Interesting ways to use...

A great set of crowd-sourced resources for integrating technologies into the classroom: http://edte.ch/blog/interesting-ways/  Good ideas on using blogs, twitter, mobile phones etc in the classroom - relevant to HE as much as schools.

Capturing those lectures

Lecture capture seems to be flavour of the month at the moment. The programme for the upcoming ALT Workshop at QMU on June 16th includes some excellent tech references for those who can't get there in person:

• Adobe and Collaborate
• Echo360
• Desire2Learn
• Mediasite by Sonic Foundry
• Panopto
• Techsmith
• MELSIG - Media Enhanced Learning SIG
• ViTAL Video in Education - HEA/ALT Special Interest Group

More on feedback

A theme that was very evident at today's Improving Assessment and Feedback Symposium was that colleagues in other Schools were well down the road of non-textual feedback, with podcasts and video commentaries becoming commonplace. The message from students is that this is really welcome. There appears to be strong evidence that students either misconstrue, ignore or can't read the scribbled feedback comments that most of us in Computing still compose for them. It was suggested that the interpersonal element in spoken feedback has a strong effect on students too.

The University of Leeds has some useful resources for anyone inspired to have a go: http://www.sddu.leeds.ac.uk/online_resources/podcasting/case_studies.html

Once inspired, you can download a free copy of Audacity free and be up and running in a few minutes: http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/13-basic-podcasting-software.htm

Adopt, adapt and improve

At this morning's Improving Assessment and Feedback symposium, the excellent presentation by Tim Vincent and Inam Haq on their massive project at BSMS to create an online question bank for  final year medical students reminded me (in a good way) of the ancient Monty Python Lingerie Robbery interpretation of the Round Table's motto.  Students were found to be using the quizzes not as an extra learning facility for their development during clinical practice, as intended, but as a last minute revision tool. The team are currently looking at ways of making the materials even more useful for students to use in the way they prefer, based on their feedback and usage logs.The message the team took from the experience seems a sensible one: if students don't do what you expect, look carefully at what they actually do and support it.

Here's the official summary of their talk: 

Tim Vincent & Inam Haq (Brighton & Sussex Medical School)

Online quizzes as a learning tool: What we didn’t expect the students to do

The Medical School have developed a bank of 600 quizzes, in the format of clinical case scenarios, using the test tool in studentcentral. Its purpose was to support final year students while on long-term clinical placements as a formative assessment learning tool and the students were given a suggested weekly minimum number (not mandatory). This session will explore how the students really used it and use that as a springboard for discussions of the implications for designing and implementing formative assessment activities.

Events for stay-at-homes...

Teaching and learning events organised at the University over the next few weeks, with no need to leave the Moulsecoomb campus:

Using Web 2.0 Technologies in Blended Learning
Monday May 23rd 12.30 – 1.30 pm, Room 400 Huxley Building, Moulsecoomb
Effective ways of using Web 2.0 technologies in blended learning - for example, collaborative learning using a blog and problem based learning with wikis. To register to attend please click here

Improving Assessment & Feedback Symposium
Friday 27 May, 2011 9.30 am -2.00 pm Mithras House, Moulsecoomb Campus           Programme details   Booking form click here
 
For more info on these and other events, including the Annual L & T conference on July 15th, go to the Centre for Learning and Teaching events page.

Improving student perceptions of feedback

This article on yesterday's publication of the Guardian University League Tables has some sensible advice about feedback for departments like ours where students aren't happy about this aspect of their courses: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/17/university-league-tables-student-survey?intcmp=239

The REAP Project (Re-engineering Assessement Processes in Scottish HE) has done some amazing work around feedback, peer review and assessment practices in general, all carefully validated by "before and after"research. This page has some stories of courses were redesigned in different institutions and departments: the University of Glasgow redesigned Computer Science accelerator course as part of the REAP Project: http://www.reap.ac.uk/reap/assessment/pilotsGUAcc.html .

Reporting back: UoB workshop on lecture capture Friday 13 May

This was a one hour session with Barbara Newland from the Centre for Teaching and Learning, reporting on a large-scale project she'd been involved in at the University of Bournemouth. This involved a system for capturing lectures and making them avaible via the institutional VLE (Blackboard). Unlike the Camtasia Relay available at Brighton, this system simply involved the lecturer turning on a microphone: the rest was automatic.

Some interesting points were that student attendance was not significantly affected, with students giving a wide range of uses of the lectures (i.e. not simply substituting for attendance). Some lecturers found the facility allowed them to change their practice, e.g. by asking students to pre-view the lecture, before using the face to face meetings for more interactive learning.