Inbuilt within Learning Space is the option of multiple reports that track activity within a module page. This monitoring feature can be particularly useful if you are wanting to gain an insight into the popularity of content or to track use of a activity, such an assessment hand-in point.
Tracking engagement and module activity helps teaching staff to reflect on the activities and resources made available to students through the learning environment. As an example using the Activity report academic staff are able to check the amount of views per resource, along with most last accessed information. Using this information staff are able to assess and evaluate content, in addition to keeping resources current.
Reports can also be used to track an individual’s engagement, highlighting their activity or actions of a specific resource. Additionally real time reports are available should you need specific information, detailed to the minute they are particularly useful for monitoring online assessment.
Should you wish to make use of the report function within Learning Space we’ve created a guide to give an overview of all the options available, and as always the team are on hand to advise if you have any questions or queries.
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 various projects being undertaken within the sector.
Inclusivity, by definition, means that everyone regardless of origin, background or ability is included in whatever activity it is that is being delivered. So, inclusive practice is about making sure that technology is used to create activities and materials that everyone can access and make use of. But it is also about using pedagogical techniques that ensure everyone can get involved and their contributions are valued equally, whilst making the most of individual strengths for the benefit of the whole group.
Inclusive practice within teaching may include providing online course content in a variety of formats and making this accessible on a variety of devices. The Open University have recently implemented a system to present VLE content in accessible formats and tools such as Gitbook facilitate publishing material in web, pdf and ebook formats. You might also find our post on re-designing learning content for online delivery useful in this regard.
Where large amounts of text are used, Educators might consider a screen capture using Snagit or an audio recording with Vocaroo. A transcript should also be provided and for video, services like Youtube and Vimeo provide automated closed captioning. For presentations, recording a Movenote to accompany the powerpoint will enable students to refer back to the lecture material and you might encourage your students to make use of tools like Cogi to record their own notes.
Key to an ‘outstanding’ institutional approach is to involve students with a diverse set of needs in developing the digital environment and that all technological investments consider the impact on access, inclusion and equality.
JISC have also published some helpful guides on getting started with accessibility and providing an inclusive HE experience. The inclusive HE would; ensure that lecture/seminar materials are available online prior to the lecture, provide an institutional means of lecture capture, support students in note taking and in their own lecture capture and provide policy on the creation of learning materials and accessibility standards.
Many universities have already made progress in promoting inclusion, Oxford Brooks, Plymouth University and the University of Sheffield are just some of the institutions who have provided guidance for staff to help develop better academic practice in this area.
At Falmouth, the team are working with our BA (Hons) Business Entrepreneurship staff and students to reimagine large text resources, traditionally given as core reading. Learners are co-creating video, audio and interactive images formats that make the learning more accessible and facilitate development of new skills in media production.
Bhagat, D & O’Neill, P (2011) Inclusive Practices, Inclusive Pedagogies: Learning from Widening Participation Research in Art & Design Higher Education CHEAD/ Ukadia Croydon
MoodleMoot is the annual conference for users of Moodle and the 22nd-24th March saw the UK event take place in Dublin. Falmouth’s Learning Space, like the majority of VLEs in the UK is built upon Moodle, so it is an excellent opportunity to find out more about upcoming features and how other HEIs are using the platform.
The first day usually takes the form of a HackFest, where participants explore and develop with Moodle functionality. Key themes for this year were Learning Analytics, Assessment and MOOC Design.
The main conference begins on day two with themes including Adoption where Middlesex University talked about inclusive learning, academic and professional service partnerships and analytics tools like Tableau to monitor and drive engagement. Within the Develop strand, the Open University presented on their new theme and also developing a tool to deliver VLE material in multiple formats which provides better accessibility for students. Check out the OU #Mootie16 write up for more. The importance of User Experience (UX) design and usability testing was also raised. Administration covered Southampton Solent’s approach to rollover and why they don’t undertake it (each module having a start and end date, students and staff can then access old modules up to 3 years).
The Moodle website documents some of the major features of the platform. Contact the team if you are interested to use these within your course. In addition, twice a year the community runs a the Learn Moodle MOOC that helps educators create courses and learning activities and peer review the work of colleagues across the globe.
Recently there have been a resurgence in podcasting, productions such as This American Life’s Serial have helped to popularise a media format that had previously dwindled; in 2014 alone Apple anticipated its users listened to 7 billion podcasts. A greater choice of podcasting apps and widespread use of smartphones have played their part in making episodic audio more accessible to individuals, and we look to education to see if this format could be utilised more in taught delivery.
Audio recordings as part of course content are commonly used in fully distant delivery, here at Falmouth our home based MA in Professional Writing use audio recordings to accompany tasks and documentation on a weekly basis, with tutors providing a guiding voice through the learning journey. At the University of Leicester podcasts are used to supplement sessions and weekly activities while at the Open University they have recently released OU Podcasts.
But how easy is it to get started with audio recording if it’s something new to you? With a range of free and open source tools available it can be quite daunting when finding the right combination of hardware and software to get started. Although, making use of specific audio recorders using your own hardware such as a mobile phone is also an option. Apps such as Dictaphone and Voice Recorder are easy to use and allow you to record voice straight from your phone, while tools such as Audacity and Audition allow you to add effects and edit your recordings. As with any tool we’d recommend liaising with a learning technologist if you’re unsure where to start or have any questions to make the process as beneficial as possible. For those who have access to Lynda.com a great selection videos and tutorials are available specifically for podcasting.
While on the subject, for podcasts specifically relating to Educational Technology #EdChat Radio and Moving at the Speed of Creativity are worth checking out. Also available to download is Radio 4 Series The Educators featuring interviews with people aiming to change the face of education.
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 various projects being undertaken within the sector.
The flipped classroom is not a new method for learning, and actually refers to techniques that have been used for a while now. You may or may not realise that you’re using these techniques in your teaching. If you’re not, then the best reason for adopting a flipped approach to teaching and learning is that it offers pedagogical advantages. Within this post I am going to focus on a few different ways that learning can be flipped.
Knowledge transfer → knowledge assimilation, and just in time teaching
CC-BY-NC 2.0 licensed image by Derek Bruff
From the image you can see that Mazur proposes is that knowledge transfer should be covered prior to attending class, and that the class time be used to help students assimilate what they have read or watched prior to coming to class. The ‘flip’ is simply that knowledge transfer happens outside class, and knowledge assimilation happens in class.
Mazur puts emphasis on the assimilation of knowledge within the classroom through peer interactions. Content and readings that the students need to receive are disseminated prior to a class based session and students are expected to engage in that transfer of knowledge. Within the class he then poses questions and problems and polls students on their answers (so they commit to an opinion). Once that is done the students discuss between them and the ones that understand articulate it to the others. The questions and problems that are asked during the class time are usually based on results of quizzes that students are asked to complete before the lecture. This type of learning is referred to as ‘just in time’ teaching as the schedule and questions for the class session are often not determined until very close to its delivery.
Blending ‘just in time’ teaching and peer instruction are not the only approaches, and whilst there is no one correct way of doing things it’s probably safe to say that an approach which sees the students actively engaged in class, rather than passive, is likely to lead to them learning more. A visual idea of how the flipped classroom could work based on the above, is given below:
Farmer, 2015
This brings me onto Experiential Learning. This certainly isn’t a new idea, and was first talked about in the early 1900’s by John Dewey:
“The Teacher and the book are no longer the only instructors; the hands, the eyes, the ears, in fact the whole body, become sources of information, while teacher and textbook become respectively the starter and the tester. No book or map is a substitute for personal experience; they cannot take the place of the actual journey” (Dewey, 1915, p74).
Fast forward 100 years, and the same things are being discussed, just in a slightly different contexts. Technology is now part of the delivery of a flipped environment, using tools to engage the learner with materials and activities outside of the classroom, allow synchronous and asynchronous discourse, and acquire knowledge.
There is a lot of overlap in the phrases used for things like experiential, active and flipped learning. There are differences, but the general consensus is that getting students to access content and engage in activities designed to develop their understanding before class, and then using the class time to discuss and engage in depth brings issues, ideas and questions to the surface. The pre-class content and activities develops their knowledge and understanding more effectively when discussed and reflected on in class (Farmer, 2015).
Flipped learning offers the best of both online and face to face learning. In a similar vain to the message in the Lens on… Blended Learning post a while back, flipped learning should offer a seamless transition between the students’ own learning environment and the classroom. Each should compliment the other, with purpose and meaning being paramount. Students should be able to have the opportunity to experiment with ideas to learn through doing, in a supported environment where they learn from everything they do, apply their knowledge into problem solving, and assimilate their knowledge to develop it into concrete experience (Kolb, 1984).
Whilst researching for this blog post, what I didn’t find is much research about flipped learning in arts and creative subjects. There is a lot of information about the marked improvement of results and performance in science, technology, engineering and maths areas. It would be interesting to work up reasoning behind the lack of literature around flipped learning for creative subjects: is it because the nature of these disciplines is already experiential, and active? Engagement within a class environment is participative, and less didactic?
Educational Technology are very interested in learning more about how you engage your students inside and outside the classroom. Do you encourage a dynamic environment within your teaching spaces? How do you think it improves what you do and how your students learn?
JISC’s Annual Digifest offers a fantastic opportunity to connect with colleagues across FE and HE and share some great practice around Educational and Information Technologies. 2016’s event took place across on 2nd-3rd March at Birmingham’s ICC and was formed of keynotes, workshops, seminars and hands-on technology displays. I attended on behalf of Falmouth University alongside a colleague from FXPlus, the University’s Shared Service Provider.
The theme of this year’s festival was to celebrate the ‘Power Of Digital’ to address challenges faced by institutions; such as keeping up with increasing demand on infrastructure and that technology adoption and understanding by students is moving at a faster pace than HEI’s are able to keep up with.
Plenary Day 1
As part of the Plenary session on day 1, Andrew Harrison talked about transforming learning spaces through technology and rather than silo-ing off activity, having spaces that celebrate inter-disciplinarity (co-incidentally a theme for the week’s #LTHEchat). Harrison promoted virtual and physical spaces that are complementary, that have technology fully integrated and that facilitate experimentation, suggesting that we want less gaffa tape holding up projector leads. He identified the challenge that HE’s face of losing real estate as learning evolves a from didactic to active models, providing flexible learning spaces means a loss of real estate. Melbourne learning lab was cited as an interesting example of a tiered learning space hacked out of an old lecture theatre and that a successful learning space will consider realms of Space , Place, Process & Experience.
Donna Lanclos continued with a series of provocations to educators and challenged delegates to develop pedagogies that work “whether the power comes on or not” and, in a similar fashion to Harrison, suggested a focus shift to Place and Presence as opposed to Tools and Practice stating “our role is to help people explore, not hand them a tool and tell them how to use it”. Lanclos talked about the intensification of presence through digital devices, in that we can be in virtual and physical space at the same time and that staff need to feel supported in these areas. An audience member asked if Digital can make better teachers and the simple response was No, but in discussion the plenary panel agreed that technology has changed what teaching can be and it can be a motivator to improve one’s practice.
#digifest16@TheContentMine No one really talked about the potential to change the “learn”-“teach” balance. for me digital changes democracy
Understanding your Institution’s Digital Practice
This mapping workshop built up on JISC’s work in the area of Digital Capability and used an extension of the Visitors and Residents model to map digital practice at an organisational level. James Clay presented some real world examples of the V&R spectrum talking about people who buy from amazon.com as visitors and those who buy and leave reviews as moving towards a resident mode. Equally on Twitter we may have retweeted/posted something today, but in resident mode we might @reply to someone or comment on a retweet. Lawrie Phipps also noted that we may not leave a “social trace” even if we have an account with a service and that the V&R spectrum is not static and that technologies and practices are ever evolving.
The mapping activity asked us to visualise practice within our own institutions and is designed to help staff discover where and how technology is being used and the level of anticipated or actual engagement. The mapping template is free to use and would be a brilliant exercise to undertake across organisational departments. I can already see how this activity would be useful for our Falmouth ICT and FXPlus IT teams to compare our own perceptions of Digital Practice.
FELTAG
This session focused on progress made since the last update to FELTAG report published by the department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). The panel considered how the Further Education Learning Technology Action Group has enabled institutions to argue a case for new technology rather than a common argument for efficiency being getting rid of teaching staff. Poor implementation of technology creates workload. Warwickshire College Group and South Staffordshire College cited a move to Google Apps and more specifically Google Classroom has enabled learning to happen anywhere, on any device. Deployment of Chromebooks has improved energy efficiency and reduced maintenance costs. Highbury college involved all staff and students in their Digital Futures Strategy, creating a sense of collaboration and ownership.
Key to all of this, and an emergent theme from the conference, was fostering a Culture of Innovation within the organisation above a Culture of Compliance. Concentrating on people and wellbeing, and having supportive leaders who are prepared to take risks, were common links between panel members, one adding that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. It was also noted that statistics are often the enemy of innovation and slow the pace of change.
Echoing the morning keynote, the panel talked about the danger of putting students in a linear environment that isn’t open, social and collaborative like they are used to and that traditional classroom teaching does not replicate life. Students in one college described letters as “things that dead people did”, SMS as “aggressive” but mobile apps as “friendly” and that we need to consider this when making use of technology to support learning. We need to ask questions of our institutional systems such as “How does the VLE support learning?”, “do we just need better ways to communicate?”.
Concerns were expressed from the audience that FELTAG was being used as a stick with which to punish those not complying with 10% online provision as set out in the recommendation. I think this may be true where organisations are not prepared to shift ingrained paradigms, but what FELTAG does is enable a conversation to happen around appropriate use of Technology Enhanced Learning and certainly in FE it seems to be supporting improvements.
Plenary Day 2
The Plenary session on day 2 focused on The Power of Digital in Learning & Teaching. JISC’s Sarah Davies led the session and added the broader picture of current and future work across the sector. Heather McDonald talked about the effect that technology will have on hollowing out middle economy jobs and that the future will see leading educators beamed into classrooms and an extension of Self Organised Learning Environments, as popularised by Sugatra Mitra. I feel that there there may be an element of social learning missing in this prediction and that it presents a future in which the didactic model of teaching hasn’t evolved. McDonald did however, go on to say that in the light of the TEF and with reference to OFSTED that we should own and define what excellent teaching is in the future and this not be in the hands of Government.
John Traxler asked “What killed the mobile learning dream?” And answered by saying that ‘Mobile Learning’ was a product of its time and arose from the aspirations of research into anytime, anywhere learning. He continued by saying that Mobile Learning initiatives were often driven by Institutes with access to devices, but now the technology is cheap, robust, easy to use, and social. This changes the dynamic of mobile learning to an “outside in rather than inwards, top down approach”. Traxler suggested that we now need to address the challenges of an abundance of devices.
Ian Dolphin opened by drawing attention to the Educause Next Generation Digital Learning Environment Initiative which argues that the VLE should move from a teacher centred model to one that supports collaboration, analytics for advice, personalisation and accessibility. Dolphin also noted that the expanding field of learner analytics raises more ‘non digital’ questions, around things such as ‘informed consent’. This view is consistent with feedback from the Open University at last year’s DigiFest, who noted that increasingly students are asking about what is being done with the vast amounts of data being collected and held about them
Chrissi Nerantzi’s talk, Wondering while Wandering addressed the rise of playfulness in Learning and Teaching, but that people are quickly discouraged from playing and innovating if the culture doesn’t support it. Also that technology shouldn’t drive learning and teaching, but in reference to the Enhance, Empower, Extend framework, we can play with it if we are empowered. Balloons were released into the audience throughout the talk and as we played Sarah Davies concluded the session by asking how do you enable play within an organisation? How would senior managers allow this? Nerantzi responded by changing terminology, saying experimentation is play and teaching staff experiment within their subject disciplines so why not in teaching. Also from experience, when academics become ‘students’, their practice develops and failures may produce many forms of ritual learning.
Davies added that developing a model of students as partners, allows a shared understanding of learning and experimentation.
I wasn’t able to attend further sessions on day two, but again an enjoyable #Digifest16 with some great speakers and fellow delegates. Having been for the last 3 years, the format continues to improve and it’s great to see such great practice within organisations that are empowering their staff and students to do more with technology to support learning.
Image courtesy of