Drinking Horses

Mark Gamble - University of Bedfordshire
Mark explored Bedfordshire’s move from Turnitin to the use of Blackboard’s assessment and feedback tool. Whilst the tool has been successful for them be did outline some drawbacks to the tool such as the delegated marking tool which allows random groups to be setup, but can leave students out, if there is more students than groups made.

He also talked about the inflexibility of not been able to add in feedback without a mark in the Blackboard assessment tool for more formative activities.

The move overall worked for them and they still used Turnitin in some areas but this was done as an instructor process uploaded to Turnitin in bulk, but only to produce the originality reports for staff.

No! Don’t put that there! (Improving the student Experience)

Tim Smale - Keele University - United Kingdom
Tim talked about how Keele have implemented a school template to their Blackboard courses and how staff need to adhere to certain elements of the templates, particularly around assessment. The student response has been positive where the template has been applied correctly. He then explained how javascript code can be used to change the appearance of Blackboard and add/remove certain options to support the templates.

Tim’s slides can be found here.

From Desk to Desktop: Making online exams work

Danny Monaghan - University of Sheffield

Danny’s session looked at how we have implemented online exams here at the university. Looking at the growth, logistics and challenges, whilst giving people some practical advice along the way.

Gamification - with Blackboard

Malcolm Murray - University of Durham

Malcolm’s session looked at how elements of gamification can be created in Blackboard. He showed how leaderboards were added into Blackboard and how content released using adaptive release can be associated with a gamification model of learning.

The downside to this is that much of the content doesn’t work on the mobile app, so this produced some severe challenges. There was also a bigger question posed around does points based gamification actually increase the quality of learning or do students rush through content to gain more points?