Tag: pedagogy (Page 1 of 2)

Joanna swimming in clear blue water surrounded by rocks — Snorkelling in Greece

Introduction for Tel Tales – Joanna Clarke

October 31, 2022 / Joanna Clarke / 1 Comment

Hi everyone 😁

I’m Joanna Clarke and I started in the Technology Enhanced Learning team as an eLearn Support Analyst this summer. I did my MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL here a few years ago, and my favourite module was on the use of technology and corpora in language teaching. Now I’m thrilled to be joining the team here, learning even more about technology and pedagogy, and applying what I already know.

I’ve taught EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and trained teachers for over 20 years (as well as having some pretty varied earlier work experience including a data assistant for clinical trials, a receptionist in France, and a thankfully short stint in a chicken factory).

Back in 2000, photocopiers and OHPs were the extents of the technology available in my college – and laminators if we were lucky, but you had to fight for those! I loved experimenting with new tools and finding new ways to engage students with lesson content. This led me to take on an ILT training role at Chichester College to find ways of supporting my colleagues in the use of technology. Initially, I was focused on how Moodle and other online resources can support individual study. As technology has evolved, it’s been fascinating to see the emergence of a wealth of resources for highly motivating competitive and cooperative activities, as well as new ways to help students express themselves and become more comfortable with sharing their ideas.

The pandemic took me to a new role at Chatterbox, a social enterprise that provides employment opportunities for marginalised people such as refugees in corporate language teaching. I was responsible for online content development and it was here that I really started to be interested in the data available for measuring student engagement and progress. In a classroom, I could always adjust my lesson content in response to students’ needs and reactions, but it’s very different from online material. At Chatterbox, I loved exploring the data available and then conducting user testing to investigate my hypotheses about student experiences. Working within the TEL team at Portsmouth will hopefully give me plenty more opportunities to use user data to inform module development.

What else can I say? You can probably predict from my work experience that I love languages – I’ve variously had passions for French, German, Greek, Czech, Japanese, and Spanish, although French is the only one that really stuck. My love of languages has also extended to programming languages. If anyone else out there is interested in learning these, I’d thoroughly recommend W3schools as an amazing resource for things like HTML, CSS and Javascript.

In my free time, I love going to the beach – particularly snorkelling around looking at the weird and wonderful underwater world. I’m lucky to have joined a very musical department. I used to play the piano and accordion, and the conversations around me now have given me a much-needed push to start playing again (and to take up the guitar – just have to toughen up my fingers first 😬).

Anyway, that’s plenty for a first introduction. If you want some company diving into the data on your Moodle site, please get in touch – we can go snorkelling for stats together 🤿😊.

Joanna is based in Mercantile House within the TEL team.

Welcome to the team, Joanna!

Explore – A guide for academic staff

August 2, 2021 / Marie Kendall-Waters / 0 Comments

Considering ways to enhance a blended and connected learning experience? Looking for a resource that can provide the basic information on digital tools at UoP? Need help and support with content capture but not sure which tool is fit for purpose? Maybe Explore can help!

What’s Explore?

In collaboration with Professor Ale Armellini, the TEL Team have designed and developed a resource called Explore – A guide for academic staff. We hope it will help provide answers to questions surrounding tool selection in blended and connected learning and teaching.

In the ever-changing world of technology, it can be difficult to stay up to date with the digital tools being used within the University, and the range of tools can often appear overwhelming. For any given teaching situation, knowing which tool will provide the best solution for you and your students is a challenge. For support staff, understanding the purpose behind a given technology is key in aiding learning and teaching. Explore can help you choose the right tool for the job; if you need training on the tool, Explore points to development opportunities.

Pedagogy and technology go hand-in-hand and when a mutual understanding is achieved great things happen.

Learning types

Explore uses Diana Laurilliard’s 6 learning types and Assessment to categorise the various tools and technologies supported by UoP. Most tools can support activities within any learning type. What determines the choice of tool is pedagogic purpose in each context. Explore is a framework to guide decision making and help innovation within learning and teaching.

Acquisition – Learning through acquisition is what learners do when they listen to a lecture or podcast, read from books or websites, and watch demos or videos.
Collaboration – Learning through collaboration embraces mainly discussion, practice, and production. Learners take part in the process of knowledge building itself through participation.
Discussion – Learning through discussion requires learners to articulate their ideas and questions, and to challenge and respond to the ideas and questions from teachers, and/or from peers.
Investigation – Learning through investigation guides learners to explore, compare and critique the texts, documents and resources that reflect the concepts and ideas being taught.
Practice – Learning through practice enables learners to adapt their actions to the task goal, and use the feedback to improve their next action. Feedback may come from self-reflection, from peers, from teachers, or from the activity itself.
Production – Learning through production involves motivating learners to consolidate what they have learned by articulating their current conceptual understanding in the form of an artefact, product, display or another deliverable.
Assessment – Learning through assessment is the way the teacher can gauge the knowledge of the learners, formatively or summatively, and give feedback designed to improve the learners’ performance.

Under each learning type on Explore, we have included some examples of digital tools that are currently in use at UoP and that could be used to achieve certain learning outcomes. For instance, if you are thinking about acquisition-type activities in your teaching you could use Panopto to create videos for your students. By clicking on each tool in Explore, you will find information about the tool itself; how to access it; key features; top tips by current users; useful links to guidance and training; media such as videos; quotes about the tool from UoP and other staff; and examples of other learning types in which the tool could be used.

Feedback

We asked a range of academics and Online Course Developers to ‘test drive’ Explore within their roles. The feedback we received has helped us to further develop the resource.

To conclude

We hope both academic and academic support staff will find Explore beneficial in shaping their decisions regarding learning and teaching over the coming months. If you have any feedback then please contact us at: ale.armellini@port.ac.uk tom.langston@port.ac.uk or marie.kendall-waters@port.ac.uk

If you are using any of the tools from Explore in an innovative way, and would be willing to share your experience, then please let us know – we can include this as we continue to develop the resource.

Explore can be accessed directly via explore.port.ac.uk or within the Learning and Teaching Innovation site.

Thank you to everyone who has provided content and feedback – we hope you enjoy using Explore!

Designers should always keep their users in mind

From compliance to culture

January 18, 2021 / Stephen Webb / 1 Comment

The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR) provides clear legal requirements for universities in terms of making learning accessible for all students. In turn, most universities have begun a journey towards compliance with PSBAR. This is a good thing, right? Well, not necessarily; at least, not by itself.

Alistair McNaught, a leading champion of accessibility and inclusion for the HE sector, argues that we need to move from an approach based on compliance to one of culture change, a culture in which we minimise barriers to learning and maximise the benefits of different learning technologies. As educators we need to ask: who is consuming our resources, what are their needs, and how can we most effectively meet those needs?

The need for us to shift from a compliance-based approach to one of developing a culture of accessibility maturity is clear when you compare a university virtual learning environment (VLE) with the other types of website covered by PSBAR.

A typical public sector body – a local council, for example – will often run a website that has content that rarely changes, is primarily text-based, and is under the control of a small team of web experts. A university VLE, on the other hand, typically has thousands of academics with a range of skill sets uploading a bewildering variety of content and pointing to third-party tools on a daily basis. A compliance-only approach for universities is thus extremely challenging. In the worst case, a compliance-only approach could lead to unintended consequences that are entirely counter-productive (and there are anecdotal accounts of this happening): an institution could choose to be “compliant” with PSBAR by dispensing with digital diversity and reverting to paper handouts. If they did this it wouldn’t matter if the handouts were poor-quality, smudged, third-generation photocopies – because the accessibility standards don’t apply to printouts. This “compliant” approach would be bad for all students but it would hugely disadvantage disabled students – which is, of course, the opposite of what PSBAR hopes to achieve.

McNaught visited UoP a few years ago when he worked for Jisc as their Accessibility Subject Matter Expert. He played the role of a “mystery shopper”, acting as a disabled student who was trying to access the University VLE, website, and other online systems. He is now an independent consultant and has recently posted some thought-provoking articles about accessibility maturity in an educational context. Throughout 2020 he worked with the charity AbilityNet to build on and update the old TechDis Accessibility Maturity Model. Together they have developed two versions of a maturity model: an institutional model and a course/module model. For anyone interested in issues of digital accessibility and inclusion, it is worth following McNaught’s upcoming series of blog posts.

At the close of 2020, McNaught also published a couple of related posts (part 1 and part 2) that provided an explicit example of how PSBAR can lead to unintended consequences. The example involves something with which UoP and many other universities have been grappling since we all increased the amount of video being produced: captioning.

At face value, the legislation requires us to provide 100% accurate captions for deaf people. A risk-averse institution that lacks the budget to create “compliant content” might remove videos from the VLE. This unintended consequence would have a negative impact on all students, including disabled students. McNaught argues that an approach rooted in accessibility maturity would take into account context, and would provide a roadmap for improving video accessibility.

For example, many courses provide most of their content as text. Alongside this, some tutors provide a video version of the content. If the video explanation provides no more information than a text alternative, then the video does not require captions. It’s only if a video introduces new information, not explicit in the text, that the issue of captioning arises. So that’s one lesson: depending upon the context, videos can be an alternative format.

Here is another example of where context is important, and where the guiding principle must be a pedagogic purpose. Imagine a video of a debate. The video might be used for different teaching purposes: to examine rhetorical devices, to study non-verbal communication, to illustrate legal arguments, to highlight technical recording considerations … there are many possible uses. And the best accessibility solution for each use case might well be different! Captioning might not be the best solution. Thus if you provide a caption and then tick the box marked “compliant video” you might nevertheless have created a barrier, not a solution, to learning needs.

Or consider a video of a long-winded, rambling, needlessly prolix interview: a summary consisting of a few bullet points might well be a better solution – for all students – than captions.

Context is important. As McNaught writes: “digital accessibility is about culture change … we need to steer a path between legalism and realism, a path that raises awareness without raising hackles and that encourages skills rather than excuses”. Steering that path won’t be easy – but the destination makes the effort worthwhile.

Credit image: Photo by fauxels from Pexels

An iPad laying on a table so you're looking at it flat on. On the screen is the titles of the new training sessions

TEL Training Workshops and Bespoke Sessions

August 3, 2020 / Mandy Harcup / 0 Comments

For the next few weeks, the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Training Team have put together a schedule of workshops, incorporating some of your old favourites, sprinkled with some online interaction, a dollop of digital technology and stirred in with a jugful of pedagogy resulting in some great revamped, updated and brand new workshops. During the last few months of virtual workshops, we’ve taken on board your comments and suggestions, which we’ve received through the feedback you’ve given us. The topics you really want sessions on and recommendations on breaking some workshops down further into bite-sized chunks. In addition, we’ve collaborated with the Academic Development (AcDev) section of the Department of Curriculum and Quality Enhancement (DCQE) to develop a new familiarisation programme to help colleagues find out more about using digital technologies to complement and enhance their teaching and interactions with students.

How do I book on a session and find more information on TEL Training Workshops?

You’ll find our calendar with all our new times and description on the sessions by going to the Department of Curriculum and Quality Enhancement (DCQE) website and clicking on the TEL Training Calendar. For alerts on up and coming training sessions from ourselves and the Academic Development (AcDev) workshops, follow us on our social media platforms:

#telportsmouth on Instagram
@TelPortsmouth on Twitter

Who are your training sessions for?

Primarily, the workshops are for lecturers and PHD Students, but they can be adapted for professional service members of staff too.

Bespoke sessions

If you’re not available at the times of our training events, or if the programme does not cover a specific area you’re interested in, we can offer a 1-2-1 session tailored to your needs or a group session for you and your colleagues. Topics for bespoke sessions can be based around our programme, or we can tailor the session to answer any specific questions or needs that you have. Please complete a Bespoke Training Request form and simply tick the box next to the session you would like training on. If you tick ‘Other’ please give a brief explanation of the topic you wished to be covered in the session. Complete with the date on which you would like your virtual training session to take place, along with your preferred time then click ‘SUBMIT’.

Please click on the link below for the Bespoke Training Request form:

Bespoke Training Request Form

We look forward to welcoming you at a TEL Training Session in the near future.

Credit Image: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

a small pile of books sitting one on top of the other, with a row of different colour lego blocks an apple and a computer mouse

Using Technology in Learning is Child’s Play – Can HE learn lessons from Primary Education?

July 13, 2020 / Shaun Searle / 0 Comments

Introduction

I am fortunate enough to work in an open plan office and regularly hear the inspirational words of the staff from ACDEV, working with lecturers to unpick their true learning intentions and ways to engage learners. The range of ideas and enthusiasm given within the discussion makes me want to don my teaching cap again but it also makes me reflect on my past experience of 10 years teaching in Primary Education.

A common question we have from lecturers is how can I use technology to engage my students more. I think this could be reworded as how can technology enable further

learning to take place. The pedagogic ideas need to be there in the first place and this idea that technology is a magic wand needs to be dispelled (pardon the pun!).

Primary education – students with short attention spans, sound familiar?

Within Primary Education there is the traditional approach of starter and introduction (normally on the carpet), activity and then a plenary at the end. This is a very simplistic structure and there are plenty of variances but I want to focus on the carpet time element. There was an urban myth of sorts that children can only concentrate and focus on the carpet for the number of minutes of their age. So in a lot of my cases, that was 4-5 minutes to get my main message across about what I wanted them to learn in the lesson. Now I am not for one suggesting 20 minute lectures but are university students that much different to primary school children? We try to promote within content capture sessions to do small bitesize recordings as they are the most viewed and well received. It made me think outside the box and get my class up and moving, or taking them outside. Quite often we would play games and children would not realise they are learning, they were hooked.

Hooking them in with technology

While this is impractical in HE due to the layout of teaching spaces around the university, another means is to use technology. I was fortunate enough to meet the late Tim Rylands. He was a truly inspirational educator who won many plaudits for pioneering gamification. I wanted to share the clip below, to highlight not the actual technology used (the clip is 5 years old) but the creative thinking behind it.

https://youtu.be/Aux_3KLxjkQ

The current flowing throughout is to engage and motivate learners and while children of primary age are perhaps a more wide and open audience, the premise is still valid in HE.

Our department offers an ‘Enhancing Lectures’ training session which has this very ethos at heart. Using a student engagement platform such as Nearpod allows students to be co-contributors to the events unfolding within their lecture. Their input is used and valued and they become active stakeholders in the success of the learning experience.

Do we promote this sort of practice enough?

Final Thoughts

Stand and Deliver may be an iconic 80’s track and may get a nostalgic airing in a club night but may not be to the liking of the modern day student. Why then should we expect the old fashioned delivery method of standing at the front of the lecture theater and imparting knowledge to be any different? I believe we need to reflect on our own pedagogic practices and survey the ever expanding landscape of technology to engage students further.

These are uncertain times and whether it’s the Moodle and Technology Conference within the Science and Health faculty on our return to campus or the Online Teaching and Learning festival in July, these provide academics with plenty of ideas and stimuli. Perhaps the greatest learning progression starts not with the student but the educators themselves.

Image Credit: Photo by Thomas Kolnowski on Unsplash

Peermark – a tool for group feedback.

March 9, 2020 / Tom Langston / 0 Comments

Recently Coventry University released a new plugin for Moodle around the idea of group and peer feedback. A colleague highlighted the new tool to me and at first glance I thought it looked like a promising solution to one of the requirements many academics have while running group work: the ability for students to score the contribution of individuals within the group and provide either public or anonymous feedback to group members.

Currently Moodle provides various options to support group work and peer learning, because Moodle HQ realises that these approaches hold an important place in the arsenal of many academics. Firstly, Moodle provides a generic framework for creating groups – these can then be allocated to an activity (such as discussion boards, wikis or group assignment submissions).

Secondly, and with a greater focus on the use of peer learning, Moodle provides the Workshop tool.

While groups can be added and used within the Workshop, the idea is predominantly that students add a submission. The submission is then allocated to a specified number of their peers, who then grade and provide feedback on it.

If you haven’t used the Workshop tool in anger, here is a quick overview of how to use it as a peer-assessment tool:

All students submit their work (traditionally this will be an essay, but it could be work in some other format).
The work is allocated to the other students. This can be scheduled and automated if required.
Every student marks the assessments they have been given (academics can also provide feedback, although this is not a requirement).
Each student receives a final grade for the submission and a grade for their ability to assess the work (academics can overwrite grades should they feel the process has proven unfair).

This tool provides students a fantastic opportunity to reflect on their own writing and work while comparing it to that of their peers. However, it does not allow for a group to provide anonymous feedback to their peers on projects. To do this academics currently have to find solutions outside of Moodle. The most notable option for this is TeamMates. TeamMates allows groups to feedback on the overall project work and then score the engagement of the rest of the team throughout the project.

We now have a new Moodle-based solution! Peerwork, created by Coventry University, is an integration with Moodle that provides a peer feedback option for group work. You can learn more about this approach from the video they have produced:

While working through Peermark, I was really impressed with its simplicity of set-up and use. I created the framework as an academic, but also completed the process as a student. Using multiple test accounts, I was able to understand how the process would work from both sides and see how you can adjust the overall grade given to a group though the peer reviews on the work.

The only criticism was really just my understanding of what the tool did (so not really a criticism of the system). When I uploaded a document as a student it cascaded it to each other members of the group. Each student does not need to upload a file, it is targeting the students for feedback on their peers and how the group worked throughout a project. The upload was almost a secondary consideration to the process.

Peermark is not the Workshop reimagined. They are two very different tools that serve a specific purpose.

The Workshop facilitates a student writing a piece of work, submitting it and other students provide feedback and evaluation of that work.

Peermark allows groups to discuss, rank and analyse how the entire team worked together over the course of the project. The work is created by the team for evaluation by the academic but the feedback given by the group on each other member will directly affect the shared grade of the team.

Peermark is currently on a test installation of Moodle.

If you would like a demonstration to see whether it would fit your need, please contact tom.langston@port.ac.uk

Image taken from Unsplash :John Schnobrich
John Schnobrich

Personal Tutoring Project

January 27, 2020 / Alana Aldred / 0 Comments

As part of the OfS-funded project Raising Awareness, Raising Aspirations (RARA) staff from a number of teams – Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), Information Systems, Academic Development, and the Academic Skills Unit – joined forces to develop a platform, website and learning resources to support tutors and tutees in the personal tutoring process.

RARA, a collaborative project between the University of Sheffield, King’s College London and the University of Portsmouth, investigated the extent to which an enhanced personal tutoring system might help reduce the attainment gap for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students and those from lower socioeconomic groups. The project had its roots in research (Cousin and Cuerton, 2012; Thomas, 2012; Mountford-Zimdars, 2015) which suggested that such a system could reduce the attainment gap, ‘based on evidence that the personal tutor can play a particularly important role in the academic integration of BME students and students from lower economic groups.’

We used an agile project methodology, drawing on the skills, experience and knowledge across the University. From the start we wanted to create a space for tutors, in consultation with tutors. From these consultations, it was clear that there was a varying understanding of the personal tutoring role across the university. Many personal tutors felt they were not equipped with the knowledge they needed to fulfill their role to the best of their ability, and this was especially true of those new to teaching.

TEL’s main project deliverable was to lead on creating staff- and student-based personal tutoring resources. In August 2018 we launched the website Personal Tutoring @ UoP for tutors and those that support this process. Since this initial launch TEL have been working to develop the site further – a new, more extensive version of the site will launch in February. The site provides information about the personal tutoring role, developing tutees, supporting and signposting tutees, and training resources.

TEL have also developed student-facing resources within Learning at Portsmouth – a student website to support transition into higher education. As well as online provision, we also developed a paper-based guide for all first-year, campus-based students to be given at their first tutorial session.

Burke et al. (2016) found that academic staff play a key role in how students construct their feelings about capability, which ultimately lead to success or failure in higher education.

The guides include information for students on how to develop themselves whilst at Portsmouth and also provided contact details of services across the University and their faculty to support them in their studies and in times of personal difficulties.

The end of the two-year RARA project was marked by our University’s first personal tutoring conference for academic staff, and the launch of a RARA personal tutoring toolkit. As an institution we are now well on our way to implementing the recommendations made in the 2019 RARA Report. Student and staff feedback has been positive – the website has not only had an impact at Portsmouth but has formed part of a national toolkit for personal tutors. These have been presented at conferences and have received positive feedback on the clarity of their design. Looking to the future, TEL will continue to work with colleagues across the institution in the development of work in this area so that as an institution we can help tackle the attainment gaps that are prevalent nationally in higher education.

References

Cousin, G., and D. Cureton. 2012. Disparities in Student Attainment (DISA). York: HEA.

Mountford-Zimdars, A., Sabri, D., Moore, J., Sanders, S., Jones, S., & Higham, L. (2015). Causes of Differences in Student Outcomes. Higher Education Funding Council for England, HEFCE. Accessed July 23, www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rereports/Year/2015/diffout/Title,104725,en.html

Thomas, L. (2012). Building student engagement and belonging in Higher Education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention & Success programme. London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

12 Days of Christmas – Learning and Teaching Advent calendar

November 29, 2019 / Alana Aldred / 0 Comments

So… December is almost upon us, and this year the TEL team, along with AcDev, have decided to create a ‘12 days of Christmas’ Learning and Teaching Advent Calendar, full of useful resources to support you in your practice as you countdown to Christmas!

We will be releasing a new advent window every working day – We hope you enjoy our festive offerings, and if so please share!

Through the mirror – learning through reflection

October 28, 2019 / Marie Kendall-Waters / 0 Comments

It’s easy to get swept along in the hustle and bustle and the hum-drum work-a-day life. The constant flow of work emails and phone calls, running from one meeting to the next, information going in one ear and out the other, you feel like you’ve run out of hours in the day before you’ve even begun! However, all the things you do at work, although might not feel like it at the time, have a purpose, and result in a solution that provides information that can help others!

So let’s take a step back and breath!

Let’s start with a little activity: go and make a cup of tea and ask yourself:

‘when was the last time I sat down and actually reflected on my work?’

It may sound like a silly question, but I bet most of you don’t actively reflect on your daily work life – things that you’ve achieved, things that didn’t go so well, new things you’ve learnt, ways you’ve helped people, provided new ways of doing things, seen or read something interesting that could help your team or section, events and conferences you’ve attended – there will always be something that you or your peers can learn from.

Can you think of any examples? If so, jot them down.

By sharing these experiences that we don’t always think are significant, we could aid others to learn and develop new skills and improve communication within a team/section and organisation.

The importance of reflection

Reflecting helps you to develop your skills and review their effectiveness, rather than just carry on doing things as you have always done them. It is about questioning, in a positive way, what you do and why you do it and then deciding whether there is a better, or more efficient, way of doing it in the future. By reflecting on a regular basis, it soon becomes habit and can be incorporated in your daily working life.

Reflection is an important part of learning and we encourage our students to actively self reflect – so why aren’t we?

The Open University explain the importance of reflection as:

‘You wouldn’t use a recipe a second time around if the dish didn’t work the first time would you? You would either adjust the recipe or find a new and, hopefully, better one. When we learn we can become stuck in a routine that may not be working effectively. Thinking about your own skills can help you identify changes you might need to make.’ [1]

This in turn helps you develop within your role and learn from your experiences. So how can we learn from our experiences and evolve by reflecting?

Putting reflective writing into practice

By regularly self reflecting and keeping a record of our experiences through writing we can put what we have learnt through reflection into practice. Reflective writing includes both analysis, description and helps clarify your thoughts, particularly important aspects and identifies areas where you need more support and can help work out strategies for problem solving. It can help you to personalise and contextualise your own learning experience.

The way you respond to situations, opinions, events or new information can aid in exploring your learning and achieve clarity and understanding of what you are learning. Blogging and online journals are a great way of keeping a record of your experiences and practicing reflective writing on a regular basis.

The benefits of reflective writing

It can be difficult when you’re busy to find time to reflect, but by doing so you’re learning an important skill. You’ll not only improve your writing skills, but you’ll increase you’ll self-awareness and develop a better understanding of others. Reflective writing can help you to develop creative thinking skills and encourages active engagement in work processes.

Did you know reflective learners share the following common characteristics:

Very motivated – know what they are trying to achieve and why.
Proactive in expanding their understanding of new ideas and topics.
Use their existing knowledge to develop their comprehension of new ideas.
Understand new concepts by aligning and comparing them to their life experiences.
Accept and understand that research and extensive reading will improve their comprehension and add value to their writing.
By evaluating of their previous learning experiences, they will develop their future learning and thinking.
Become self-aware and are clearly able to identify, explain, and leverage their strengths and work on their weaknesses

Learning by doing – Reflective learning cycle – the theory bit!

Graham Gibbs’ (1988) Reflective Learning Cycle was developed to give structure to learning from experiences. It offers a framework for examining experiences, and given its cyclic nature lends itself particularly well to repeated experiences, allowing you to learn and plan from things that either went well or didn’t go well. It covers 6 stages:

Description of the experience
Feelings and thoughts about the experience
Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad
Analysis to make sense of the situation
Conclusion about what you learned and what you could have done differently
Action plan for how you would deal with similar situations in the future, or general changes you might find appropriate.

Carol Dweck (2007) takes this a step further by looking at the growth mindset – which reinforces the idea that everyone can learn and learn most things well. Reflection can help you to fulfil your potential by believing you can improve.

‘In practice reflective learning allows students to step back from their regular learning methodology and develop critical thinking skills to enhance their future performance by analyzing and reviewing their learning experiences – both the content of what they have learnt and the emotions, if any, attached to the learning content.’ [2]

Carol Dweck – growth mindset https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve#t-353

How we are ‘Learning by doing’ – Tel Tales and the Tel Team

Tel Tales is an example of reflective writing in practice, it’s a community of practice, where we regularly share our experiences, ideas, failures and learning through blogging. It can often feel difficult and challenging as a form of self reflection and academic writing as it does involve writing about our errors and anxieties just as well as our successes. It’s often hard to find the time to stand back and reflect but it’s also crucial for us in developing and evolving as individuals and as a team within the current university climate.

Reflection is an important skill in learning and developing one’s self and helps us to personalise and conceptualise our own experiences. Collaboratively, it’s a great way to share our experiences whether bad or good, and develop as a team whilst raising our profile and improving our writing and critical thinking skills.

We are always looking for guest bloggers, so if you would like to contribute to our blog and did have time to have that cuppa and reflect, then please get in touch with me and share your ideas!

Audiovisual in Education – A general discussion about a topic that is more relevant than ever

August 27, 2019 / Shaun Searle / 0 Comments

My colleague Tom Langston recently visited a session hosted by Learning on Screen, The British Universities and Colleges Film and Video Council (https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/) and it reminded me of a previous visit I undertook a few years ago (before Instagram!) which I thought I’d use to form the basis of this blog. One of the great things about escaping the university is the possibility to network and have discussions with professionals from other institutions and companies. Spanning business and education, it is amazing how views match or differ and hearing a different take on modern university life is insightful.

Technology is a “new” problem

A concept I encounter on a near daily basis is the trouble of meeting the modern demands of the student with technology as it has progressed at such a rate of knots, that we are struggling to keep up. Interestingly, the minutes from the council’s meeting in 1954 were shared with the attendees and the main themes and issues raised were assessing our own pedagogy, how to use new mediums in education and the advancement of technology. Issues that are very topical even in 2019.

A concept also levied at us is that the “modern student” has never been so technologically advanced. They were raised in the age of the internet and the school years were entwined with handheld device usage. They have not necessarily needed to phone up Uncle Ray or another assigned family expert to ask him about 17th century monarchs as they can “google” it. This Generation Z or iGen, as they may be referred to, use and naturally access technology in a very different way to their predecessors or their more ancient educators.

However with this is a common misconception about levels of understanding. Just because a student can use an iPhone and access film, does not mean they “know” or are experts in it.

Access does not automatically equal knowledge

Are these digital natives as savvy as we think they are? Or is it a gross assumption based on our observations of them accessing technology. HE Institutions (as well as our team) are looking closer at digital capabilities and providing support for those who need it, but do we as educators need to consider assessing the digital needs of the students rather than naturally assuming that they would want VR tours and interacting with embedded H5P content.

It draws me to the constructivist approach when teaching Primary Science in my previous life, where you would have your topic but it’s ultimately the students who govern how they are going to learn and find out things and it can result in an outcome at a far greater depth due to their immersion in the process.

A tension between form and context

Visual Literacy and the use of audiovisual also opens up an array of issues to consider. Take for example the BBC , which has an unbelievable bank of resources. The issue of copyright and ownership is a topic we have had blogs about in the past. There is a view that we need to have some buy in from the broadcasters and content owners to serve education. This would open up the concept of not just reusing sources but being creative beyond the content’s initial use. The idea of repurposing the material, taking an old thing a part and making something new with it. The BBC Archive, was created to be used by film-makers and was not necessarily intended for public consumption. It opens up a can of worms that perhaps material that looks fairly inconspicuous today, can have a massive impact in the future. This is evident due to the scandals raised by historical tweets being uncovered and the use of archived film footage in investigations into high profile court cases about abuse.

There has to be some education for students about not just the technology and media we use but the context around it.

Final Thoughts

The more we look to bring audiovisual into our teaching, the more we are going to have to look at ourselves and change how we teach. The idea that people sit in blacked out rooms watching films is an old school pedagogic view, just as the days of students being sat down talked at are no more.

There is an element of Audiovisual that gets their eyes off of their screens and onto the intended one at the front. We can use technology and platforms such as Twitter to allow students to engage on an individual basis. We must ensure that it is not a passive viewing experience but allows students to research, reference and back up their own point of view, offering the stimulus for a voice that otherwise may have stayed quiet.

The final thing to consider is the danger that if we spend too long of today worrying and focusing on “how to use technology and film” and it prevents trial, implementation and reflection, in ten years time those concerns will be obsolete and new issues will have replaced them.

Images from:

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Tag: pedagogy (Page 1 of 2)

Introduction for Tel Tales – Joanna Clarke