In this series of articles, the Educational Technology team will be providing an insight into existing practice using technology for learning and teaching at Falmouth University and also at projects being undertaken within the wider HE sector. Our previous articles have looked at the process of Feedback and Open Education.
As we enter the summer term it seems only right to have a look at the process of assessment. This time of the year is heavily associated with assessment as students hand in final pieces of work before the end of the academic year. As a University specialising in creative arts, the submissions from our students are as diverse as the courses studied, it’s our role as technologists to support a wide range of submission formats when it comes to online hand-ins.
As with 98% of Universities, Falmouth uses Turnitin as a tool for online submissions. Turnitin allows students and staff to check work for citations and text matches across a variety of sources including online journals, websites and books. Although the tool can be used to identify potential plagiarism it also allows students to understand how to correctly cite referenced work by visually identifying any text which has been matched to another source. Allowing students to view ‘originality reports’ in this way has received some criticism in the past, although others feel it’s a useful aid to develop academic writing.
In addition to Turnitin, a file upload function is in place at Falmouth University that handles a variety of formats submitted for assessment via the VLE. This can include data, image and video files and facilitates commenting and feedback from academic members of staff.
In the past we have also used external media platforms such as Vimeo to handle assessed materials. In the case of Vimeo, students uploaded video content and tagged work with unique module codes so staff could easily search and mark material.
As the methods for documenting, collecting and recording work diversifies, it’s our job as a team to ensure the digital assessment process is as streamlined as possible. We’re always interested to hear from other Ed Tech teams who have implemented successful assessment methods or tools, if you’d like to share a workflow that’s worked well for your students please get in touch!
Presented as a call to action for the next government the report aimed “to consider and report on information and communications technology, competitiveness and skills in the United Kingdom”.
Education featured highly within the report and there was concern that the UK will be left behind in this digital era, something that has been echoed by others in the past; Google CEO Eric Schmidt has previously stated that the UK hadn’t embraced its ‘computer heritage’ to the detriment of economic growth.
As the digital skills demanded for industry increases it’s only natural that the education sector comes under scrutiny; “Universities should ensure that all graduates are digitally competent.” Jisc’s current Building Digital Capability project helps to address these issues by promoting effective use of digital technologies in education, at the recent Digifest event delegates in sessions were asked to reflect on digital capabilities within their institutions. The variations on how individual universities are responding to these issues were surprising, and shows we still have a lot more to accomplish in this area.
As a learning technology team we’re always keen to develop and support institutional initiatives around digital capabilities. Should you wish to find out more or see how we can assist please get in touch.
Commissioned by the New Media Consortium (NMC) in collaboration with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), this annual publication is widely referred to in the field of learning technology and education as a leading source for depicting potential future trends. This year’s publication marks the 12th anniversary of the Higher Education edition of the report; other published editions as part of the Horizon series include the K-12 edition and the Museum edition.
The report itself is broken down into three main sections; key trends, significant challenges and important developments. Each of these areas are further categorised as part of the report, for example trends can be either short-term, mid-term or long-term.
As a comprehensive document it would be very hard to cover every aspect of the report in one blog post so for benefit of keeping it shortish we’ve selected a few topics from each category.
Key Trends:
Advancing Cultures of Change and Innovation: Basing approaches taken to innovation in education on agile startups, where technology acts as a catalyst for change, has been suggested in this years long term trends. This method highlights the need to adapt in an era of rapid technical development, something not all Universities are comfortable with. There is a definite need for policy change in this area; digital technologies that students use in their day to day should be seen as a catalyst.
Increasing Use of Blended Learning: The development of new tools that can be used for education will enhance the options that are available for use in online learning and increase use as a result. Traditional face-to-face courses are complemented with online learning as students require more accessible means to access learning content away from classroom interactions. Increased use of blended learning solutions requires concrete guidelines which has implications for policy and leadership.
Significant Challenges:
Improving Digital Literacy: The ability to understand digital tools and information is seen as a significant challenge in this years report, not least because there seems to be a lack of consensus as to what constitutes as ‘digital literacy’ across many colleges and universities. Suggested as being an iterative process to accommodate for range of tools and evolving methods of use, this challenge has been defined as solvable.
Rewarding Teaching: With research so high on the agenda in Universities implementation of effective pedagogies for teaching are lacking. The REF has put greater pressure on teachers to be publishing research, meaning a reliance on part time teachers to cover taught sessions. This “Wicked Challenge” (Those that are complex to even define, much less address) suggests methods of teaching and quality of instruction need to be at the forefront.
Important Developments:
Bring Your Own Device: A widely used term, BYOD refers to when people bring their own equipment to their learning or work environment. Links between productivity and personal device usage have been documented, not least because users are already accustomed to working with their own laptop, phone or tablet. Personalised content and individual settings can be assigned to each device, again making them easier to use for study or work. Sufficient infrastructure and policies should be in place to support people who wish to use their own devices at University. Flexible workspaces that allow for personal devices to aid study should also be taken into consideration.
Flipped Classroom: The flipped classroom is a model of learning whereby the time spent in a class environment is dedicated to more active cognitive learning, time away from the class is spent learning through podcasts, videos and associated materials. This method shifts the ownership of learning from the instructors to the students and has proved popular in HE. The flipped classroom can be implemented at various scales and has a reported adoption time of one year or less according to the horizon report.
How these topics evolve over the coming year will be interesting to observe, especially from the perspective of policy and leadership in these areas. Further topics from the report were debated in an earlier post this year for those wishing to look at some additional key trends.
The Horizon report is published annually and individuals are recommended to get involved using the projects wiki page – http://horizon.wiki.nmc.org/
Last week with help from The Compass we set out to gather some feedback from students on the apps they would most recommend to others to aid study at University.
Recent statistics reveal that educational apps are the second most downloaded category in Apple’s app store, but what constitutes as an educational app? Often apps that aren’t typically seen as educational can be assistive in University study, so using the speak-board on Penryn campus helped us gain further insight into the apps our students found useful and would recommend to others.
Referencing apps were the most recommended of all the apps posted on the board, RefME in particular received praise; the free app syncs to your RefME account and allows you to scan resources using your phone or device to create citations, reference lists and bibliographies. EasyBib was also noted as a good app with the pretty much the same functionality as RefME, however this doesn’t support Harvard referencing.
Video based apps were also those featuring high on recommendations, especially those which involved an element of learning; You Tube and Ted Talks were seen as good apps for watching content on the go, SciShow, VSauce, Crash Course were specific You Tube channels which were put forward as being particularly educational and interesting to watch. Khan Academy was also mentioned, this app features a host of educational materials available for free.
Needing some music to help with studying? Spotifyis a music streaming service which puts millions of tracks at your finger tips. 8tracks was another recommended app which featured on our feedback board, described as the peoples playlister, users are able to create mixtapes of 8 tracks or more to share with the online community.
Of all the types of apps posted to help with studying, organisational tools were by far the most recommended. Document organisation tools such as Evernote and Google Drive were suggested, also note taking and list apps: Todolist, Keep Notes (which featured in our recent Tools to Support Research post) and Reminders. There are an abundance of these tools available for phone and tablet, it’s easy to see why they’re popular especially when it comes to University study. HabitRPGcame highly recommended from a few individuals, the ‘gamified’ to do list app aims to ‘make habit building fun’ by rewarding points when you complete day-to-day tasks.
The University of the West of England also features in our list of recommended apps with SAM,a tool to help understand and manage anxiety. It’s free and allows you to visualise your anxiety profile and connect to with a wider community who use the app.
For those wanting to make apps for your device Aris was one tool mentioned last week, one student has used the platform to create a campus tour for fellow classmates, built as user-friendly and open source it has all the resources to get you started.
To accompany the feedback received from students we are holding an apps event for staff to come and share tools they find useful as part of their teaching at University (12:00, 11th February, Peter Lanyon, Seminar 7, Penryn Campus).
Thanks to all who took part in the speak-board, if you’d like any more information about any of the apps mentioned or you’d like to talk about using apps as part of Learning and Teaching at Falmouth University please get in touch – etsupport@falmouth.ac.uk
Here’s the full list of recommended apps from the speak-board:
As a team we’re often asked to attend sessions and give an overview of Educational Technology and how it can be used to support teaching within higher education. Instead of diving straight in with gadgets and apps a good introduction to ed tech is to look at the learners themselves and their experiences. Students coming from FE and other educational pathways bring with them their own expectations of digital technologies; these need to be recognised if our institutions are to fully support the students who come to study at University level.
Compiled by Helen Beetham, David White and Joanna Wild the report “Students’ expectations and experiences of the digital environment” is one resource we’ve highlighted in introductory staff sessions. Taking into consideration expectations of connectivity, technical support and resource availability is something we encourage of teaching staff and so to have a national project addressing these themes is encouraging for future educational policy making.
Further information about the Digital Student Project including upcoming FE consultation events can be found via the Jisc Website, Twitter (#digitalstudent) or the project blog.
