JISC DigiFest 2019 - Reflections

I attended the JISC Digital Festival March 12-13^th 2019, at Birmingham International Convention Centre.

Most of the sessions I attended are freely available on the JISC website, as such I have just recorded what I picked up as the main points for me to consider.

Opening keynote - educating for the future, now / Speaker: Anne-Marie Imafidon, CEO of the Stemettes.

Key points:

• Digital literacy the fourth literacy (reading, writing and arithmetic); support digital literacy as a basic skill
• Inclusivity – gender, race, class

DigiReady: preparing learners for a digital workplace / Speakers: Andrew Sprake, lecturer in physical education, University of Central Lancashire, Neesha Ridley, senior lecturer in midwifery, University of Central Lancashire, Chris Melia , senior learning technologist, University of Central Lancashire

https://www.slideshare.net/JISC/digiready-preparing-learners-for-a-digital-workplace

Key points:

• Preparing students for the workplace
• Use Microsoft Teams platform as a collaborative space
• Digital Skills programme – including workshops and accreditation
• Academic staff led – required update of skills

Microsoft Teams

I had a chat with a member of the Microsoft Team about Microsoft Teams – basically I am a Microsoft girl at heart.

https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software

Microsoft Educator

I didn’t have time to investigate the tools available here, but these look interesting for CPD.

https://education.microsoft.com/

Why students think digital skills are important for the workplace?

https://youtu.be/_x3cF2_owgQ

Key Points:

• Use of digital tools allowed students to be more flexible and adaptable
• Gained access to industry standard software
• Supported collaboration with fellow students
• Multi-device compatibility
• Cloud tools allowed students to study anywhere
• Students felt that gaining good digital skills would give them “an edge” in a competitive workplace

Digital storytelling for all / Speaker: Gordon Duffy-McGhie, director - teaching, learning and student development, Middlesbrough College

https://www.slideshare.net/JISC/digital-storytelling-for-all

Key Points:

• Educational use of creating digital stories (videos)
• Engaged students more than “flat text”
• Students liked to see themselves and activities that they would be studying
• Process (of creating a video) by the students is as important as the end product

Welcome and opening keynote - how to create a broader, fairer and smarter education system? / Speaker: Joysy John, director of education, Nesta.

https://youtu.be/3ULMAWckFeo

You can find more information about Nesta here.

Key Points:

• Reiterated some of the key points mentioned above – inclusion & employability

Listening to teachers: implications for education and digital / Chair: Lawrie Phipps, senior co-design manager, Jisc; Speakers: Donna Lanclos, anthropologist consultant, Nikki Rivers, lecturer in English literature, University of Gloucestershire, Sarah Davies, director of education innovation, University of Bristol

https://www.slideshare.net/JISC/listening-to-teachers-implications-for-education-and-digital

This was a discussion of the research published in summary here.

Key Points:

• Innovation does not necessarily mean technology
• Is a digital detox leading to isolation vrs digital is isolating because it is not face-to-face
• Questions about sign-posting in libraries for academic staff

Responding to the digital accessibility regulations / Chair: Alistair McNaught, subject specialist (accessibility and inclusion), Jisc; Speakers: Abi James, senior accessibility and usability consultant, Ability Net, Anthony Ilona, policy engagement manager, Government Digital Service, Cabinet Office, Julia Taylor, subject specialist (accessibility and inclusion), Jisc

https://www.slideshare.net/JISC/responding-to-the-digital-accessibility-regulations

Key Points:

• Disabilities may impact on people in a number of ways, including visual, hearing, motor abilities and cognitive abilities
• New disability accessibility regulations affect public sector digital assets including websites and apps; to ensure that content is available to all in some format.
• New regulations came into force 23/09/2018
• Timeline: new websites compliant by 23/09/2019; existing websites compliant by 23/09/2020; apps compliant by 23/06/2021
• How to make your public sector website or mobile app more inclusive and meet accessibility standards / https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps
• As content creators we need to ensure that content we add to digital spaces complies with the regulations.
• Content includes: websites, documents hosted on websites, videos and multimedia content, intranets and extranets VLEs, libraries, student portals , staff portals

Further Help:

JISC Accessibility: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/accessibility

DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY REGULATIONS Jisc email list http://tiny.cc/DigRegMail

Automatic checkers:

• W3C Easy Checks https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/
• WAVE http://wave.webaim.org/
• MS Office Accessibility Checker (MS Office 365)

Understanding WCAG 2.1 https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/helping-people-to-use-your-service/understanding-wcag

Testing for Accessibility https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/helping-people-to-use-your-service/testing-for-accessibility

Government Digital Service https://gds.blog.gov.uk/

How you are embracing the change of technological capability, and the needs of the students of the future, not the past? / Speaker: Andrew Proctor, director of digital services, Staffordshire University.

https://www.slideshare.net/JISC/how-you-are-embracing-the-change-of-technological-capability-and-the-needs-of-the-students-of-the-future-not-the-past

Key Points:

• Education 4.0 – more learner centric, more personalisation
• Everything connects – data, AI, personalisation, digital skills – more understanding of what is happening with students
• AI replacing the user interface - Beacon

Hints and Tips for doing Social Media on the Side

On Thursday 6^th December 2018 I attended an “unconference” for Keele social media staff.

What is an “unconference”?

The idea of an unconference is that it is an informal gathering of people, around a common theme or topic, where they can discuss and share ideas. The agenda is set by the participants and can be on an adhoc basis.

For the social media unconference I decided to share my experiences, hints and tips for providing a social media outlet where it is only a small part of the job, and you have limited access to time and resources. This blog posts relays what I delivered to the unconference.

Social Media on the Side – for the time-poor, for the resource-poor

So I am an eresources librarian at the Health Library, and the main part of my job is to ensure our NHS users can access their subscribed online resources. I also support our social media streams, including Twitter and Facebook. This activity needs to be fitted around my current job responsibilities. The topic of this post will relate to my use of Twitter. Hopefully if you are in a similar situation you will be able to pick up a couple of helpful tips.

Audience

The Health Library twitter feed is aimed at our key users – nursing, midwifery and medical students at the University and NHS staff who work for the NHS organisations we support. I use SumAll to thank our most generous followers and this was generated one week in November:

SUMALL thank you card to our biggest fans

The aim of our social media is to promote the facilities, services and resources of the library, encourage our user groups to utilise good quality healthcare resources and develop a positive reputation for the library.

Creating Images

Twitter seems to be always telling us that using images in social media feeds is a good idea. Attractive images can catch the eye of the browser as they scroll through their feed, hopefully making them stop to checkout your message.

I use PowerPoint for creating images. It is a standard install on our PCs, available if I need to hot-desk and uses a standard Microsoft toolbar I am familiar with. I don’t have to use specialist software (which I don’t have a budget for) or develop specialist skills (which I don’t have time for).

Using PowerPoint you can:

Screen-shot of the powerpoint toolbar

• Resize the slide to a custom size that is standard for social media.
• Add images and photos
• Edit images and photos via resize, crop, re-colour, use “artistic” effects, add borders
• Add title bars to highlight what the post is about
• Add text (keep the message simple, you can even use bullet points if you want to)
• Use shapes to create your own icons
• Compress images to reduce the file size (particularly if you have used large images and have cropped images)

Use the “save as…” option to save your PowerPoint slides as images. You can do this either on a single slide basis or for all slides at the same time.

Here are a couple of examples:

Opening Hours at the Health Library: this image uses a photo of the clock in the library, title bar, simple text and our logo.

Twitter image for library opening times

NHS Journals – check for full-text access: this image uses a stock image from our web content team with title bar, text and logo.

Twitter image for NHS eJournals

Patient Voices collection: here I scanned in some of our book cover pages to promote our Patient Voices collection.

Twitter image for Patient Voices collection

NHS Resources – here I used some icons that I had created in PowerPoint

Twitter image for NHS resources, using icons created in powerpoint

You can be as creative as you like. You can create simple, smart and clean images in relatively little time. Take a look at the images other organisations are creating and learn from them. There are lots of videos on Youtube demonstrating the power of PowerPoint in creating images.

Content

Using Themes

I have found that grouping tweets into themes is an efficient way to create content. Examples of themes I have used include:

• What can the Library do for you – series of tweets, with images, about our facilities
• Be Prepared – series of tweets promoting our training to students to help them prepare for their assignments / dissertation. Here are some of the images I used:

Compilation of twitter images used in the "Be Prepared" theme

I can create a template and then just change a few things to create a series of images.

Repeat and Re-Use Content

Messages can be repeated. Bear in mind that users won’t see all your tweets. Try posting messages on different days and at different times. Content can be repeated to appeal to a new audience. For example I regularly post messages about our facilities (What can the Library do for you) when new NHS staff start, and when new students start.

You can re-use existing content such as blog posts and web pages. I regularly post blog items about how to use our resources. These will automatically be added to the twitter feed, but a couple of months later I do a series of tweets to remind our followers and refer back to the blog posts.

Re-Tweeting Others

You can re-tweet relevant content from other feeds that you follow. I follow a wide range of health-related twitter feeds – news, research, NHS organisations, Keele-related departments. It can be helpful to add these into Lists that you can quickly check for new, relevant content. I have a list of Keele twitter feeds – this includes schools, research institutes, student support services, SU, and staff members.

Planning

Planning also helps me to post content on a regular basis. I can decide on several themes for the year, though I tend to work about 3 months ahead. I can create content in batches. Here is a screen-shot of my completed themes for 2018.

Screen-shot of example themes

I use the scheduling tool HootSuite. You can set up a free account, which allows you to link to 3 social media accounts and schedule 30 messages at a time. Here is a screen-shot of my schedule for December:

Screen-shot of my scheduled tweets in hootsuite 

You can see that I have scheduled to send messages to both our Twitter feed and our Facebook page.

In Summary

The processes I have described above helps me to create content which includes simple attractive images, themed content, scheduled in advance at regular intervals. This allows me to develop a twitter feed with limited resources and limited time:

• Use simple, available tools to create images
• Create content in themes
• Repeat, Re-use, Retweet
• Plan and schedule ahead

Related post: Social Media-can you tell it’s working yet?

eLearning 101: Lesson 10 – how to take your elearning skills to the next level (option 3)

10 Things you could create instead of an elearning course

1. Quick skills-based scenario
2. Short self-study exercises
3. “Best of…” tips video
4. Interactive tour of a form
5. Job-aid or tool
6. Podcasts
7. Interactive Infographic
8. “How to…” videos
9. Decision-making tool
10. Online repository

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This was a helpful reminder that you don’t always have to create an all-encompassing elearning object. And in fact on reflection I also do many of these things – as I think it can be helpful to learners to learn in small-bites. Most of my learning activities are presented to learners via our Information Skills for Health blog.

eLearning 101: Lesson 10 – how to take your elearning skills to the next level (option 2)

Improve your questions to create more effective assessments

Here are some hints & tips:

1. Align quiz questions with course objectives
2. Use a variety of quiz question types. Try scenario-based questions and case studies to mimic realistic situations
3. Be clear and concise; give clear directions
4. Create feedback – keep it short and try to reinforce the lesson

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This is a handy checklist of things to keep in mind when you are developing your quiz ideas. I am definitely trying to make questions more relevant to students by making them scenario-based.

eLearning 101: Lesson 10 – how to take your elearning skills to the next level (option 1)

The final lesson presented various options to select to carry on learning. I looked at:

How to measure the satisfaction of learners taking your online course.

Here are some suggested questions:

1. How would you rate the overall difficulty of this course?
2. What are the 3 most relevant things you learnt in this course?
3. How confident are you that you can apply the new skill on the job?
4. What’s the most useful thing you learned on this course?
5. Is there anything the course didn’t cover that would’ve been helpful to know?

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Again this is something that I need to improve on. We do have a feedback form. I have tried to make it as easy as possible for the users to complete but I think we need to gather more qualitative data.

eLearning 101: Lesson 9 – how to measure the effectiveness of your elearning course

This lesson posed the questions:

• How can you tell if your course is successful?
• Does it change learner behaviour?
• What can you measure?

Different types of courses may have different performance metrics. Articulate suggest the following:

Type 1 Performance Improvement Courses

Participants learn a new skill or are given information to help them do their jobs or study better. Recommended measurement – consider pre vrs post course assessments, or improvement in a particular task.

Type 2 Organisational Compliance Courses

Recommended measurement – pre vrs post course assessment

Type 3 Sharing Information

Recommended measurement – could track access to the information source, eg download of a file or direction to a web page.

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This is an area that I need to improve on, in order to make any feedback to the user relevant. There have been various discussions on the forums within Articulate about this topic which have been interesting.

eLearning 101: Lesson 8 – how to share your elearning course with learners

This lesson looked at different ways to publish your learning online.

Via a web server

Suggested external web hosting options:

• Tempshare – for temporary sharing content. This might allow you to share content for review
• Amazon S3 – free and fee-based hosting packages

Via a Learning Management Service (LMS)

In this scenario you need to include protocols that allow the learning object to “talk” to the LMS, such as Tin Can API, Scorm or AICC

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We deliver our courses via the university web server. This is something that I sorted out early on in our project so that we had some proof that we could get a workable system.