Keynote:
Jonathan Worth
Jonathan is professional
photographer. He started by talking about how the development of the internet
has impacted his business as a photographer and how he tried to control the use
of his images.
Internet changing
interpretation of images:
- a photograph is evidence
:: an image is an experience
- Images shared on the
Internet by users - What is the story behind the experience?
He then moved on to talk
about an online photography course that he developed and ran and how this led
him to think about how much information / data we give out about ourselves
online. What responsibilities as educational providers do we have?
Keynote:
Laura Czerniewicz – Considering Inequality as Higher Education Goes Online
Laura is from the
University of Cape Town in South Africa. She talked about the global North and
the global South; global education (MOOCs), the inequalities of society and
education.
Emergence of MOOCs (Mass
Open Online Courses); now moving into the mainstream
- Conventional >>
Flexible
- Fees, complete package >>
free / paid, individual elements
Increase in diversity of
providers eg non-education institutions like digital media companies,
publishers.
Education viewed as an
export; increasingly global orientation
“Colonisation” of the
online educational space by elite, global north, western-orientated
institutions
Institutions not
considering widening participation nor addressing inequality
Keynote:
Phillip Long – Learning Sciences: Impact on Learning Technologies &
Learning Activities
Phillip talked about the
difference between learning and performance (ie achievement in assessment); how
the 2 are different; these are different aims for teaching activities. He
discussed a number of studies that looked at different activities that impacted
on knowledge retention and learning.
Invited
Speakers:
Speaker:
Rebecca Ferguson – Scaling Up Learning Analytics
Learning Analytics – “collection
& analysis of data about learners and their contexts for purposes of
understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs”
Learners may also want
access to their own analytics
Organisation records
analytics aligned to their objectives
Is what learners need to
know the same as what the organisation may need to know?
Discussion of what the
OU is doing – development of a dashboard so that data can be presented to users
(academics); allow action and intervention to support learners
I liked the idea of the
Flipped Classroom.
They used google
analytics to assess the use of the learning objects and found that there was a
peak use before, during and after the lectures, and a large peak in usage
during exam time suggesting that students referred back to the objects for
revision.
Quizit
– crowdsourcing personalised formative assessments
The authors presented
the QuizIt tool – a mobile gaming app. Students can quiz themselves and each
other on key aspects of their learning, also create quizzes and interact with
each other eg ratings, comments. Leader boards are created based on interactions
of the student.
The app will be launched
in October – freely available to HE institutions.
Connecting
students, staff and employers together for shaping the future of learning
Presentation of a number
of Jisc funded projects, looking at the involvement of businesses in the
development of learning materials to support “employability skills” and how
technology can be used to do this – elearning portals developed with input from
both academia and businesses.
- What are “employability
skills”? Are they different for different employers? Do they change over time?
- Can education be
extended beyond the education institution into the workplace? Placements,
mentors, using alumni?
- Barriers to involvement
of businesses?
[is this something that
will impact on us as nursing education continues throughout their career?]
Learners
as agents of change (LA)
We
are the Champions! Students as partners at the University of Southampton (LA)
This project involved
recruiting students as digital literacy champions. The students were
recommended by their tutors, and worked with the academic and the digital
literacy team/technologist to enhance teaching and learning. It was considered
a partnership. Students were paid, although the authors seemed confident that
students would have done it voluntarily (work was completed without timesheets
being submitted for example). Payment was deemed to have “professionalised” the
role.
Champions were recruited
across disciplines and the idea has been extended to for example sustainability
champions, enterprise champions.
Delivering
a simulated games industry placement to enhance the employability of graduates
The authors described
setting up a simulated project to help students prepare for work in the
computer games industry (where placements have been difficult to set up).
Activities included building teams, dealing with a client, presenting ideas,
completing worksheets(?), delivering a product.
Very interesting though
I don’t think relevant to our particular student set.
The
Innovation Game: How students are informing our digital journey
The authors recruited
students to act as student innovators to promote the use of digital technology
within the college. Students reviewed apps, wrote up blog entries, were also
part of their class review process providing feedback on lessons and how
digital technology could be used to enhance them. Initially driven by the
academic team, the students soon started to make suggested about what
interested them and other students.
Students volunteered and
gained confidence from the experience.
Suggested apps RefMe –
reference generating app, Grammarly – grammar checking tool
Professional
development with a cup of tea
Author discussed the
process and project to replace current face to face CPD activities with online
learning within a pharmacy company.
Learning objects were
developed in Articulate Storyline and made available via Moodle (VLE). Agile methodology
was used. The aim was to provide short (have a cup of tea) interesting learning
opportunities.
Development of learning
objects: Replace >> Enhance >> Transform
The project was deemed
successful with good feedback from staff.
Open
educational practice (OE)
Why
Institutions Adopt MOOCs: Breaking Down Traditional Boundaries or Reproducing
Privilege?
The presenters looked at
some of the driving forces for the development of MOOCs by institutions:
- Institutional visability
/ profile
- Student recruitment
- Flexible Learning
- Reaching new students
- Some case studies also
considered:
- Opportunity for
curriculum redesign / reform
- Promotional
opportunities
There appeared to be
little concern about widening access or participation.
At Dublin City
University (authors) they are developing their own MOOCs. They have decided to
phrase things as “connected” and avoid the use of “online”.
They suggest that
providers of moocs should consider what their drivers are, what their mission
is.
[aspects of this were
echoed in Laura Czerniewicz’s keynote talk about inequalities.]
Open
learning at the workplace: scaffolding user’s digital competences
The authors presented
details about their Eagle project:
- cross-european
- public administration
employees in rural communities
- enhanced CPD
- delivered in the
workplace
- using open education
resources
This project uses “gamification”
and badges to promote learner activity (more like “online
socialisation”). Learners:
- can set up profiles
- socially interact with
others
- develop skills /
competencies
- contribute their own
learning activities eg worksheets, videos
- gain status eg creator,
adapter
- users gain credit from
interacting with the system
- metrics will determine
learner status based on activity
Do
we need instructional designers?
Basically this guy told
a room full of “instructional designers” and “learning technologists” that they
were useless middlemen as redundant as the liberal democrats and that academics
needed a slap to make them step up to plate and do stuff themselves. I couldn’t
decide if he was taking the pee or not.
Participatory
approaches to the development of learning technologies (PD)
Pixellation:
The Key for Collaborative Online Education
“By pixellation we mean
the delivery of notions in the most concise and self-contained format possible:
a pixel of knowledge”
The author talked about
how he and his team of academics developed a range of small, essentially
bite-sized, elearning content that could support users ongoing learning of
self-contained, mostly maths / science based, concepts.
He reported that this
project was well-received by both students and academics.
Are we ready to learn
from learning analytics?
The authors were hoping
to present a taxonomy of learning analytics however they had not got to this
point yet which was disappointing. Their project aims to help identify and
classify the learning data which will help non-technical academic staff to use
it to drive learning design and learning outcomes.
Building
an e-learning platform in WordPress
Manchester Medical
School discussed how they developed a learning platform in Wordpress. This acts
as a learning portal for the medical school online content. Blackboard is the
institutional VLE but was deemed not fit for purpose. Contract programmer was
used to do a lot of the work. Relevant “plugins” were developed to provide some
functionality.
Features of the new
system:
- Single sign-on
- Search facility
- Development of taxonomy
to tag content and so link related content
- Links to a curriculum
mapping tool
- Student can add and
retain their own notes
- Video content can be
added to videopress and downloaded by student for offline viewing
Social
media in learning and teaching (SM)
Didn’t attend anything
in this strand.
Reflections
Here are a few of the
key points that I picked up.
We’re
“pixelated”!
Well, I think we can
stand up quite well compared to others. Our offering of short learning objects
offers students an opportunity to learn in bite-size (pixelated) bits (with or
without a cup of tea); they can be utilised outside of or within training /
teaching (flipped classroom). It was comforting to see that other people were
also using Articulate Storyline and videos to deliver learning content.
Looking forward:
We perhaps need to think
more about how we design our etutorials so that we don’t just reproduce
off-line content, but include more interactivity and relate to the real world
the learners operate in. The features available within Articulate Storyline may
be able to help us with this.
Learning Portal
The idea of a learning
portal sounds really good. Since we don’t get any exposure on Blackboard and we
need to appeal to non-keele users the idea presented by the team from Manchester
using Wordpress seemed very appealing, although clearly very technical.
Looking forward
A learning portal could
offer us the ability to:
- Present learning content
in an institution-dependent space (ie not Keele-branded)
- Allow use of taxonomy
and tags to link learning resources
- Provide search facility
- Allow users to comment /
rate content
Learning
about Learners Learning
I was really hoping for
some practical solutions as to how to collect
and use learning analytics – what to collect, how to collect it, what
can it tell you, how you apply the knowledge to improving the product. However
I didn’t really find this in the sessions I attended.
Discussions were really
about the institution level policy and procedures to develop or they talked
about large data gathering exercises at a higher level.
Note that one of the
keynote speakers (Jonathan Worth) raised the issue of recording data about
learners – what are we collecting, have we asked them, do they have a right to
be forgotten? What are our responsibilities to learners?
Looking forward:
I think that this is an
area we need to improve to order to gain information about what students find
useful / not useful, in order to improve our elearning offering.
Stealth
Learners
Two presenters talked
about students being used as “agents of change” – champions or innovators.
These sounded like really good projects where students are used to educate both
academics and their student peers. In both these cases they started off as proponents
of the use of digital technologies in teaching / learning. These ideas were
extended to other disciplines at the institutions.
Looking forward:
This seemed like the
type of thing that could also be applied to library services and students -
using students to spread the knowledge, use of library resources and
development of information skills.
Gamification or Social Learning
A number of presenters
talked about the “gamification” of learning objects; either literally producing
game-type quizzes or using the ideas of leaderboards, status, ratings, contribution,
social interaction etc used within social media elements to drive learning
activity.
Looking forward:
Given that the library
service now operates over 3 sites – Keele Campus, Royal Stoke and County
(Stafford) – a platform where staff are encouraged to collaborate, share
practices and learning, develop social interaction etc might be something to
investigate.
