Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP

Tag: conference

RIDE 2023 – Sustaining Innovation: Research and Practice

The Centre for Online and Distance Education (CODE) is a University of London initiative focusing on research, training, capacity building, and strategy and policy development to support innovation in online and distance education. On 28 and 29 March 2023, CODE held its 17th annual conference – a hybrid in-person and online event – on Research in Distance Education (RIDE). The theme of RIDE 2023 was sustaining innovation and sustainable practices.

Here are a half-dozen of my personal highlights and takeaways from the conference:

Photo of the outside of Senate House in London. A grey imposing Art Deco building.

Senate House London

  1. In-person conferences are better than virtual conferences. Last week I met someone from my undergraduate days, a person I hadn’t seen in four decades. And I caught up with a colleague from the early days of the TEL team, who is now working in London. (It’s remarkable how many Portsmouth EdTech people seem to have ended up in London!) It was great to reminisce and to hear what is new. These interactions I guess might have happened online, but I doubt it.
  2. Hybrid conferences are hard to get right. The Senate House was constructed in the 1930s, and it is simply not set up to handle a hybrid conference. The organisers did their best to ensure that in-person and online participants enjoyed an equivalent experience, but the limitations of the technology and the physical spaces in the building made it difficult. I can understand why conference organisers want to run hybrid events (and why teachers want to run hybrid lectures) but these are hard things to get right. I have attended many excellent online conferences, and many excellent in-person conferences, but I cannot recall a hybrid event that has ever worked seamlessly.
  3. The sector is continuing to debate and think-through the opportunities and threats posed by generative AI. Professor Mike Sharples, from the OU, delivered an excellent keynote address. He noted that he had given the talk several times recently, and each time he had to update it: developments in this field are currently happening on a weekly basis. (It was also interesting to learn that Mike began research into AI and education during his PhD – about 40 years ago!)
  4. The concentration on sustainability provided an interesting lens through which to view our practice. One session looked at the move from in-person, paper-based exams to online exams. The claim was that this was a much more environmentally friendly approach to distance education. That might be so – but a full accounting was not given of the environmental costs of online. A lot more research is needed.
  5. The University of London Worldwide is experimenting with AI tutors. The intention is not to replace human tutors with AI tutors but to see whether this technology can help provide some elements of a personalised education at scale. They are just at the start of this project – it will be interesting to see how it develops.

Credit Image: Photo by Open Journey

New year, blank page, fresh start!

The festive season can be a hectic time for us all, rushing here there and everywhere, feeling that you’re constantly racing against the clock to get things done at home and at work. The last minute dash to the shops to buy your loved ones gifts for Christmas, the big food shop to get the all important ingredients for your Christmas dinner (the most eagerly awaited meal of the year!) and the work deadlines that seem to be ongoing and need to be met before everyone breaks up for annual leave – it can be relentless and can easily become overwhelming. 

At this busy time, it’s important to take time out not only to recharge your batteries but also to take stock of what you’ve achieved over the last year, time to reflect and to look ahead to the coming year. The beginning of a new year brings with it a fresh start and blank page for all our hopes for 2020.

‘Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Make it a good one’. - Brad Paisley

So, before we start thinking about the Tel team’s hopes for 2020, and all the things we want to achieve and work on, I would like to spend some time practicing ‘reflection’ (for tips on reflection visit my post: Through the mirror – learning through reflection) and look at what we’ve worked on in 2019. It’s easy to forget what we’ve achieved in a year and that’s why it’s so important when actively reflecting to make sure you have recorded your achievements and things you would like to improve on in some way or another. Our blog site, Tel Tales, is a great way of keeping a record of the Tel team’s work over the year and by contributing to the site it helps us take stock of what we have learnt, whether bad or good, collaboratively.

A whistle-stop tour of a year in the life of the Tel team

Accessibility was at the forefront of our minds in 2019. We wanted to ensure staff were aware that we, as a university, have a legal requirement to provide accessible content to our students. We developed Moodle Baseline and, to help with accessibility for digital content, we installed a plugin called Ally into Moodle. We looked at Grackle for accessible Google Docs and Slides, Automatic Media Transcription and how we could convert Print-based booklets to accessible online resources.

We attended conferences such as Remaking Marking Conference, Digifest 2019,  a Adobe/Higher Times forum called: Making digital literacy a pillar of education, the 19th EAIR Forum, TED Global Conference and Wonkfest 2019.

We looked at Scenario Based Learning, Wikipedia, Online Exams in Moodle, Videos in Higher Education, Content Capture and Digital Badges. We revisited topics such as Copyright and the all-important informative Did you Know? posts for Moodle. Moodle was upgraded to 3.7. We explored the increasing interest in Audiovisual in Education.

Assessments and feedback were also running topics of 2019. We looked at the different types of online assessments we had to offer and looked at feedback and shifting culture in the way we provided feedback to our students by ‘feeding forward’ to students using Edword.

We started to think about 5G and how this may affect us, by looking at Education 4.0 and Natalie 4.0. We looked at the pedagogy behind practice in learning and how visual note taking such as doodling could aid concentration and memory.

We revisited our social media platforms and looked at ways we could revamp them a little to increase our followers on Instagram and Twitter. So far this has worked and we are now advertising Tel and AcDev workshops, which again has helped increase the number of attendees.

We made time to reflect and looked at the importance of reflection. We explored change particularly in our current climate at the university and how we react to change. We looked at technology and our mental health and wellbeing.

Our regular guest blogger; Adrian Sharkey, kindly contributed to Tel Tales to tell us all about the new Linkedin Learning and Julian Ingle told us all about his writing retreats.

Stuart Sims and Andy Clegg joined the AcDev team and I returned from maternity leave.

We said a fond farewell to Jerry, who was seconded to IS.

Finally, we finished the year by looking at Three Useful Apps in Learning and Teaching. The 12 apps of Christmas had a make-over and was revamped into 12 days of Christmas – Learning and Teaching Advent Calendar.

Phew! I think that was everything! Surprising, when you do take the time to reflect, just how much you can achieve in one year. As you can see, for us it’s quite a lot!!

What’s in store for 2020?

As you may have been aware we have had a few internal promotions within the team: Mike Wilson has been seconded to a Senior Lecturer In Digital Learning & Innovation for part of the working week and Senior Educational Technologist for Tel the rest of the week. Shaun Searle has now been seconded into Jerry Collingswood’s post as a Senior Educational Technologist and Tom Cripps seconded to back-fill Mike’s role when he is working with AcDev. 

The new year will therefore welcome Jo Fairwood, seconded to Shaun’s original role on eLearn as an OCD, and Abigail Lee seconded to Tom’s OCD role. 

Content capture will continue to grow organically and, following a staff–student consultation, the university will be introducing a Content Capture policy in 2020.

Accessibility will continue to be a focus for the Tel team. We will also be looking at best practice when it comes to external examiners.

We will continue to explore Edword, an online platform that will allow richer feedback to students. And we will be working much more closely with the AcDev team in 2020, which we are very much looking forward to!

We intend to carry on blogging away – so please, when you have a spare five minutes, check in with us to see what we’ve been up to. And feel free to follow us on our social media platforms! Please leave comments – we appreciate any feedback you have for us.

Finally – we are always looking for guest bloggers! So if you have something of interest that you would like to share on Tel Tales then please contact me at marie.kendall-waters@port.ac.uk.

So from myself and all the team we hope you all have a very happy 2020

keep exploring

 

Image credits:

AR/VR in Education

In July 2019 I attended the TED Global Conference in Edinburgh. One of the most exciting talks at the conference included a live demonstration of volumetric video – a technological development that will surely change the nature of cinematic storytelling, sports viewing, and much else besides. The technology also has huge potential in education: one can imagine using it for field trips and virtual lectures. That educational potential, however, is unlikely to be realised in the short-to-medium term: most universities don’t have the skills, equipment or financial resources to build these immersive environments. But what universities can do – and increasingly are doing – is to investigate the educational potential of established augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology.

In early September 2019 the ALT mailing list was bombarded with “me too” responses to a post explaining how pockets of interest in AR/VR were spread across a particular institution and that it would be good to be able to somehow share that practice. UoP represents one of those “me too” responses. We know of people across the University who are exploring the potential of AR/VR for learning and for skills development. It would be great if we could bring those pockets of expertise together, in order to share tips and tricks and experience. In the first instance, a group of us from TEL and Sports Science have met to discuss this – and we hope to develop a definite proposal for how this might work over the next few weeks. Watch out for news of this. In the meantime, if you have an interest in the educational aspects of AR/VR (or volumetric video) – please drop us a line. 

Image Credit: Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

Remaking Marking Conference

Along with colleagues from about 30 different UK universities I attended the Remaking Marking: Electronic Management of Assessment conference held on 4 September 2018 at the University of Reading. I came back feeling confident that, here at Portsmouth, we are developing the electronic management of assessment (EMA) in a reasonable way. Our use of Moodle gives us an element of flexibility that some institutions, using other VLEs, are lacking. Furthermore, the drivers for implementing EMA and people’s hopes for this approach appear to be the same here as everywhere else in the sector. On the other hand, academics have some legitimate concerns – DSE worries; offline marking; having to scroll through documents; the functionality and usability of marking tools; the need to take account of disciplinary differences – and these are shared across the sector, Portsmouth included.

One worrying aspect of the conference was the number of institutions that had tried to implement a marks integration project – and failed. It seems strange that data held in one electronic system (the VLE) cannot readily be transferred to another electronic system (the Student Record System (SRS)), but this seems to be the case. It is particularly strange given that the data we want to transfer – student marks – is so important; surely we shouldn’t have to rely on an intermediate stage in which humans can introduce error? We thought we’d cracked the problem here, several years ago, but the proposed solution was not guaranteed to be sustainable at the SRS end. Perhaps the new SRS will open up new possibilities for us.

Some interesting discussions centred around:

  • the use of rubrics, and whether (and how) they should be used more widely;
  • the use of shared QuickMarks – should a central department or section provide a library of generic QuickMarks, containing links to high-quality support resources, for use across a faculty or institution?
  • the increased use of audio feedback – research suggests that students appreciate audio feedback, but only in certain cases.

One suggestion I found particularly interesting came from Dr Rachel Maxwell, University of Northampton. They thought it important to manage student expectations regarding EMA. In particular, they found that students didn’t have a clear idea of what the assessment process entails at university level. 

A student-generated illustration of the assessment process in place at the University of Northampton. (Credit: Katie May Parsons, all rights reserved)  

Header image taken from the Remaking Marking: Electronic Management of Assessment Conference (2018). Birds Migrating in Formation 
(Assessed: 12th November 2018).  Thank you to The University of Reading for letting us use their poster.

 

Digital Skills Certificate

Earlier in the year I went to Digifest 2018, the biggest conference for Education Technology in the UK. As well as a chance to meet fellow professionals the conference presents a wide range of inspirational, thought provoking ideas. These can be from large solutions like an Augmented Reality band from Edinburgh playing live on stage with an orchestra in Birmingham, that tests the limits of the Janet Network, to suggestions on simple teaching techniques.

One of the presentations I saw was from the IT Training Team at the University of Lancaster, who set up a ‘Digital Skills Certificate’ for students and staff mapped to the Jisc Digital Capability Framework, it offered online courses in a range of topics under the six elements of digital capability. When participants completed the course it gave them a ‘certificate’ that could be posted on LinkedIn, for students it also went on their Higher Education Achievement Record (HEAR) transcript. It’s a great way for students and staff to develop digital and employability skills and also be able to clearly demonstrate those skills to potential employers for placements and work beyond university.

I like to think I know a good idea when I see one and began thinking how this could be adapted for use at the University of Portsmouth. The Jisc Framework is a great tool to use in order to develop student and staff Digital Capability. In the last year we have also implemented Lynda.com, an online resource of over 10,000 courses. The University of Portsmouth version of the Digital Skills Certificate combines the use of these tools.

Click on this link to see the video.

The University of Portsmouth Digital Skills Certificate is on Moodle and available for both students and staff to self register onto. Participants choose at least one course from each element of the Framework:

  • IT Proficiency – Word, Excel, Google Drive, SPSS
  • Information, Data and Media Literacies – Excel Statistics, Data Driven Presentations with Excel and PowerPoint, SPSS for Academic Research
  • Digital Creation, Innovation and Scholarship – PowerPoint: Designing Better Slides, Introduction to Screencasting, Google Sites
  • Communication, Collaboration and Partnership – GMail, Twitter, Webex
  • Digital Learning and Self Development – complete the Jisc Digital Discovery Tool
  • Digital Identity and Well Being – Computer Security and Internet Safety, LinkedIn for Students, Digital Citizenship

The courses are from Lynda.com and can be completed at participants’ own pace, anytime, anywhere. Once the course is completed, Lynda provides a certificate of completion that can be added to LinkedIn, it also needs to be uploaded as a PDF to the Moodle assignment for that section. The next step is to complete a quiz based on the topic that has just been studied and if passed a certificate for that element of the framework is issued.

Participants can study as many of the courses as they like, but one from each element is required. When all six have been completed an overall ‘Digital Skills Certificate’ is issued, for students this will be shown on their HEAR transcript.

For further information go to: digitalskills.port.ac.uk

adrian.sharkey@port.ac.uk

@adrianjsharkey

 

A year of the TEL Tales blog

I’ve been asked to write a post to mark the fact that the TEL Tales blog is one year old. Happy birthday! Except… it’s actually a lot older than this. The current blog is in fact the third incarnation of TEL Tales: the previous two attempts limped along for a couple of months, then died.

It’s not surprising that the early TEL Tales didn’t survive – many blogs start, last for a few postings, and then fade away. The main reason that the early TEL Tales failed to thrive was simply that few people wanted to tell their tales. This is common. Last week a group of us participated in the PressED Twitter conference, which was devoted to the use of WordPress in Higher Education, and one of the presentations was called “Feel the fear and do it anyway”. The author, Suzanne Falkener, was a teaching fellow at the University of Strathclyde, and she found she had to overcome a large amount of apprehension before starting a blog. She wrote: “It’s ok to have a fear of blogging. There are a lot of ‘what ifs’ including: What if no one reads this? What if people think my blog is rubbish. What if I am publicly humiliated? What if my writing style isn’t good enough for my community?” She felt the fear and did it anyway – and the result was a blog that people found useful, with an audience that grew slowly but steadily.

I think a lot of members of the TEL team here at Portsmouth feel the same apprehension that Suzanne felt. But this time round we’ve applied more pressure to get people in the team to write something. And the same thing that happened to Suzanne happened to our team members – as Suzanne wrote: “Guess what? When I posted my first blog, nothing terrible happened. I wasn’t ridiculed. People read it.”  

We still have some people in the team who are reluctant to write. But in each and every case those people have tales to tell, and they are the ones best placed to tell them. So we’ll keep applying pressure to get them to write … and with luck we’ll still be here for the second birthday of TEL Tales.

MoodleMoot 2017

MoodleMoot UK & Ireland is held each year; it is the main Moodle conference in the UK which focuses on collaboration and sharing best practice. This year MoodleMoot ran for three days between the 10th and the 12th April, I attended the two days that make up the main conference and missed the “hackfest” on the first day which is typically more developer-led.

The choice of sessions available to attend were diverse and interesting. I was able to visit a number of sessions that have some great ideas, which I can hopefully introduce to the team.

I’ll will try to highlight some of the most relevant or interesting information from the sessions that I attended. However I would recommend searching Twitter for the hashtag #MootIEUK17 as many people were tweeting notes, comments and observations from each session. It really enhanced the first day of the conference for me (until my phone with the Twitter account died, but that’s another story!).

The first session I saw was from the University of London. They reviewed Moodle from both staff and student perspectives, specifically looking at navigation and how to improve the user experience. An example they used was how it’s difficult getting feedback to the student when the gradebook only displays a grade and no indication of feedback. From the academic point of view they discussed how it wasn’t clear if work was marked, or whether the student could or couldn’t see it. They reviewed the new themes being developed at Moodle and the problems they may face rolling them out before they were ready.

Janice Button from Plymouth University implemented the grid format which is a Moodle plugin that hides all the topics and creates a grid view of icons. When they are clicked the relevant section of content is then displayed.

The next session I attended was presented by Lewis Carr. He demonstrated how well developed badges increase engagement, creating more gamified interactions, this was interesting at Portsmouth we have looked at creating badges within Moodle and a few in academics within the University are using them. Properly thought out achievements and goals can also improve how the student progresses through a course. It was pointed out by Janice Button that from entry courses to level 5 (second year courses) the amount of content increased dramatically, this made the progress bar more daunting and the revisiting of quizzes and similar interactions dropped off as the amount of work to be done increased. Lewis also highlighted the need of social interaction and engaging the students before, during and after the course to develop and build the learning experience.

The morning sessions were interesting and informative and gave us plenty to discuss over lunch. After we’d eaten, there were pico presentations (short and snappy when compared the the morning talks) which opened the afternoon sessions and were a great way to continue. Two sessions stood out: our own Mike Wilson spoke about Assessment Enhancement and the customisations that have been developed for our Moodle installation, and Rebecca Barrington put the “oo” back into Moodle by looking at how to keep academics on-board with the development of sites, explaining how embedding resources within Moodle is a great way to enhance and develop what you already have.

My turn to present was nearing, now, I am not normally a nervous presenter but the thought of presenting on a stage with the glare of lights and a massive screen behind me contributed to the nerves this time around! Whilst I got through it with positive feedback and managed to handle a few questions reasonably well, I felt I could have been better and should I be lucky enough to do another talk will endeavour to get those nerves in check and slow down!

Looking back, there certainly wasn’t a need to be nervous, the whole day was incredibly relaxed and just a creative hub for people who are keen educators, all looking at how we can approach our teaching, training and Moodle usage in a interesting way.

A panel discussion on getting rid of the desktop and turning to only a mobile solution ended the day. This was a very open discussion with questions from the audience and a range of views. A point that resonated with me, was the idea that we should always look at what we do for those end users on a mobile as the number of active mobile users is rising. The other side of this argument however, is that development from a mobile is not really practical. Whatever we develop should allow us to be flexible though, ensuring that our end users having the easiest and most simple experience of Moodle. The new themes and tools that are being added to the newer versions of Moodle show that this is also a concern for the ‘core’ Moodle team.

Day two of the conference saw my phone die, which meant that tweeting from the @TelPortsmouth account was curbed! The sessions I would like to draw on from the second day happened just before lunch as the second day was more sedate due to the evening festivities of the reception dinner the night before.

Mary Cooch, who is known amongst the Moodle community as the ‘Moodle Fairy’, did two sessions and I attended one entitled “10 user experience improvements since Moodle 3.1” of which I had heard of most updates. It was useful to see but essentially if you go through a versions release notes they will be highlighted there (I am sure many people don’t!)

The second session and my pick of the second day was “Competency based education a look at the features in Moodle 3.1 / 3.2”. This session was interesting, informative and above all confusing! Competencies are used to “describe the level of understanding or proficiency of a learner in certain subject-related skills”. Competencies are a new and growing feature of Moodle. TEL are researching Competencies so that members of staff in the University can possibly make use of them in the future.

MoodleMoot is a fantastic event that I would suggest to anyone involved with any aspect of Moodle. It was engaging, with a great range of subjects and everything from back end/admin level sessions to those designed to be understandable for the average user. It was also a great place to ask anyone a question, everyone was approachable and for the reception dinner, a great place to hijack the Moodle stage display and use it for photos!

Image credits: https://moodlemoot.org/mootieuk17/

Learning Technologies Conference 2017 – Reflection

The 2017 Learning Technologies conference took place on 1st and 2nd February. There were two sections to the conference, the paid sessions and the open floor with free talks. The free talks were to some degree or other essentially sales pitches from trade stands on the floor. That being said, they did attempt to not be too “salesy” and provided some very useful ideas and concepts.

Learning Technologies to me implied educational technologies and this is very true about the subject matter and stands of the show, however, it looked at a wider sphere of corporate learning and systems that develop the skills required to train and enhance business learning.

I was keen to listen to as many of the shows as I could and had plenty of choice with about 81 free session to choose from. 11 Theatres (Open floor spaces) with sessions on a wide range of topics and varying perspectives on similar topics.

For the rest of this post I will summarise my notes from each session with key points that will help with your eLearning.

The sessions I attended were:

  1. Beyond the Buzz: use social learning to supercharge your training program
  2. Transforming the real learner experience
  3. OMG not another seminar about eLearning
  4. Harnessing the power of social learning
  5. (Traditional) eLearning is dead – here’s what the future holds
  6. Meet the modern learner: digital strategies to engage millennials

Beyond the Buzz: use social learning to supercharge your training program

Hosted by Docebo.

The session was ironically a lot of buzzwords and talked very little in depth about anything however the main focus was around the 70:20:10 model for learning.

Looking at how to blend formal, experimental and social learning with the split being 70% on real life experience, on the job experience and tasks and problem solving encountered through real world problems. 20% can be achieved through observation and social environments. The final 10% from traditional formal training including both face to face and online training.

It stressed that click through learning objects that are created as digital learning that might give you a quiz score and a tick to say the training is complete are not the only option to learning (This was actually a key feature of many of the presentations).

A progress line was illustrated along the Who/What/When/Why/Where idea that featured the focus of Who are the champions of the company, What can they share and offer, When can they offer this and how, Why should the information be learned? A reward system for the learner to achieve goals towards many tasks and Where can this all be hosted or acquired for others to develop their knowledge, A central location for knowledge transfer that is simple and easy to investigate is key to the process.

As this wasn’t a direct sales pitch some of the answers were left to the potential to talk to them on the trade stand and look at the product that they offer.

Conclusion:

It was an interesting starting session for the conference and looking back at my notes it actually echoes through all the session I attended. It offered a model of learning with experts available to talk through this, however reading subsequent literature the 70:20:10 model of learning has had criticism leveled at it towards the effectiveness of the model.

Transforming the real learner experience

Hosted by David Perring from Fossway.com

This session looked at the statistics behind a learners needs and key importance drivers, starting with “What makes a compelling learning technology?”

It was argued that as developers and educators we should hold higher ambitions than just acceptable. The role of acceptable is not adequate in the 21st century learners portfolio and each resource should be able to offer a great user experience and provide the information.

The question of key drivers behind what influences a good learning platform were ranked:

  1. Usability
  2. Deliver engaging learning experiences
  3. Expertise
  4. Ability to deliver learning impact
  5. Quality of partners and support
  6. Learner engagement features.

It was then asked, How can we improve with the increase in demand from many organisations to have more solutions for their learners to access content.

Surprisingly the figures had video resources as the key improvement, followed by Mobile, Blended and User generated content.

The top 5 demands of what a learning platform should offer the students were:

  1. Learner engagement
  2. Mobile learning
  3. Social / Collaborative learning
  4. Analytics and dashboard features
  5. A Virtual Classroom.

Many organisations focus on the short term operational performance but lose site of the long term and need to have a future readiness that can adapt to changing market places and challenges.

Fossway have developed PLASMA Learning.

Plan – What do I need to know?

Learn – How can I learn?

Apply – How am I using the information?

Sustain – What am I doing to achieve the long term learning goals?

Measure – How well am I doing with my targets?

Analyse – Where do I need to go next?

This model takes experiences that we want to create and looks at how to use the technology we have available to achieve that. Real learning experiences are not just the technology  but how we use it to engage the learners own learning.

It is not possible to assess learning through checklists and tick box activities, it is developed through a story and describes a journey of what a learning experience should be.

Conclusion

This was the most interesting talk of the day with a real look at the data behind the student experience. It clarified many of the ideas that we all now understand behind student learning and how the technology is key to the learner experience but is not the central point.

OMG. Not another seminar about eLearning

Hosted by Learning Heroes.

The presenter was very candid about the purpose of these free seminars and how they were offered to them due their investments in the show. The short session was focussed on old elearning skill vs the new skills required. The old model looked at the creator of resources, In-house production of materials. The new model it was argued was as the curator of materials. These would be a person that can gather information from multiple sources and evaluate the experience of other experts rather than being a subject matter expert. The ability to think laterally and find content for free over expensive charged for content.

This last part was not just about it being completely free but developing the model of a singular paid for experience per user, when you can source and disseminate materials for unlimited usage.

Conclusion

This was a very short session that felt under prepared (especially compared with the previous session). It had a the glimmer of a great idea regarding the way subject experts should develop and curate their learning information but it was lost in the fact the slides were uninteresting as was he about delivering it.

Harnessing the power of social learning

Presented by AstraZeneca

This felt irrelevant to me as from the start they were talking about compliance training for a corporate audience, however they underlined their ability to take a small team of developers and produce a resource that was beneficial to all the people within the company that required training.

The key message was that they got the end user to record and share their experiences of learning, and get others to ask questions of that experience so that everyone was learning from everyone else a little each day.

The importance of story telling and keeping information simple and understandable with the learner helping take the subject matter and distilling it down into relevant examples that then develop overall understanding.

They created a search feature for the question “How do I?” that provides each user with a blend of experience and activities that enable the learner to reach the answer to the question.

It showed again how it’s not just a tick box exercise to say you now understand the subject, or pass a test to show competency but an ongoing process of learning and reflection.

Conclusion

The session was interesting to hear a case study for the Fuse Universal product, but was focussed on compliance training.

The confusion for me came when after they finished the talk the showed a video (shot like a documentary) that was essentially the talk again. It felt that they had spent all this money on a video and decided they had to show it.

Traditional eLearning is dead what the future holds

Presented by Juliette Denny of Growth Engineering

This was the presentation that OMG (See above) wanted to be. The presenter was also dressed as a superhero (did I miss that bit out before?) but had a very positive attitude, well designed presentation and had worked hard to get the content and message to be understood.

They key point raised was this; eLearning assumes one off learning is effective. Create one resource, tick a box and you have learnt the subject. This is a flawed concept. Bloom’s Taxonomy was brought in and the idea that the goal should be to change behaviour of the learner, and key to that is making learning fun. Entertainment beats education, people want to play games and they gravitate to what they like. Learning can be seen as boring, but why should that be the case? Research from the University of Colorado shows that game based scores for activities are 11% higher than the equivalent standard test.

Mobile learning is also over taking traditional desktop learning, so the need to make content that is fun and engaging, competitive as well as multi device friendly is a major task. She posited that the human attention span has gone from 16 seconds to on 8 seconds (less than a goldfish at 9 seconds). This was why micro-learning is a more efficient way of learning for current students, apparently 17% more efficient but I was unable to get the data source for this.

Echoing back to the opening session of the day the idea of social reinforcement with 90% of learning being informal and the social aspect is the bridge into changing and adapting the learning behaviour. The idea is to make each area campaign driven and more exciting.

Conclusion

This was a very enthusiastic session and passionate towards the product that was being sold (albeit indirectly). Growthengineering.co.uk is the framework for creating competitive games that feed into their own LMS/VLE platform. They are working hard to change the approach taken by corporate clients but I am not sure that it would transfer to HE.

Final Thought

The conference was extremely interesting with a large selection of products on offer. The free seminars were interesting despite being a little sales orientated, there was still a lot of information worth reflecting on and transferring into our future decisions.

I still have a bag full of flyers to investigate and decide what might be worth considering for implementation.

The conference was vast and I hope to attend again next year as it drives learning within the business sector which will tie to what a HE institution should be offering students who study while on placement or within a role. For free, it was worth the money!

Image credits: http://www.learningtechnologies.co.uk/

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