Staff development TEL Workshops: October 2014

We'd just like to disseminate the details of the technology enhanced learning sessions we are running during October, as part of the wider Learning Services development provision.

The following workshops are intended for staff (both lecturers and support teams), the details are below, and the online booking form is available from:

• Learning Services Workshops

Flipping your teaching model: the how and the why (21st October: 12:00 to 13:00)

The flipped classroom is a teaching model which integrates the use of online and face to face teaching spaces to maximise the learning experience. The broad approach is to use the online for pre and post session activities, to enable the face to face teaching to be more active and problem based. This workshop will discuss what it is, and provide hands-on experience at developing a flipped classroom approach.

Getting more out of your LearnUCS module (21st October: 13:00 to 14:00)

This workshop is intended as a question and answer session, around how you might get more out of your use of LearnUCS. The session will weave actual uses by lecturers at UCS around effective uses of video, collaborative tools, reflective tools, and assessment tools.

Using social media to become a connected educator (22nd October: 11:00 to 12:00)

Social media is becoming increasingly important as a means of sharing ideas and work. This workshop will explore ways you can harness social media to enhance your own personal learning environment. The session will focus on the application of Twitter and YouTube to discover material and resources.

How clickers can change the way you teach (22nd October: 12:00 to 13:00)

Clickers (audience response systems) offer the lecturer a simple, non threatening way to enhance the effectiveness of student participation within a teaching session, and open up opportunities to improve formative feedback mechanism. This session will introduce clickers, question writing and work through deployment strategies.

Monitoring student engagement and performance in your LearnUCS Course (22nd October: 13.00 to 14.00)

With the inclusion of more interactive tools and learning designs within LearnUCS lecturers are able to make use of the Retention Centre. This new feature allows lecturers to check on student progress within their course according to criteria of their choice. Students' participation and engagement are visually displayed, alerting the lecturer to any potential risk and students who are excelling.

Creating talk over powerpoints and similar videos (22nd October: 14.00 to 15.00)

A popular request from staff is, how can they create short talk over powerpoints / presentations which they can share with their students? This session will cover the rationale, what do you want to create and how is this embedded within your learning model, and providing the hands-on experience of creating the video and embedding within LearnUCS.

Designing a group based learning activity (23rd October: 12:00 to 13:00)

This workshop will discuss the opportunities for enhancing learning through group based learning activities, and how technologies might more effectively facilitate this learning model. The technology enhanced, group based learning activities will focus on the group tools within LearnUCS, and the social media. We’ll be exploring activities where they will create and share content.

Getting started with the LearnUCS Quiz engine in your teaching and assessment models (23rd October: 13:00 to 14:00)

Objective testing in LearnUCS (the quiz engine) is probably one of the most under utilised tools with the VLE, and it tends to be viewed as only useful for lower order learning skills. This session aims to challenge this perception as it is argued the tool offers significant benefits as a formative and summative assessment feedback tool, and we'll ensure you have the technical skills to design and develop an objective test using LearnUCS.

We hope to see you at one of these sessions. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please email elevate@ucs.ac.uk

Great Yarmouth: HE Professional Discussion Day

The Elevate Team ran a two hour discussion as part of Great Yarmouth College's "HE Professional Discussion" day on the 16th July.

The slides are available below. The intention was to start lots of conversations around current and potential use of technology enhanced learning within their course design. The focus was to pitch it around how people could discover and share ideas. Therefore, we spent time unpacking support routes and communities of practice, fed by information from the Elevate Team blog.

From my perspective the session went very well, we managed to surface lots of practice which was currently going on across the course teams, and explore how we could implement a very straight forward learning design based on the flipped classroom model.

The learning model seemed to find lots of traction within the group (unless they were agreeing in the hope I'd go away). We worked through:

1. tweaking the menu on LearnUCS so it is really clear what students need to do (so lots of task 1, task 2).
2. including clear instructions at the start of each task
3. embedding a youTube video (which they might create as a talk over powerpoint) or a twitter discover and share activity
4. followed by a short quiz which asks questions about the embedded activity, including a free text question
5. the final activity (post taught session) was to use a course blog to capture what key concepts the student took from the session (similar to a two minute essay)

The discussion then shifted to using tools and strategies to help ensure this became effective. Including the effective use of the retention centre to help communications, rubrics to speed up feedback, and how to use pre-session activity could be embedded with the taught session.

The session was left where we would follow up at start of next academic year, unless we could help over the summer.

If you'd like a similar session with your course team, Department of Learning Network, then email the elevate team (elevate@ucs.ac.uk)

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Yarmouth

Elevate Team: Staff development programme Sept to Dec, 2013

This is the first heads up of our staff development package to cover September to December 2013. The emphasis of the programme is to offer shorter sessions which act to stimulate your ideas about applying these technologies within your teaching and assessment strategies.

These sessions include;

Masterclasses (30 mins)

November 12th AM in W315

• Using the peer assessment tool in LearnUCS
• How might I use a tablet (iPad or equivalent) in my teaching, learning and assessment
• What is the LearnUCS Retention Centre, and why might it be useful for a lecturer?

November 13th PM in W315

• How can I extend my teaching and assessment using web conference tools?
• I've used clickers for multiple choice questions in class, so what else can I use them for?
• What does LearnUCS offer as a learning and teaching tool?

Tasters (15 mins)

October 8th, AM in W315

• Using Clickers in your teaching
• Changing the look of your LearnUCS module
• Using the LearnUCS wiki for Student Group Work
• What does Twitter offer for your teaching?
• Bring externals into your teaching using the GoTo Meeting Conference Software

These short sessions are supported through the 1-2-1 mechanisms with a more structured deployment of the hub and spoke model at UCS Ipswich. A timetable will be made available of when and where we'll be based for staff drop-ins.

• Waterfront (Floors 2 & 3): Wednesday 9.30 to 12.30
• James Hehir: Thursday 9.30 to 12.00
• Arts: Monday 9.30 to 12.00

Our generic workshop programme will start in January 2014. However, we will be providing a selection of online workshops through LearnUCS from October 2013, and we would encourage you to request bespoke workshops for your course team. Please email elevate@ucs.ac.uk to discuss your ideas.

The online workshops include;

• Using objective testing (LearnUCS Quiz) in your teaching and learning
• ePortfolios for the reflective learner
• Making time for discussion: how to flip your classroom

For background and reflections on the Elevate Team staff development programme (2012/13), see

• https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12497737/reports/DevelopingstafftoeffectivelyuseLearningTechnologiesatUCSReflectionsfrom201213.pdf

Getting started with objective tests in teaching - a 3.5 hour online course

I'm really pleased to announce the Elevate Team are rolling out our first online course, which is offered as an alternative to our face to face workshop, or our unstructured FAQs.

This course is based on our Getting Started with Objective Testing, and lasts approximately 3.5 hours, with a week to complete it. On successful completion we'll send you a Certificate of Attendance.

The rationale for the course is objective testing in LearnUCS (the quiz engine) is probably one of the most under utilised tools with the VLE, and it tends to be viewed as only useful for lower order learning skills. This course aims to challenge this perception as it is argued the tool offers significant benefits as a formative feedback tool.

For instance, in a recent review of the Viewpoints Curriculum Design Workshop produced at the University of Ulster, when reviewing the principles of good feedback section it made constant reference to using objective testing for both formative and summative assessments. There was also reference to more creative learning activities where students are required to create objective tests.

The rationale for this short, online course is there is interest and significant untapped potential for staff to use objective tests in their teaching, learning and assessment. This course will make you aware, update your skills and build confidence in using objective testing in your teaching.

What are the course dates?

The course will commence on the 11th Feb, and run until the 15th. You will probably spend about 3.5 hours on the tasks within the course.

How do you enrol?

We are approaching this differently to our usual model of embedding it with our LearnUCS. This course is actually hosted in CourseSites.Com, which is offered by Blackboard. This means you do not need to be a member of UCS to complete the course, or use a UCS login. We are hoping this will help those across the Learning Network and beyond.

To enrol, simply visit the following URL and follow the self enrolment option.

• https://www.coursesites.com/s/_Elevate1

Would you like to better understand how to enhance your teaching through technology? If yes, this MOOC is for you ...

If you'd like to better understand how you might enhance your teaching through the better use of technology, the Association of Learning Technologists (ALT) are running a MOOC (Massive open online course) starting in April 2013 which addresses this very question.

This course is free and online. To find out more information and to register visit >>> http://octel.alt.ac.uk/

The emerging ideas and content are very exciting and map nicely to the emerging offering from UCS.

The question you might ask is why register? what is in it for you?

I'd suggest there are a number of really positive outcomes;

• a better appreciation of the opportunities which technology can offer your teaching


• opportunities to develop connections with people across UK HE


• opportunities to discover resources which you can use within your teaching and assessment


• chance to transfer the delivery and learning model of the MOOC to your course design(s)

If you do register, it would be great if you emailed the Elevate Team to inform us. We could then arrange a cross institutional meeting to see about how people can take their ideas further, and also discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of the MOOC style deliver.

University of Leeds Casebook: L&T - worth a coffee break

One of the activities in my "What can Wolsey do for my teaching" session I run as part of the e-Skills for e-Learning Course is to widen our horizons in terms of how people have been using VLEs in their teaching at other UK HEIs. To do this, I simply pick another UK HEIs case studies area and encourage staff to spend time reviewing the case studies. The one I used yesterday was the University of Leeds Casebook. This site covers case studies from two perspectives, the learning and teaching focus (Assessment, Evaluation, Supporting Students etc.,) and technology (VLE, Audio, Mobile, Quiz tools etc.,).

I'd suggest if you have time over a coffee, to kick back and browse through the case studies to give a heads up on potential uses, success and failures. See

• http://www.sddu.leeds.ac.uk/casestudies/

If you'd like to discuss how these ideas might be included within your teaching, simply email us at elevate@ucs.ac.uk. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

 

Opportunities for your staff development: JISC Online Events

There are a couple of JISC online events coming up which you might find really useful.

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JISC Webnar: Curriculum Design - changing the paradigm
2nd November, FREE

see >>> http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2011/11/webinarcurriculumdesign

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JISC Online Conference: Learning in Transition
22nd to 25th November 2011, £50 Registration

See >>> http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningpedagogy/elpconference11/programme.aspx

Keynote speakers include:

David Puttnam, Lord Puttnam of Queensgate
Bill Rammell Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Plymouth University
Mike Sharples, Professor of Educational Technology at the Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University
Ewan McIntosh CEO, NoTosh and expert speaker on finding creative ways of using emerging technologies in education

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Advanced eSkills Workshop - Manipulating the Gradebook, Course Statistics and the Dashboard

The Elevate Team ran its first workshop session as part of the Advanced eSkills for eLearning initiative for staff at UCS.  The session was titled "Manipulating the Gradebook, Course Statistics and the Dashboard to meet your needs", seven members of staff attended the workshop, which I didn't think was too bad considering the time of year with exams and marking being high on the agenda.

I took the opportunity at the start of the session to show the attendees how to deploy a survey, every UCS module contains the official module feedback form as a survey.  A discussion ensued about how well used the online surveys were, one lecturer confirmed that they used the online survey and were getting 100% response rate.  This may have been due to the "cunning" use of the Adaptive Release feature in Blackboard, students have to complete the survey before the essay submission point becomes available.

The rest of the session was to cover the following topics:

• Enabling Statistics for items, folders etc.


• Viewing Statistics


• Running module/course reports


• Early Warning System


• Performance Dashboard


• Grade Centre
  
  
  
  • Hide/Show Columns
  
  
  • Smart Views
  
  
  
  

We moved to a more hands on approach and had the attendees follow my lead, starting with enabling/disabling statistics for items, folders, survey etc. and then moving on to how you can view those statistics.  Depending on the module, course or community that is being used, the criteria may need to be modified.  For a normal module, you should be able to select length of the module with no issues, but for some course and community areas, the criteria may need to be narrowed down due to the number of users on that area.  Sometimes the statistics have been known to time out if there are a large number of users and the date criteria is also covering a wide range.

Next we looked at how to run module/course wide reports for a number of activities.  We spent some time going through each of the reports, again mentioning the possible issues with the criteria and why they may need to change that criteria.  Once a few of the attendees had run some reports, we moved to the Early Warning System.

The Early Warning System is a rule-driven communication tool that sends email messages to Students and their Observers when the criteria for the rule is triggered. Rules can be based upon a test score, a due date, or Course access. Each notification message is fully customizable. A notification log is created for each student who receives a Early Warning message.

The above is Blackboard description of the Early Warning System, we went through and created a rule to pull through students that hadn't accessed the module area with a set number of days.  We then looked at how the system can notifications to those picked out by the rule.  A quick discussion was had regarding the types of rules that could be created, and a quick look at the Performance Dashboard.

One area that is heavily used within Wolsey is the Grade Centre, most lecturers use this feature due to the number of online submissions being made at UCS.  Although this is currently being done, there is little knowledge of what can actually be done via the Grade Centre, rather than just adding grades or feedback.

First off we had a look at hiding columns to tidy up the view, especially if areas have a number of quizzes, assessments etc.  The Elevate Team has noticed a growing number of problems where lecturers are choosing to hide a column from their Grade Centre view rather than hiding the column from the students' My Grades view.  This has led to a number of issues so we spent 10 minutes discussion what should be made unavailable from the students' view whilst waiting for grades to be ratified.  We went through the complete process from initial creation of the submission area to releasing the grades.

After this we had a look at Smart Views, how they can be used and how to create them, this was the area that created the most buzz in the room.  Many of the lecturers mark work from other modules, usually they are given a group or selection of students rather than them all.  They could really see the benefit in creating a smart view of just the students that they need to mark, and how they could also just include the column of the assessment they were working with.  Saving them having to sometimes scroll through hundreds of students with many columns in the Grade Centre.

So, overall a good session, the attendees had quite a mix of skills and knowledge of Wolsey, we sometimes had to skip back to more basic elements, but it was a useful session for all involved.

This workshop will become part of the stand alone Elevate staff development programme.

external (netskills) event on blogs and social networking

Just a quick heads up for an event on the 23rd March in Birmingham. The JISC Netskills service are running a staff development event on the 23rd March in Birmingham entitled, "community participation with blogs and social networking". For more information, including prices, see ... http://bit.ly/gt3Tvs

 

Thoughts from objective testing workshop

I ran the last of the Elevate Teams three sessions for the e-skills for e-learning programme, with a workshop on Using objective testing in learning and teaching. This was designed as an introduction, so we looked at what are the characteristics of objective testing, how it might be used, some principles of effective formative feedback, walked through how to create and deploy a Wolsey Quiz, and a TurningPoint (clicker) quiz, and finally unleased the attendees in groups to design and deploy these objective tests.

The discussion and sharing of ideas was very rich as the exercises allowed us to quickly overcome the technical aspects & perceived barriers and focus on question design, and implementation. Infact, two of the groups didn't follow the instructions of developing objective quizzes around Tea, and instead started to work up quizzes they planned to use in the next few weeks :-)

The feedback forms where positive with the mean response being "strongly agree" to the trainer helping me feel at ease and encouraged participation, while the mean response was "agree" to overall I found the content of the session helpful.

Second Session - Enhancing collaborative and group learning through innovative technologies

The Elevate team ran its second workshop through the eskills for eLearning initiative on Monday, this workshop will now work as a stand alone session in the UCS Spring 2011 Staff Development programme.

11 members of staff attended this workshop, all had been at the previous "Getting started with Wolsey" session and were ready for a new challenge.  The session plan can be found here, as you can see we working running this workshop looking mainly at the tools within Wolsey, rather than trying to cover too many cloud based tools.  I'm sure we will look at running master classes on specific applications.

We started by having a quick discussion of what the attendees though "collaboration" meant, by the nature of the level of this workshop most answer were quite traditional, with the use of chalk boards and other offline tools.  A mention of interactive whiteboards popped up, but no online collaboration tools were put forward.  We then had a chat about some online tools, mainly around blogs and wikis, no one mentioned "Wikipedia", but they had all heard of it.  But surprisingly no one knew what a wiki allowed with regards to anyone editing the page.

All attendees were amazed by this, which led very nicely in to our first activity.  The first activity was to get the attendees top use the available tools as students, to get a feel of what the students do, and how those tools work.

I had previously setup a blog using the Blackboard blog tool, posing a question about coffee, the attendees simply had to reply using the comments feature.  We introduced them to this type of use for the blog tool rather than the discussion board as we are having a growing number of staff moving from the Blackboard discussion board tool as it does become very unwieldy with lots of posts.

Staff have found that students prefer using the blog tools as it is much easier to navigate and reply to the correct posts, the downside is you lose the "threaded"  nature of a discussion board, but so far this hasn't been a negative.

After a few minutes of discussion about coffee tastes, we moved to the next task, using wikis.  For this we used the Learning Objects Team (wiki) tool, at UCS we currently have Blackboard Learn 9.0 which doesn't have its own wiki tool, that 9.1 does.

I had previously setup a wiki, asking the attendees to spend 10-15 minutes researching educational uses of wikis, then asking them to create their own page within the wiki and enter their findings.  After this, I then went in and showed how anyone could edit the wiki pages and create links between them, creating a navigational structure.  Explaining how this tool can be used for so much collaborative work.

At this point a number of the attendees were starting to understand the potential of these tools and how they could use them in their teaching.

I then went through and showed a few live modules that were using these tools and how they were being used, again this reaffirmed the thoughts of the attendees.  We then spent the next 45 minutes with a hands on "follow my lead" approach to actually setting up these tools in a module, this showed them just how simple it is to start using these tools.  The first tool we setup was the Group tool, as this can be a very powerful feature, we then discussed the use of blogs and journals, and the fact that a group blog is not only available to the group, it is possible for others to find and read.  If a group blog is required to be completely private to the group, the journal tool is the one to use.

After this we had a quick discussion based on the question "What is stopping you using this tomorrow?", everyone seemed genuinely enthused by the workshop and were looking forward to trying the tools out, one attendee stayed behind afterwards for a chat about setting up groups and using the journal tool for collaboration amongst those groups.

The attendees really were looking forward to the next workshop "How might you use objective testing in your teaching and learning?" being run by Andy.

First session - Getting started with Wolsey

Yesterday was the first of the Elevate Teams staff development workshops.

Around ten attendees arrived and after a brief introduction we got stuck into the first activity, a quick ten minute discussion about what people thought a VLE was and what tasks they would expect it to do. The usual elements cropped up, collaboration, resources, distance learning etc.. The one thing that wasn't mentioned was the word portal so I spent a couple of minutes describing what a portal did and how UCS has used it's VLE as a portal encapsulating both student/staff intranets, institution wide discussion boards and learning elements into one relevant point of interest.

The next activity on the agenda was a more in-depth overview of how UCS uses a VLE (Wolsey). References were made to the list drawn up from the first discussion we had.

This is where things drifted slightly from the original plan, a large percentage of the attendees had already covered the practical elements we were going to cover, the bulk of this time was instead used as a Q&A session where attendees asked more precise questions such as creating folders and structuring content. We did expand on the use of the 'Send Mail' function within Wolsey.

One surprising element which cropped up in the next activity (What is stopping you using it tomorrow?) was the fact no-one mentioned IT Skills, this has always been a caveat of previous training sessions we gave a few years ago, the main items that did rear their heads were

• Confidence performing specific tasks


• Trusting the system


• Knowing 'The processes'

All of which can certainly be rectified by providing more step-by-step guides and expanding our staff development programme, all of which are already well on their way.

It seems most people were happy going in and having a play :)

The session ended giving attendees a little time to fill in a quick post workshop form, something really for attendees to quickly note what they have learnt, take away and use as they will.

After showing the attendees the support elements and where to go for the support a couple of attendees stayed behind to run through a couple of things, but overall I think most attendees left knowing something new.. which is of course the aim!

We will adjust the session plan slightly to allow us to be more dynamic with the middle practical session.

Check out the session plan - Getting started with Wolsey in your teaching and learning

That's all for now, Aaron will be presenting the next workshop on the 14th and will be covering the collaborative side of Wolsey including groups, Wikis and Blogs.

David

Staff Development Programme (Nov & Dec 2010)

During November and December 2010 the team will be running a number of face to face staff development events. For more information on how to book your place please contact us at wolsey@ucs.ac.uk. Also if you'd like us to run a staff development session for you and colleagues please contact us.

Workshops (open to all staff)

• Getting started with using WOLSEY in your Teaching and Learning (7th Dec - 10.00 to 12.00 - East Building T302)

Masterclass (local request)

• The potential application of QR Codes in a Library context (25th Nov - UCS Librarian's Meeting - WSC)


• Enhancing face to face feedback and assessing knowledge using classroom technologies (15th Dec - Learning Resources Team)

Seminars (open to all staff)

• Enhancing face to face feedback and assessing knowledge using classroom technologies (10th Dec - 12.30 to 1.30 W115)

Drop-in Series (open to all staff)

• 23rd Nov - Waterfront - 10.00 to 11.30


• 2nd Dec - Waterfront - 2.00 to 3.30


• 8th Dec - Waterfront - 10.00 to 11.30