Keele Digital Festival 2018

At the beginning of this June Keele University held a festival to allow staff to showcase and celebrate some of their work around the use of technology in teaching.

Here are some of my reflections on the sessions I attended:

Learning Environments

First I wanted to comment on a couple of the learning spaces where the sessions were held: the Digital Health Hub in the Pharmacy department and the Concept Learning Space in the Chancellors Building (both on Keele Campus). First of all you could smell the newness. At the digital hub there were about 60 workstations with either a PC or laptop, so the laptop could be removed to make more space. In groups of about 6 or 8 they were clustered around a large screen which either the tutor or a student could share material to. Here is a case study report from the suppliers.

In the Concept Learning Space there were 5 colour-coded desks, sitting about 7 students, each with a large PC screen, keyboard and mouse.

Both these environments provide pleasant collaborative working spaces.

It was interesting to see what other users had created as a learning space. It would be good to see if our IT rooms could be reconfigured to allow for collaborative work by students. Our training room is quite an old-fashioned layout with rows of PC workstations. Likewise the IT suite is similarly in rows. Students struggle to find any group work areas.

Augmented reality in Pharmacy

So, in the Digital Health Hub staff demonstrated a couple of the resources that they have developed.

• Pharma Keele Cards – an app that students can use with postcard size cards detailing drug molecular structures. You can scan the card with the app, then view a 3d image of the structure. Moving the card allows you to “move” the structure so that you can investigate it further. The app also includes details about the drug, such as dosage, side-effects etc. You can find the app on your play store, but you’ll need the cards to have a go.
• Virtual Patient – this resource allowed students to question and assess a virtual patient, request tests, analyse results, complete treatments, with the patient responding appropriately. It looked amazing and I’m sure that the students would really find it engaging.

Getting to know G-suite

This session allowed participants to collaborate on a document – how confusing it was. However the point was to demonstrate some of the features of the G-suite – the google education suite of apps – that allows people to work together and collaborate on content. There was also a demonstration of some of the new features in gmail and how to use appointment blocks in calendar.

I know that I don’t use google products as much as I could and ought to take the time to find out what will be useful in my day-to-day work.

Ask a student

There was a lunchtime session where we could post questions to a group of students and get their perspective. Unfortunately the questions that I entered were not chosen.

However their responses from the questions that were asked were quite revealing and a little scary. Here are a couple of things that I took away:

1. Being comfortable with some IT doesn’t mean that you know how to deal with the myriad of systems that you need to use within the HE / student environment
2. The KLE was difficult to use and it was hard to find things
3. They relied on their tutors to point out what extra reading / learning content to use; and tutors needed to indicate clearly how it related to assignments and exams.

This wasn’t really good news for our library services. We struggle to get some students to recognise their skills gap and attend library sessions. Although I am no longer worried about not being on the KLE as it doesn’t look like it would help much.

Online learning environments to support open academic skills workshops

Here a member of staff from Learning Support presented how she was using Google Classroom to extend involvement of students beyond the classroom and build a community. Learning Support are also not on the KLE so Google Classroom looks like an opportunity to continue independent learning beyond the training session, by offering extra resources and allowing students a space to continue the discussion.

I think it would be worth investigating more about what google classroom can help us to achieve.

Summary

Overall it was a pretty informative day; got to see some high-level teaching aids and some practical ideas about what to consider to improve my work and our interactions with students.