Tel Tales

Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP

Page 12 of 26

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Accessibility: Investigating Automatic Media Transcription

November 4, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Background

Accessibility is now an important aspect of digital learning. We need to take accessibility seriously both to satisfy the needs of an increasingly diverse student body and the requirements recently brought into law. Of course, digital learning often encompasses a wide variety of resources in a range of media. The challenge of bringing all these resources in line with regulations is considerable, both on a technical and organisational level. Fortunately technology can help to ease the burden, with a number of integrations available to help examine and fix content-related accessibility issues.

One particularly large challenge, and one that is particularly helped by the use of technology, is video. While it is possible to watch and transcribe a video manually, when faced with a library of nearly 8000 hours of video, the challenge becomes insurmountable! This is where technology can step in: it can automate the process and reduce the number of person-hours required.

For quite some time, YouTube has been able to automatically caption videos. In the past, however, the transcriptions produced by the algorithms have often been the subject of ridicule for the sometimes bizarre and hilarious interpretations. Thankfully things have moved on considerably, with increasingly advanced AI and machine learning helping to increase the reliability of computer transcription.

For the majority of our video content, we rely upon a home-spun system composed of a Wowza Streaming Media server and a custom-built front-end to manage content and metadata. While this system has the facility to allow subtitles to be added, it does not feature any way to automate the process of creating transcriptions. For this reason, we are currently investigating our options, with a view to either hosting our video content elsewhere or improving our current provision by implementing auto-transcription facilities.

The contenders

We have been investigating a few services to judge the accuracy of the transcription. We have tried each service with the same videos to see how accurately they can transcribe a variety of media content. Below are some details of three services we are currently examining.

Mozilla Deepspeech

An open-source option that can be run on-premises, Deepspeech requires a certain amount of technical skill in deploying and managing Linux servers. Being open-source and community driven, the more effort you put in, the better the output will be. It allows you to train your own neural network to increase the accuracy of transcriptions, so theoretically it would be possible to improve your transcription accuracy, although it may require a large investment of time and effort. As we are simply testing the out-of-box abilities, we have used the default models provided by the developers.

Google Speech to Text Engine

This is an API made available through the Google Cloud Platform. The service itself is used by YouTube to provide auto-transcriptions of uploaded videos. While using it through YouTube is free at the point of upload, utilising the API in your own projects can cause costs to rack up quickly (and remember that we have 8000 hours of video sitting on our servers, waiting to be transcribed). The pricing options are transparent, however, so we can easily calculate the cost of transcribing all of our existing content.

Amazon Transcribe

This cloud service is utilized by Amazon’s virtual assistant “Alexa” and works in a similar way to Google’s offering, with transcription charged based upon the number of seconds of content transcribed. The service is used by the content capture service Echo 360 to transcribe material. By our rough calculations, transcribing our 8000 hours of content through Amazon would be a little cheaper than through Google. 

The results

Here are some example transcriptions of one short piece of video content. 

Mozilla Deepspeech

so wee al seend apisode of the dragon tf dend where the ontroprenel holks in with a really great idea good looking numbers the dragons e recing out their hands and then one of the dragons pipes up let see your contract and os soddenly ontrepenelox exposed because they thought they had a contra they don’t what they have iser some verbal understanding your colercial contracts are really important to you business mey should be kept clear concise so the point to add value when seeking in bestment wor in ed if you come to sellin a business also commercial contracts areningportant to the void conslote because both sides of the contract should now wot their obligations are a more their rights are

Google Speech to Text (through youtube)

so we’ve all seen episodes of the Dragons Den where the entrepreneur walks in with a really great idea good-looking numbers the Dragons are eating out their hands and then one of the Dragons pipes up let’s see your contract and all the sudden the entrepreneur looks exposed because they thought they had a contract they don’t what they have is a some verbal understanding your commercial contracts are really important to your business they should be kept clear concise to the point to add value when seeking investment or indeed if you come to sell the business also commercial contracts are really important to avoid conflict because both sides of the contract should know what their obligations are and what their rights are

Amazon Transcribe

So we’ve all seen episodes of the Dragon’s Den, where the entrepreneur walks in with a really great idea, good looking numbers that dragons reaching out their hands. And then one of the dragons pipes up. Let’s see your contract over something. The entrepreneur let’s exposed because they thought they had a contract. They don’t. What they have is a some verbal understanding your commercial contracts of really important to your business. They should be kept clear, concise to the point. Add value when seeking investment, or indeed, if you come to sell the business. Also, commercial contracts are really important to avoid conflict because both sides of the contract should know what their obligations are, what their rights on.

Conclusion

As you can see from the output above, while the Mozilla software makes a good guess at a lot of the content, it also gets confused in other parts, inventing new words along the way and joining others together to form a rather useless text that does not represent what has been said at all well. I’m sure its abilities will improve as more time is spent by the community training the neural network. However, Google and Amazon clearly have the upper hand – which is not surprising, given their extensive user base and resources. 

While Amazon Transcribe makes a very good attempt, even adding punctuation where it predicts it should appear, it is not 100% accurate in this case. Some words are mis-interpreted and others are missing. However, in the main, the words that are confused are not essential to the understanding of the video.

Google Speech to Text makes the best attempt at transcribing the video, getting all words 100% correct, and even adding capital letters for proper nouns that it clearly recognises. There are options to insert punctuation when using the API, but this feature is not available in the YouTube conversion process.

From this (preliminary and admittedly small) test, it seems you get what you pay for: the most expensive service is the most accurate and the cheapest is the least accurate. Also, the headline cost of using Google Speech to Text on 8000 hours of video is not necessarily accurate. We need to remember that not all of this content is actively used: this is an accumulation of 8 years of content, and it’s possible that only a small fraction of it is still actually being watched. We now need to spend some time interrogating our video statistics to determine how much of the old content really needs to be transcribed. 

The best value compromise, if we choose to continue to host video ourselves, may be to transcribe all future videos and any that have been watched at some point in the last year. In addition, it should be possible to provide an ‘on-demand’ service, whereby videos are flagged by users as requiring a transcription at the click of a button. Once flagged, the video is queued for transcription and a few minutes later a transcription is made available and the user alerted.

Video title: Warner Goodman Commercial Contracts.
Copyright: Lynda Povey ( Enterprise Adviser) nest, The University of Portsmouth.

Image Credit: Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Through the mirror - learning through reflection

Through the mirror – learning through reflection

October 28, 2019 / / 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.

Gibbs Reflective Cycle

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!

Further reading:

Using Blogs to Enhance Critical Reflection and Community of Practice https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4c24/86837c8ee3bc4a52b925143cb20d5cdd45a9.pdf

Reflective Cycle
https://www.toolshero.com/management/gibbs-reflective-cycle-graham-gibbs/


References:

[1] The Open University, 2019: http://www.open.ac.uk/choose/unison/develop/my-skills/self-reflection 2019.

[2] Li-ling Ooi, www.colourmylearning.com, 2019:https://www.colourmylearning.com/2017/11/collaborative-blogging-as-a-reflective-learning-tool/ – Gibbs’ Reflective Learning Cycle.

Credit image: Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

Love to Learn pencil signage on a wall near a walking man

Top Four Moodle Questions – Part 2 Students

October 21, 2019 / / 0 Comments

So here we are at the beginning of another academic year, all that work to get Moodle up and running has paid off and even if I say so myself it’s looking good! So I’ve given you the Four Top Moodle Questions for Lecturers, now I bet you’re wondering what are the top Moodle questions asked by students.

At the number 1 slot is: “I’ve logged into Moodle and I can’t see any information, where are my modules?” This question normally starts being asked as soon as the students finish enrolling at the university, which can be even before Induction week!  Hopefully, by now all the students that have Teaching Block 1 (19SEP) and Year long (19YR) modules can now see their sites on their homepage. Modules are hidden from student view so that the sites can be updated and are usually released by the lecturer in their first taught session with students. This isn’t written in stone and the lecturer can unhide them at any time once the module is ready.

In at number 2 is: “I’ve got some modules, but some are still missing, can you add them to my Moodle homepage?”  Teaching Block 2 modules are normally kept hidden until the beginning of January.  Some lecturers release these modules before January but others prefer for students to view their material in chronological order.  If you’re still missing modules in January 2020, please contact us on elearn@port.ac.uk so we can investigate the issue further.  

The 3rd most popular question is: “Where can I find my timetable in Moodle?” The answer to this question is, you won’t be able to find your timetable in Moodle.  Your timetable can be found on MyPort Information Hub.  Along the top banner you will see four titles, one of those titles is “My Timetable”.  Here you’ll find a calendar with your timetable on, you can look at it daily, weekly or monthly. Information shown is the length of the lecture, the building where your lecture is taking place, plus the room number, along with the title of the lecture.

The 4th question normally appears in January its: “I’ve been given the wrong year modules. Why do my modules end with the date of the last year?”  Most academic Undergraduate courses begin in August and end in July, so regardless of which Teaching Block it is, the module will end (for this year) with 19. It is the year that the August is in which indicates what year appears on the code and not the calendar year.  So this year you’ll see in January 2020 that your modules will end with 19JAN.

Credit Image: Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Gentleman stand on a blue flooring with a VR headset on

AR/VR in Education

October 14, 2019 / / 1 Comment

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

An image with elements of assessments and feedback - edword, openess, assessment, flexible, api, 360, feedback

Great feedback is essential

October 3, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Wouldn’t it be great if students could read the feedback they’ve received for their assignment, write a short reflection on what they could do to improve (perhaps also identifying what they’d like to receive feedback on next time round) and then see their grade? 

Our current online assessment tools (Turnitin and Moodle Assignment) don’t allow us to do this. Luckily we know an assignment tool that does – and it has many other modern assessment feedback mechanisms too.

I’m passionate about helping improve assessment feedback for students. It’s one of the things I’ll be working on in my new secondment as a Senior Lecturer in Digital Learning & Innovation. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays I’ll be working between the TEL and AcDev teams to help coordinate projects to better support academics, Online Course Developers and students with a focus on digital education. In particular, I’ll be working to help get a small pilot off the ground for EdWord – a fantastic new assessment tool that promises to address many of the requirements of modern assessment and feedback. If you’re interested in taking part in this pilot please let me know.

In addition, I’ll also be helping to establish an online staff community alongside the APEX programme featuring special interest groups. This will be a great place to make contact with like-minded staff from other faculties and exchange ideas.

Tom Langston and I will be creating a support mechanism for Online Course Developers who are interested in completing their CMALT portfolio and who might be interested in taking part in future elearning projects with TEL.

I’ll also be doing a bit of lecturing on the Research Informed Teaching programme, which I’m looking forward to. So this will be a busy year for me!

Please get in touch if you’ve got any ideas or projects we can help you with. Both the TEL and AcDev teams would appreciate  your feedback as we work to ensure we’re offering the services that will provide value to you and your students (you can reach me on ext. 3194).

Image credit: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paper_Plane_Vector.svg

 

people sitting in a row with notepads and pens ready. The image is just their main body, not faces

Guest Blogger: Stuart Sims – Introduction for Tel Tales

September 30, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Hello! My name is Stuart Sims and I’m a relatively recent addition to DCQE in the Academic Development team. I’m a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education with responsibility for Staff-Student Co-creation and the Academic Professional Apprenticeship (both of which I’ll explain shortly). I joined Portsmouth a few months ago from the University of Winchester where I worked as an Educational Developer and Head of Student Engagement.

Portsmouth CoCreate

One of my main activities in DCQE is to develop Portsmouth CoCreate, an ambitious attempt to promote and embed staff-student partnership in the co-development of the curriculum cross institutionally. Co-creation has grown as an agenda for many universities in recent years, not least of all because it can operate as a way forward from a more transactional relationship with students. Many of us are familiar with the well-trodden arguments about students as customers and consumers which have emerged since the introduction of and increases in tuition fees (for those who aren’t, this article from Molesworth, Nixon and Scullion from 2009 is a good starting point). To cut a long story short, if students are paying an eye-watering amount to study with us they may have changed expectations about what that means. The principles of co-creation are not about giving more student choice (as you may expect in a market-driven system) but rather giving students more responsibility and investment to mutually develop or agree the nature of their learning with staff.

An essential part of this work is to discover and highlight what is being done already in this area here. In a relatively short time I have discovered a wide range of innovative practices at Portsmouth ranging from co-developing assessments to collaborative peer mentoring schemes. In the coming months we will be profiling effective practices from Portsmouth and beyond to support others in taking a co-created approach with their students.

We are taking a multi-faceted approach to developing co-creation, this includes training and support for course teams to apply these principles in their context (including in line with the new annual monitoring processes) and the development of a new cross-intuitional module around co-creation.

Academic Professional Apprenticeship

The other half of my role is teaching on our new Academic Professional Apprenticeship (and PgCert). This is a course aimed at staff new to Higher Education and is part of our institutional shift to prioritise Degree Apprenticeships. A new standard in the sector, we are one of the first institutions to develop a course for new lecturers around this apprenticeship model.

The course is mapped to the UKPSF and course members not only receive a qualification, but Fellowship of the HEA upon completion. This course therefore provides an alternative and complementary approach to the APEX programme to support colleagues in achieving this internationally recognised award.

Our first cohort of around 50 course members are just completing their first year and about to progress on to the Research Informed Teaching module which I lead. This module is focused around the conduct of an enhancement or research project which the course members have developed in the first year. The taught elements relate to Educational Research Methods and key learning theories to support this. As well as supporting the development of colleagues, this will lead to a huge range of innovative practice in learning and teaching emerging across the institution. 

Stuart Sims is based in Mercantile with AcDev and the Tel team.

Welcome to the team, Stuart! We look forward to hearing more about your projects in the not so distant future on Tel Tales.

Credit image:  Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash

Moodle 3.7 - New Features

Moodle 3.7 – New Features

September 23, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Each year, over the summer, the University upgrades Moodle to ensure staff and students have access to all the new features and fixes.

In this post I’ll give an outline of the new features in Moodle 3.7 that are most relevant to the University.

  • New Theme updates.

The new theme provides a new look to the dashboard. The courses are displayed by default in ‘card’ view. This can be changed in the drop down menu to either a list or summary view. Courses/Modules can be starred and filtered so that the most frequently used ones are easily accessible. The Timeline block on the dashboard page shows upcoming events from all your sites. This can be demonstrated by viewing the Moodle tour. Reset a tour by clicking the icon at the top of a page. Tour Icon

There is now an in-line reply box, making it quicker to respond to a post. Important discussions can be ‘starred’ at an individual level. This will sort your favourite posts to the top of your list (under any pinned posts). Discussions can also be sorted by reply, latest post or creation date.

There is a new personal messaging space, that allows conversation between users. Conversations can be ‘starred’ and filtered according to importance. The tool also allows for live chat to take place similar to GChat in Google.

When undertaking a quiz, the student is able to clear their choice and change their answer.

If a page has been hidden in a book, it will now display to an academic even with editing turned off. It will appear greyed out, showing that it is not visible to a student.

 

People sitting around a desk with their laptops open laughing

Top Four Moodle Questions

September 16, 2019 / / 0 Comments

At the beginning of each new academic year Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) receive many Moodle queries from staff – here are the top four that we’re asked:

Q1) I can’t see my module(s) on my Moodle Homepage, why not?

A1) Are you a new member of staff or have you recently taken over the module? Has the module changed name/code and has it had a Moodle presence previously? These are some of the reasons you may not be able to see a module on your homepage, to help us resolve the issue for you we will require some details about the module(s) – the module title and/or the module code, the level of access that you require for the module(s), and your username. With this information we can add you to the module or create a blank module (or clone an existing one) for you to build.

Q2) My students are not attached to my module(s), why not?

A2) Students are added to modules in Moodle by mapping course codes and registration instances, or modules codes and attendance groups against Student Records. We do not manually add students as this access will not update should they change their modules of study.  Let us know if you are missing students and we will try to see if we can resolve this problem for you or bring it to the attention of your course administrators if a change needs to be made in Student Records.

Q3) I can see my students are attached to my module, but they are saying that they can’t see the module on their homepage, why not?

A3) It could be that your module is still hidden from student view.  To unhide your module, go to the module, click on the ‘Actions Menu’ (top right hand-side), click on ‘Edit settings’, click on the drop down arrow in the box alongside the ‘Course visibility’ title, click on ‘Show’ scroll down and click on ‘Save and display’.  Once your students have refreshed their Moodle page, students should be able to see the module.  If students still cannot see the module, please supply the module’s details and we will investigate to see if we can resolve this issue. 

screenshot of the words Course Visibility next to a box with a drop down arrow showing the word Show

A screenshot of the drop down box, if it says Hide click on Show.

It is also important to remember that modules ending in JAN stay hidden from student view until January (or until the module is unhidden).  So you’ll see the students, but the students won’t see the module.

Q4) My colleague needs access to my module, can I add them myself?

A4) Yes you can – on the module page click on the ‘Actions Menu’ (top right hand-side), click on ‘More’ at the bottom of the list. Click on the tab ‘Users’, then in the ‘Users’ section click on ‘Enrolled users’ (first title).  This will take you to the participants page, click on the box that says ‘Enrol users’ a box will appear, first assign the role you wish your colleague to have from the drop-down menu, then type their name in the top search box, were it says ‘Select users’. When the name you require appears click on it, so it appears above the box, then click on the ‘Enrol selected users and cohorts’ button.  

screenshot of the enrol users box showing details of where to clickA sample of the Enrol users box.

When your colleague refreshes their page or logs into Moodle the module will appear on their homepage.
With Lecturer access you can give another colleague a ‘Lecturer’, ‘non-editing Teacher’ or ‘Guest’ role, you cannot assign the ‘Student’ role.

Alternatively, complete the Moodle Request form on My Services and we’ll add new users for you. 

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Episode 10 – Bartolomeo Meletti from Learning on Screen – Copyright

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Copyright Resources:

copyrightuser.org

learningonscreen.ac.uk

The Game is On

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IPKat

1709 Blog

Nowhere Land – Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Seeking Guest Bloggers!!

Guest Blogger Wanted!

September 2, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Rather than just us rambling on, we’d like to invite colleagues from within the University community to write a blog for us. We’d like your blog to be associated with technology in some shape or form, but that’s not always necessary.

It’s often difficult to get started, so we’ve detailed some types of content that we’re interested in publishing in the hope that it might prompt you to tell your story:

  • Have you tried a piece of software that you found amazing? Or started using a new App that you want to shout about? It could help you with your studies, get you ready for the exams period or calm you down after a really stressful day.
  • Have you attended a conference where new technology was demonstrated and you’d like to share with colleagues across the University.
  • Have you produced a course introductory video with us, and want to encourage others to do the same? You could embed this video into your blog post.
  • Have you attended a TEL training session or an Academic Development (AcDev) workshop and then incorporated what you learnt into your teaching? How has our help and support prompted you to go on and put your learning into practice. Tell us how your audience responded, was it a success or a failure?
  • Have you taken a LinkedIn course and want to write your verdict on it? How did you feel using LinkedIn? Would you use it again? Will you/have you implemented what you learnt into your teaching?

When you start to think about writing a blog, even one on a topic you’re familiar with, does your mind go blank? If so, you’ll find some help and tips on what makes a successful blog in our first ever post Why Blog? Good question, why blog indeed?. If you want to gain more confidence and knowledge before tackling your first blog try taking a course on LinkedIn, there are a wealth of informative videos on blogging, and also some aimed at creating a blog, and finding images for blogging. Some of these are videos which are only a couple of minutes long, so go on, take a look, you know, you want to! 😉

For a slightly longer course take a look at the Writing a Compelling Blog Post by Starshine Roshell. Starshine is an award-winning journalist and writing coach, her course covers areas such as, content, structure, style policies, much the same as other courses, but she also demonstrates how to personalise your blog “by developing your own voice” and how to turn your knowledge into a brief, passionate, but sensitive blog that will make people want to read it. Starshine includes a Blog Checklist, which reminds you of things to keep in mind when writing your own content, and is certainly useful to look at once you’ve completed your writing.

If you’re interested in writing a blog for us, email elearn@port.ac.uk with your ideas on a subject, we are always happy to hear your suggestions and discuss with you.

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