Billed as a list which depicts “the smartest and savviest bloggers in Higher Education” the Dean’s list is an annual compilation of Educational Technology blogs from around the world.
The 2015 list features many well known and respected blogs and we’re chuffed to be included, thank you EdTech Higher Ed!
“The technology team at Falmouth University in the United Kingdom regularly blogs about the deliberations, musings and evolving thoughts on education technology. It’s a great peek into the inner workings of the challenges and successes within a higher education technology team.”
Here’s to another year of thought provoking posts and ponderments from the ET Team!
As the end of another academic year draws to a close it’s the perfect time to reflect on another years worth of teaching and perform some housekeeping on your learning environment module areas.
In the course of the year external links to other areas may have changed and assignment briefs might have altered so it’s important to check your modules to make sure all content is up to date and relevant to a new cohort.
The temptation might be to hide content or move it to the bottom of the page, ultimately this will become confusing for other staff and students in the long run so we’d recommend deleting any content no longer relevant to keep your pages looking fresh and up to date.
As part of our archive process a snapshot of the environment is taken every August so there will always be a reference to past content if needed, a module’s content evolves from one year to the next so the addition and amendment of material is to be expected.
For parity of student experience across the learning environment all modules should adhere to the minimum module content guidelines; further details and tips on how to implement these can be found in Learning Space.
To add any new documents simply ‘turn editing on’ and drag and drop files onto the page, external links can be added by choosing “Add a resource or activity > Add URL”. Section text can be amended by selecting “Edit this section”. Detailed guidance can be found in our help documentation if needed.
If you’re not sure where to start or would like some additional information regarding Summer Housekeeping please get in touch with the team – etsupport@falmouth.ac.uk
Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen the emergence and rise of two technology tools that are competing to win us over with real-time, on-demand, video streaming/broadcast with a social media twist. Meerkat and Periscope offer the ability for mobile users to broadcast and view live video from all over the globe with the added function of connecting with other viewers using Twitter.
Both apps do similar things, but at the time of writing only Meerkat is available on Android as well as iOS, so we’ll be looking at the experience of Meerkat to begin with.
Creating a new live stream on Meerkat will present you with a screen like this:
At the top you see user and location details, across the video you see message details and at the bottom you have a few controls; post a message, switch on the flash, flip the camera and stop the stream.
When you start a new stream, it will post a link to your Twitter feed and then when you make any comments you have the choice for them to appear just in the app, but also on your Twitter feed:
Whereas previously, live video streaming apps have been designed around the Desktop use (Skype, Hangouts), Meerkat and Periscope are specifically focusing on the mobile experience, by having full screen video and a commenting overlay with just a few buttons for interaction.
Potential Learning and Teaching Applications
I’ve written before about DIY Lecture Capture and these new apps offer similar possibilities for mobile users. With the addition of a Swivl for example, you could stream a live session and have an automated camera operator following you around the room. You could use this for CPD in the form of a lesson observation, have colleagues comment live with their thoughts/feedback.
Live streaming might also be great for field trips. You could connect with other staff/students and potential students in real time and learners could choose to document the video through Twitter/Storify and discuss this when back on campus.
These examples are off the top of my head, the technology is new and many streams will be of people’s kitchen’s as they get used to the app, but there will be educational practitioners already putting this technology to use, so if you have an idea or learning activity that might benefit from on-demand streaming, get in touch with the team.
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!
Increased connectivity both in the information and social domain, suggests Steve Wheeler leads to an online learning landscape where context and community are key. The social web has enabled us to share and gain knowledge with an immediacy and ease that challenges institutional educational models and will continue to present new opportunities for teaching and learning.
We now have streams of information that we have compartmentalised into Twitter lists or Pinterest boards that are designed around our interests. Whilst this helps limit noise in terms of articles and resources that we don’t find useful, it can result in an information bubble where we aren’t being exposed to alternative arguments or opinion.
Many web resources now facilitate forms of social curation, facilitating interaction around these resources. Here’s a few that I’ve found most useful:
Does what it says on the tin. List.ly is a list creator with the added abilty to comment and vote up/down list items. It’s also great for curating web resources as it will pull in images and information about the links you paste in, which you can then edit. It’s a collaborative tool, so you can ask others to add to your list and in a similar way to pinterest or Tumblr, you can relist items on another list and you can embed your lists on other sites, like Learning Space for example. I recently created a list of Open Source Educational Tools and one on free Course Design Tools.
Revue is a relatively new service that allows you to curate a weekly email digest that people can subscribe to or you can subscribe them to and can pull in a range of content from your existing social media tools (favourite Tweets or Facebook likes etc.). It also has a handy chrome extension that let’s you save content to your weekly/monthly digest as you browse the web. When you come to send out your news, Revue presents your curated items in an easily digestible format that you can edit and add to and then send out to readers. It also publishes these to the web under your revue user name. I had a go a few weeks back, just to test the service and I think this might be useful for professional services teams to update each other with current thinking/interesting reading in their fields.
Gibbon facilitates the design of a personalised curriculum around your interests, you can curate your own learning playlists or subscribe to others and you can initiate or contribute to discussions around those resources. Gibbon also takes into account the time it takes to read/view resources so you can specify that you want a half hour digest around your interests so that you can learn in small chunks in a time/place convenient to you. This potentially has beneficial implications for CPD in that you could set aside time each week for staff to engage with their learning playlists. You can also curate playlists as a team around topics that you feel would be of benefit to your audience. I created a public playlist centred around Open and User Experience led Learning Design as these should be important considerations for academic staff and those working in technological disciplines.
Personally, I’ve also started using the blog as a form of curation and where there are reference points, I’ve added links. There is such a huge amount of knowledge available via the web, we need curation tools and curators to funnel the information and we need social interaction to validate this and facilitate critical engagement.
Much of this is borrowed from a previous post written for #BYOD4L
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 first looked at the process of Feedback and our second looks at Open Education.
The term ‘Open Education’ refers to the ethos and practices of removing barriers to, and providing and promoting new opportunities for learning. It is more about an approach and a mindset than a set of technologies or a way of teaching and is focussed around the learning community rather than the didactic teacher-student relationship. Catherine Cronin’s excellent presentation, Navigating The Marvellous which presents openness within the context of higher education and the social and technological practices of modern learners and educators.
The last few years have seen the rise of ‘Open’ on the educational agenda, in part due to the buzz around MOOCs being a disruptor to education. However, most mainstream MOOCs have been institutionalised and bent to fit existing educational practices, so we’re seeing the buzzword become less relevant. Open Education and Open Educational Resources in contrast are becoming more so, as the worldwide Open Education Week site conveys . The affordances that technology offer Open Learning have been seized around the fringes by Open Educators that seek to exploit technology and challenge educational paradigms.
The conversation around Open Education is active in Scotland, with practitioners who have instigated Open Badges projects and in Wales where this years #OER15 conference is being hosted. The DigiLit Leicester project, who we talked about in our ET trends for 2015, also hosted the first OER Schools conference earlier this year, helping schools and colleges to further understand the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and how to create and promote their own resources.Cable Green’s keynote from #OER15 addresses the current and future state of OER and the benefits to education and society.
Whilst researching this post, I came across a previous project that took place at Falmouth a few years back called Openspace, which promoted sharing of Open Educational Resources and corroborates existing research into the field. It states that OER use can aid recruitment, enhance institutional reputation and catalyse collaboration and uptake of new technologies. The Openspace website is no longer active, but if anyone at the institution is interested in how technology can support Open Educational practice, get in touch with the team.
