Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP
Click on our blog posts below to view what the team have been up to, where we’ve been and what inspires us in learning and teaching. We are always looking for keen bloggers to contribute to our site, if you are a University of Portsmouth member of staff and interested in writing a post for Tel Tales then please get in touch with your ideas.
Twelve months ago I reviewed how TEL had navigated 2020, the strangest year I guess any of us have experienced. The TEL team, by implementing several new technologies and enhancing existing technologies, helped support the University’s pivot to what the literature now refers to as “emergency remote teaching” (ERT). Now, at the start of 2022, it is worth reflecting on what we learned during 2021 – a year in which Covid carried on posing problems.
The first point to make is that technology continued to be used heavily. As the University’s “blended and connected” approach to teaching and learning bedded in, and we experienced the welcome sight of students once again milling around on campus, I expected Moodle use to drop compared to last year. September 2021 did indeed see a drop in monthly users compared to September 2020. But almost the same number of users accessed Moodle in October 2021 as in October 2020. And 10% more users accessed in November 2021 compared to November 2020. In part this use pattern will have mirrored the waves of the epidemic, with online offering a safe environment for teaching and learning. But in part it shows, I believe, that technology has become embedded in teaching and learning, in a way that was not the case just two years ago.
The increasing use of Panopto provides another example. The last time I looked (which was six weeks ago; these figures will already be outdated!) staff had created 87,410 videos and recorded 35,442 hours of content. Students had racked up 2.23 million views and downloads. These are large numbers, and again they demonstrate that staff and students are engaging with technology in a way we could not have predicted two years ago.
Nevertheless, we need to ask: in 2021 did we fully embrace the opportunities offered by a blended and connected approach to teaching and learning?
I suspect the answer is “no”: to a large extent we were all still operating in ERT mode.
The reasons for this are understandable. It takes time to redesign a course or module so that students can get the most out of a blended and connected environment. Effective redesign takes the skills and experience of a mix of people. And the process requires support from professional services. That broad, team-based approach to the redesign of courses and modules has not been part of the culture at Portsmouth – so although it is possible to point to numerous individual examples of good, innovative practice, I believe the University as a whole has been unable to take full advantage of a blended and connected approach.
One of my hopes for 2022 is that we will see a much more considered use of technology in teaching and learning. In some cases that will mean more technology, in some cases different technology, and in some cases less technology. The key is to identify the best blend of activities to ensure students can learn and can demonstrate mastery of that learning. In other words, I hope in 2022 we will see much more emphasis on learning design.
In order to further this ambition TEL, AcDev, and Faculty colleagues, working under the leadership of Professor Ale Armellini, are developing enABLe – a framework based on well established and well researched principles, but one that is new to Portsmouth. The intention is to offer structured and collaborative workshops, at the course or module level, around learning design (and learning re-design). These collegiate, student-focused, needs-driven workshops are flexible: they can be used for new programme development, for programmes needing attention around learning and teaching as flagged in the EQUIP process, and for programmes simply requiring a refresh in a specific area such as feedback. In each case, the workshops are founded on the key principles of Active Blended Learning. If you would like to learn more, please contact Sarah Eaton.
At some point the pandemic will become endemic and, as politicians tell us, we will “learn to live with the virus”. But when that happens we should take care not to forget the lessons – both positive and negative – of 2020 and 2021. It would be foolish for us to try to return to our teaching practices of 2019. Amanda Gorman, the poet who read at President Biden’s inauguration, ends her latest poem, New Year’s Lyric, with the following lines:
“So let us not return to what was normal,
But reach toward what is next…”
I think that is a perfect sentiment for education in 2022.
Introduction by Tom:
I was asked by Vevox (a company we work closely with that facilitates audience response) to run the first session in their autumn webinar series. I was happy to do this and you can watch the recording of the session on Youtube.
After the session, Joe from Vevox was asked if I would mind someone writing a blog relating to the session. I was flattered and said of course. Dr Rachel Chan from St Mary’s University in Twickenham wrote her blog and shared it with me and I asked her if we could re-publish it here on TelTales. She was happy to let us use the blog…so this blog is a short reflection from Rachel after attending my webinar on “Co-Creating Expectations with Vevox”.
Co-creation Blog
My name is Rachel Chan, I am a Senior Lecturer – Clinical Specialist Physiotherapist teaching on the BSc in Physiotherapy at St Mary’s University in Twickenham. Throughout my academic career, I have always been hugely committed to Teaching and Learning. I recently listened to a talk by Tom Langston from the University of Portsmouth about co-creation and thought it might be valuable to write a short blog to share some of his key messages.
Tom began by asking us a question ‘What is co-creation?’ We were all on the right track, people suggested things like ‘student partnership,’ ‘collaboration’ and ‘support.’ Bovill and colleagues(2016) define it as ‘…when staff and students work collaboratively with one another to create components of curricula and /or pedagogical approaches.’ Great, so, Where does it work? Tom showed us that co-creation can work in many areas of pedagogy including setting expectations, assessment criteria, curriculum content and assessment design. I was already sold by this point but there are many, less obvious benefits, to adopting co-creation in your pedagogical practice.
The idea of co-creation may make some educators feel anxious and, in some areas, it will be easier to implement than others (assessment design may be more challenging for example) but you can and should start small. Bovill and Bulley have created a ladder that models co-creation, it shows dictated curriculum at the bottom and an anarchic level of students in control at the top (ttps://eprints.gla.ac.uk/57709/1/57709.pdf). Tom wasn’t suggesting you aim too high but believes adopting some co-creation in your practice will have huge benefits for all.
How to adopt this principle of co-creation? There are many ways in which you can successfully include co-creation in your teaching such as using an EVS to make quizzes or simply creating a collaboration space to stimulate discussions with students.
My take-home message…Step 1. always try to engage your students in your teaching, and perhaps more importantly…Step 2. respond to that engagement. Thanks, Tom, I am inspired!
If you have any questions or would like to know more about co-creation, please contact Tom at: tom.langston@port.ac.uk
This blog is written by Tom Langston, Digital Learning and Teaching specialist and Dr Jo Brindley who is the Course Leader for the Academic Professional Apprenticeship (APA). The APA is a course for new career academics within the University and provides them with ideas, support and guidance on developing their teaching skills. The course is constantly evolving in how it is delivered as it was designed to highlight best practices and current ideas within Higher Education. The course, as you will see, decided to innovate and deliver feedback using Panopto. Providing the opportunity for academics (as students) to experience a range of feedback types and engage with non-traditional forms of feedback on assessment.
While the University has always had the option of recording videos, it wasn’t until Panopto, and the integration within Moodle, that I had considered using video as a tool for feedback. That’s not to say others hadn’t done it. I know people like Philip Brabazon have been doing audio feedback (not video I know) which has received positive feedback.
So with that being said, I recently graduated the first cohort for the Academic Professional Apprenticeship and have since started working closely with the course team. I was asked to help mark a few assignments and before I undertook this I asked if I could do the feedback as a video. Jo was keen to see how this would go and decided to do her feedback in the same way (I think she just needed an excuse and possibly a safety net to do it).
We planned how we would approach the feedback and decided that Panopto would give us the easiest way to implement it. It allowed us to have our face on a screen, allowing us to demonstrate that we might have some points that need investigation but in a non-confrontational and open way. The ability to record a screen with the assignment and the marking criteria displayed at the same time helped us show how we mapped our thoughts and marking to the submission.
This was my first experience as a marker which might mean this is a little unrepresentative. Having never marked scripts in the traditional way (either pen and paper or on-screen) giving video feedback felt a more comfortable way to mark as I knew what I was saying would not be misinterpreted. Now the argument here might be that it is a “quick” option, however, being new to marking I actually did both. Firstly, I worked through the submissions and wrote my feedback about each section down, and then secondly marked it again but on camera, and read back what I had noted the first time I read it.
When we were devising this marking process, we made the conscious decision to not worry about being “perfect” and going back to rerecord mistakes. We wanted it to be as conversational as possible so it felt natural and genuine. Not everyone is going to want to be on camera, but the same can be achieved from the audio feedback I mentioned earlier.
The other nice feature of Panopto is the tracking ability of views. It is possible to see how much of a video someone has watched and how long they spent reviewing the material. For me, the eye-opening part was that many of the submissions I marked, the student watched the first few minutes of the introduction and then skipped through the bulk of the video until they got to the feedback for the final higher weighted part of the submission, which was a literature review, similar to that written in a journal article. They skipped much of the feedback surrounding the reflective elements from the portfolio they had created as part of the submission, which I found interesting as these were the areas that I felt most people needed more work on, compared to the final section which was more similar to research work they may have previously undertaken.
With this in mind, I would still provide the detailed feedback that I did as I only marked a few submissions and not every student will approach their feedback in the same way. It is something though that I will review each time as it would be an element that I would discuss at the start of the assessment process with the students to find what they might value. If they just want a grade for certain sections or if they want a detailed breakdown across the whole assignment. These conversations would be a key part in helping students to engage as if they are asking for a certain level of feedback they will hopefully then investigate each area accordingly.
The impact of the pandemic has been a catalyst to try out new ways of working and I was excited by the suggestion from Tom that we try out using a screencast as a way of providing more personalised feedback as part of the assessment process.
I have, historically, used audio feedback and I know that this was always positively received by learners, so the opportunity to use Panopto was one I was keen to experiment with. For me, one of the benefits was that the screencast enabled four views; the assessment artefact itself, the marking criteria, the marker and the associated captions. This felt like a really robust way of delivering feedback as it was easy to link the marking criteria with the submitted assessment on screen, which assisted the learners to join the dots up regarding the award of marks.
As Tom has said, we took a conversational approach to the feedback, but this didn’t make the feedback provision a swift process as planning/note-taking was also required. I think this was useful to Tom as it was his first time marking, when we met for calibration following marking the same submissions at the start of the process, these notes assisted with our conversation. As I progressed through the bulk of the marking I started to utilise the pause facility, which I think made the process quicker (fewer notes to capture) and this didn’t seem to affect the overall quality of engagement with the feedback.
I was pleased with the approach and quality of feedback provided. There was definitely more scope to work on feed-forward and we will be providing feedback in this way during the next assessment diet. Comments from the External Examiner around this approach were very positive.
Credit Image: Photo by Przemyslaw Marczynski on Unsplash
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Similarity scoring should be a secondary consideration for online assessment. Much more important factors, from my point of view, are ease of marking for academics; access to quality feedback for students; and innovative authentic assessment workflows.
Turnitin are close to monopolising the market on similarity scoring of student papers but many assessment platforms already use Turnitin and Urkund as plugin services to provide similarity scoring.
As an institution one of our strengths lies in quiz/question-based assessments. This is particularly the case in the Science and Technology faculties. We have a mature sophisticated platform in Moodle to deliver these types of assessments and a deep level of staff expertise across the organisation, which has developed further through-out the pandemic.
The risk factors for UoP include a need to increase capacity for online exams (or diversify some of our assessment types onto an external platform at peak periods) and the ability to be able to innovate in terms of essay/file-based assessments.
From what I can see, Turntin has stagnated in terms of assessment innovations in recent years and have not yet improved service reliability at key assessment periods by migrating their platforms to a service like AWS. This has been promised repeatedly but not delivered on as yet.
This is potentially a reason why we saw growth in Moodle assignment and quiz usage during the pandemic rather than a big increase in Turnitin usage (trust in the reliability of the service and flexibility of the functionality).
So where could we focus our effort to improve the assessment tools for educators and students to gain the most benefits?
Posing a long-form question to a student and easily marking the finished product should be a simple process – and it is on platforms such as Turnitin. However, we are increasingly adapting our assessments to be more authentic: assessments that more closely match how students will operate in the workplace. This often requires more sophisticated workflows and mechanisms, which should still be straightforward for academics to engage with and make sense of if they are to be successful.
During the pandemic staff were forced to transition away from paper-based exams. Many exams were instead delivered as coursework or window assignments (e.g. a 2hr assignment within a 24hr window) or as question-based quiz exams. When exam halls are available again staff may revert back to previous paper-based solutions. After all, we know how these work and paper doesn’t need charging or a stable wifi connection. However, we can harness this forward momentum with a platform dedicated to supporting timed essay assignments on students’ own devices or University machines. Several platforms offer functionality for students to download assignments at the start of an exam with no need to have an internet connection until it’s time to submit at the end. This could represent a robust, safe exam experience that more closely matches how students study today. Who handwrites for three hours any more? I’d be willing to bet most students don’t.
There are challenges with BYOD (bring your own device) particularly around charging and ensuring student machines are reliable. Many of these challenges can be solved with a small stock of fully charged devices, which can be swapped out to students when needed. Chromebooks are ideal online exam devices for this very reason, due to their long battery life and simple configuration.
Workflows such as “feedback before grades” can help students better engage with their feedback, but better access to feedback for students in a variety of places is also key.
Services that offer a holistic view of assessment feedback, or the ability to extract these comments via API so we can build our own views, are increasingly valuable. This functionality will enable key staff such as personal tutors or learning support tutors to view student feedback as a whole (rather than in silos) to spot key areas to help students improve their academic work.
To round out where I started with this post, providing similarity checking is an important part of modern assessment – but it is a problem that has already been solved, multiple times.
If we make assessment more authentic, more flexible and more collaborative there will be less need for plagiarism detection because students will be demonstrating more of the attributes we want them to leave University with. I accept this is perhaps an overly idealistic viewpoint, as there are a lot of students to assess each year, but this is more reason to explore flexible assessment solutions that can make the lives of academics and students a bit easier.
With the impact of the global pandemic continuing to dominate the academic year 2020/21, including a variety of lockdowns and restrictions profoundly affecting everyday and working life, it has been an extraordinarily challenging year. How has the year been for you?
As this challenging year draws to a close, take some time to pause, reflect and engage with wellbeing and inclusion resources, and you could win Amazon vouchers worth up to £100.
Complete the Wellbeing in Difficult Times One Year On tool and be eligible for a prize draw.
A small independent University of Portsmouth research group, led by Head of Wellbeing, Dr Denise Meyer, has been investigating how staff and students at the University have been coping during the pandemic.
Staff interviewed about using the original Wellbeing in Difficult Times tool in July 2020 reported finding it interesting and thought-provoking. They particularly valued the personalised feedback they received and felt it helped them better consider their own wellbeing.
By completing the updated personalised wellbeing tool one year on you will:
Have an opportunity to pause and reflect on aspects of your own wellbeing, coping strategies and resilience during this challenging year.
Get automatic personalised feedback about your answers to the standardised measures one year on, with suggestions for how to maintain or improve your wellbeing.
Help to further test the tool for evaluating future interventions to support staff and student wellbeing, such as the Festival of Inclusivity & Wellbeing described below.
Be able to enter a prize draw for Amazon vouchers, as a thank you for taking the 20-30 minutes to complete it – with a top prize of £100, 2 x £75, 3 x £50, 4 x £25.
The team would like a wide range of perspectives, and we hope to have good representation from participants with minority identities who can provide feedback about their experiences around inclusion at the University – for example, international students/staff, BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) students/staff, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning) students/staff, students/staff with neurodiversity, disability or specific learning difficulty.
Your responses will be dealt with anonymously and confidentially. Full information about the development of the survey tool and wider research programme, and about privacy and confidentiality, is provided at the start of the survey before the consent section. The survey has already been shared again with students.
Catch up with the popular keynotes and sessions from the Festival of Inclusivity & Wellbeing
The opening address on ‘Building a sense of belonging in a compassionate, inclusive learning community’ launched our first Festival of Inclusivity and Wellbeing with a hands-on introduction to our unique whole-institution approach to wellbeing and inclusion – the Learning, Teaching and Working Well framework. The framework promotes a compassionate mindset towards self and others which recognises the emotional impact of learning, work and life challenges and the central role of a sense of belonging in helping to meet these challenges and flourish. The rest of the Festival offered sessions aiming to build hands-on skills related to this framework.
Recordings of this and all the other sessions are now available on the Festival website. Staff who were able to attend the Festival on 12 May used words like ‘inspiring’, ‘thought provoking’ and ‘soothing’ for the various keynotes, workshops and wellbeing sessions they attended.
Why not bookmark this Self-care Break page of 5-minute wellbeing taster sessions as a resource to dip into when you need a break during the working day? You can choose from mindfulness, hand massage, chair yoga, laughter, and mindful movement. Or catch up on some of the sessions listed below.
The inspiring keynote by Dr Doyin Atewologun, an internationally recognised expert on leadership, diversity, intersectionality and organisation culture, on ‘Leading the way to a more inclusive university community’ comes highly recommended from those who attended it. Or catch up on other popular sessions like:
Managing stress, anxiety and burnout – including an introduction to the SilverCloud and Togetherall online resources
Understanding how racism affects us all and how to be an ally
Understanding restorative practice – skills for preventing and healing conflict
Learning more about mental health and wellbeing – including skills for self-compassion and an introduction to the Recovery College
An introduction to UoP staff networks
There are also sessions for academic and other student-facing staff:
Student experiences of inclusion and wellbeing with guest speaker Maisha Islam
Universal design for learning and assistance technology – creating an inclusive classroom
Report, support and safeguard – managing disclosures of serious issues
Learning Well resources – establishing a community of practice for wellbeing and inclusion in the curriculum
The last day for updating the personalised wellbeing tool is Saturday 31st July 2021.
As you may be aware, Professor Ale Armellini is creating a Digital Success Plan for the University. Rather than create the Plan and seek comment after the fact (and after any substantive changes could be made), Professor Armellini formed a cross-University group to help shape his ideas as well as provide valuable input into the Plan.
Aron Truss from BAL and I were both asked to participate in the group and have been working on elements of the Plan together.
With the Plan progressing and nearing completion, the idea of shining a light on where we are up to felt appropriate as there may still be people unaware of the project, that would like to offer some suggestions or find out more about what the Plan hopes to achieve.
This piece is partly promotional and partly reflective of our experiences of working on a project to substantially impact how we approach our digital teaching and learning experiences.
I heard about the Digital Learning Plan while talking to colleagues in another meeting. I asked if I could put myself forward to represent the team and feedback on our ideas. I sent my request in and was asked to join. It was an honour to be asked along and felt really good to actually be aware of the ideas that were going forward. I think more that I was actually able to feed into the process and get the team’s voice heard within such an interesting part of the University’s future.
During summer 2020, I worked as part of a team, contributing to my Faculty’s (BaL) plans for the 2020-2021 academic year. I was subsequently asked to be part of one of the University workstrands which led to my inclusion on the Digital Success Plan working group. My current role involves supporting and promoting the digital agenda in the Faculty of Business and Law, so I was really pleased to be involved in this, as I’m keen to see how we can continue to enhance digital learning and teaching for both staff and students.
I think one of the biggest revelations for me was how unified everyone seemed to be. Of course, there were differences, but generally, everyone had the same idea for where we would like to see this go. I think one key point was while we can offer something that will help guide everyone with the implementation of a more “digital” curriculum, it endeavours to allow the flexibility for people to be innovative and develop their materials to fit their needs.
The Digital Success Plan is going to work in partnership with the new Education Plan, and its purpose is to facilitate the implementation of the University vision/strategy, so the themes covered are directly applicable to learning and teaching practice. This is what I find really interesting, as I’m excited to see how we can support people, and facilitate the development of digital education in a meaningful and useful way for staff and students. I think the ambition around creating a risk-friendly culture that supports pedagogic innovation is really exciting and important to enable the development of new digital learning opportunities. The promotion of learning design and the use of a clear methodology to achieve this also has the capacity to significantly impact our practice.
For me it was the speed at which the change had to take place. It forced people to look into an uncomfortable situation that helped them realise “I can actually do this”. Obviously, people weren’t experts overnight and they still needed help, but I hope they say that it was not as bad as they had first thought. It did increase stress and workloads and that is something no one wanted, but again, I hope people can reflect on this and see that they can adapt what they have made this year and see that these new resources can be developed and implemented in the future.
There has been some brilliant practice demonstrated by colleagues this year, including a massive shift in the baseline delivery of things like video resources (Panopto), synchronous online sessions (Zoom) and effective use of the VLE (Moodle templates). The Plan looks to build on this, but it’s clear that the trajectory will be away from “emergency remote teaching” to a more considered and sustainable model that includes learning design planning and enhancements to tools and systems as well.
For me the Plan offers those still unsure about digital learning the chance to find a “security” blanket in what they can do. It helps shape ideas and lay a foundation for whatever they want to try next.
The Plan has been built on a foundation of strong pedagogy and positive student experience, facilitated by a series of aims, which include supporting staff and students to develop their digital fluency, fostering multidisciplinarity, encouraging pedagogic innovation and flexibility (including around assessment), and further cementing the principles, and best practice, of blended and connected learning.
Well, the next step is to consider the final suggestions that may have come in and see how they can be incorporated into the Plan as it stands. I don’t want that to sound like it’s already written and set in stone, it really isn’t, but it does have some element of the structure that we are now working within. There are a few meetings yet to happen where the ideas are polished and finalised, and that is the exciting part. We can see what the vision of this was and where it is now going.
The aim is to launch the Plan later this summer. Ale is still keen to hear feedback from staff if people have questions or comments. As practitioners, I think it might be worth us beginning a discussion about what the implementation of the Plan might look like.
The most important thing for me is that we maintain a good line of communication with the end-users. It is our chance to be real innovators in HE and find ways to engage and develop our digital provision. It is a chance to engage the students in the conversation about what they want but also what we expect from them too. It is exciting to be able to have taken part in this. I think this alongside the new Explore tool is a great starting point for where the University can go next with digital learning and teaching.
As a practitioner, the area of most interest to me is the embedding of a methodology for learning design, and the fostering of a culture that enables partnership in design between OCDs/learning designers and academics. I’m keen to see this aim realised, as I think it has the capacity to make the student and staff experience better all round. I’d be interested to hear what our colleagues feel about this too, and how they think this could be facilitated.
In pre-Covid times, exams delivered via Moodle were limited by the availability of suitable physical spaces. Exam rooms represented a bottleneck to the number of students taking exams concurrently.
For the last year, we’ve used Moodle (and integrated platforms) to deliver the majority of our teaching and assessment online.
A visualisation of the online assessment mix at the University of Portsmouth:
In May 2020 many academics who had previously planned to deliver paper-based exams had to quickly adapt and deliver online assessments. In some cases, these required students to scan or take pictures of their work and upload these to assignments (Moodle or Turnitin) for marking.
In recent months, newer platforms to handle this workflow and ease the marking burden for academics have been developed – platforms such as Turnitin Gradescope and CrowdMark. These platforms leverage the similarities in students’ answers so academics can mark many answers at once. When time allows, we hope to be able to evaluate these platforms in more detail.
In the diagram above you can see “Assignments under exam conditions” as the meeting point between traditional essays and restricted online exams. This year we have seen a big growth in this area as academics move from paper-based written exams to time-restricted assignments. An obvious caveat here is that these haven’t been conducted under true exam conditions and so are best described as open book exams. Many digital assessment platforms now include various types of proctoring and would be able to handle remote time-restricted essays (and other assessment types) securely. There are, however, a number of ethical issues to be considered with online proctoring, and we need to proceed cautiously here.
As a University, I feel we should also be looking to expand our capacity for online assessment as over the next decade we will probably see the end of paper-based exams in favour of typed essay papers delivered online due in part to student expectations.
Academics have had a year to adapt to exams in lockdown and many have discovered the benefits of Moodle quizzes for exams that offer automatic marking. (And note that Moodle is excellent at delivering scientific and mathematical exam questions as well as longer coursework assignment submissions.) Generally speaking the Technology and Science and Health faculties deliver the majority of our Moodle quiz based exams and the number of exams has grown significantly during the lockdown. Many academics don’t want to go back to paper.
In Technology Enhanced Learning we oversee online exams and assessments in terms of supporting and evaluating the digital tools and making sure Moodle can handle the number of exams thrown at it. The number of online exams has increased substantially over the last year, all funnelled into two exam windows. As a team we work closely with colleagues in IS to provide more capacity in Moodle and with timetabling to ensure the exams are evenly distributed to avoid terminal peaks of concurrent users, providing a stable Moodle platform for all users.
Without the bottleneck of physical exam rooms, the January 2021 exams were initially weighed in the favour of academic requests around having exams earlier in the day and only using the first week of the exam window to maximise available marking time. Unfortunately, this translated into a scenario that would have presented a significant number of terminal peaks of concurrent users on Moodle. Members of TEL worked closely with the central timetabling unit to level out these peaks and with the exception of one or two slow points, we all delivered a successful exam window in January.
In advance of the May/June exams, we have gone further and set hard parameters around how many exams (quizzes) or timed assignments (Turnitin or Moodle assignments) can be timetabled in any given time slot. We’d like to thank CTU for their tireless effort to make this happen. It wasn’t an easy job to manage all the necessary requirements but it’s given us an exam timetable that looks like the image below. This really is invaluable work to the University when assessment represents so much effort by students, academics and support staff.
Our increasing reliance on online assessment means, I think, that we should investigate new technologies to support that function. Platforms such as Gradescope or CrowdMark could help relieve the marking burden; one of the many platforms such as Wiseflow or Mettl or Inspera could provide extra exam capacity (with the functionality to proctor exams if that was something the University wanted to do). Moodle, with its advanced quiz and assignment capabilities, would continue to play a key role.
I believe we will get through this coming assessment period well, but as our reliance on online assessment grows so must our technologies to support it.
As a University the Covid-19 pandemic has been a driver for the uptake of online learning and assessment. As a University community, we need to harness this positive momentum and diversify our offering of assessment platforms to support students and staff.
‘Digital Accessibility’ or ‘Accessibility’ is a heated topic at the moment. Public sector bodies like us have the obligation by law to comply with Accessibility Regulations 2018 with a series of deadlines to meet. It is also an important part of our University Vision 2030 and Strategy 2025 where it says we should ‘respect and celebrate diversity and equal opportunity through an inclusive culture’.
But what does ‘Digital Accessibility’ mean and how does it apply to us in teaching and learning?
Before we look into that, let’s first find out what is ‘Accessibility’.
Accessibility is about removing disability.
What is disability? Disability happens when there’s a barrier between people and their environment. It is commonly seen as a condition or a problem of the body or mind (impairment) that requires medical treatment. However, UK Equality Act 2010 recognised and acknowledged that disability, or barriers, can be caused not just by the impairment(s) but also by the way society is organised. This is defined in the social model of disability. According to the social model of disability, these barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets, or they can be caused by people’s attitudes to difference, like assuming disabled people can’t do certain things [3]. For many people with impairment(s), the main barrier they experience does not stem directly from their bodies, but rather from their unwelcome reception in the world, in terms of how physical structures, institutional norms, and social attitudes exclude and/or denigrate them. [4]
This is where ‘Accessibility’ plays a part.
Accessibility is about finding and dismantling these social barriers, creating an environment that adapts to the needs, ideally as early as possible in the process. For example: accessible toilets, lifts, wheelchair ramps, braille on printed materials, even simple things like left-handed scissors etc. When barriers are removed, disabled people can be independent, autonomous and equal in society.
Accessibility supports and celebrates inclusion; it should be ok to be different, with impairment(s) or not. It is about ending exclusion and oppression so that people with impairment(s) are not required to change who they are in order to be entitled to the same rights and opportunities as everyone else.
Digital accessibility is ‘Accessibility’ in digital media.
It is about making digital products like websites, mobile apps and other digital tools and technologies accessible to everyone. It is the ability for all users to have an equal opportunity to access and benefit from the same services or digital products, regardless of any impairment(s) they may have.
Digital accessibility in teaching and learning is ‘Accessibility’ in digital teaching and learning products – the courses’ contents and activities, and the service we offer to our students.
It means all students are given access to all teaching materials and the ability to participate in all teaching and learning activities, regardless of any impairment(s) they may have.
Taking digital accessibility on board in teaching and learning is very much about understanding that, if we’re creating inaccessible learning materials or activities, then effectively we’re responsible for creating barriers. These kinds of resources often lack structure, written and designed with a set of assumptions. It is about having the realisation when we create resources that fail to accommodate a certain group of students, effectively we have disabled them.
Now we know what digital accessibility is and its role in teaching and learning, let’s have a look at what it is not.
It’s not. Digital accessibility in essence is about inclusiveness and universality.
It’s about having good design and making resources that can be used by as many people as possible.
I believe every student, in fact, everyone was once in one or more of the situations below; maybe even more than once:
In these situations, everyone can benefit from the flexibility brought by materials and activities designed with digital accessibility in mind. In fact, many of us use elements of them without particularly thinking about them. We might think that only disabled students use assistive technology, but, in fact, we are walking around with a kind of assistive device in our pockets all the time – our mobile phones. Have we not used and enjoyed its built-in accessibility functions like voice over, browser enlarge, colour changes, speech recognition, screen reader etc ever? When digital accessibility is put in place, everyone benefits including ourselves; inevitably everyone grows old and will eventually be impaired by age. So, essentially, we are just helping ourselves.
This video from the Web Accessibility Initiative shows a variety of ways that content produced to be accessible is beneficial for all users regardless of their ability or disability.
Yes, it is. Digital accessibility is everyone’s responsibility.
We’re all in this together. As mentioned before, it is required by law and it is the University’s Vision. More importantly, as an educational institution, we are responsible. We are the teachers and role models, what you do makes a difference. We can change and have the responsibility to lead the change in society’s perceptions and practice. We can create a society that accepts and celebrates that everyone is unique, recognises and encourages the strength and talents of people with impairment(s).
The whole purpose of providing education is to give the young the things they need in order to develop in an orderly, sequential way into members of society; to impact and change lives. Digital accessibility helps us fulfil that purpose. It provides us with an opportunity for education to reach everyone who needs it, in a way that can benefit as many people as possible. It gives us an opportunity to improve our teaching and learning materials to fulfil their purpose of existence. It is our responsibility to make that change.
No, it’s very easy. All you need is empathy and consideration.
What you do at the start makes it easier at the end. Follow these good practices when designing and adding your content. When you start doing it, you will realise that most of them are really just common sense! Information should be consistent and easy to find, easy to read, and easy to navigate; documents need good structure and colour contrast; images and graphs are described well; videos have captions or transcriptions etc, just to name a few. It is all a matter of common sense. eLearning Tools website has all the support and information you need to create this kind of accessible content.
Remember that when you design and create your content with digital accessibility in mind, you will not only create better learning materials, you will have content that can be more easily reused and repurposed – saving a lot of time in the future!
References
Credit Image:Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
I normally start all of my blogs with an anecdote from my decade of teaching and this time I’m going to take you all the way back! Back to my early days when I was a headstrong newly qualified teacher that had aspirations to be inspirational, full of new and cutting edge ideas and naive to any of the politics around the job. The pressure to achieve results and improve particularly my classes’ writing levels meant I always spent a lot of time (far too much!) trying to think up new activities to address the issue. Being an English specialist and with aspirations to lead the subject, it became my own personal crusade. I felt if I could improve my classes’ fine motor skills, this, in turn, would hopefully improve the quality of writing produced. I used to have sleepless nights over why my tasks that had taken ages to prepare, were in tune with their interests and created with cool computer images were having no impact. I ran this past a more mature teacher who showed me quite a thick book from the mid-’70s / early ’80s that contained cutting activities. The book itself had seen a lot of action and initially, I was very dismissive, saying that kids nowadays would have little interest in something so dated. She asked me to try it for a week and lo and behold my class loved it! It had other benefits I hadn’t foreseen such as calming and improving behaviour, making them take pride and care in their work. The writing levels did improve but not for my innovations but from my repurposing of old material that had been successful previously and was still relevant to my current students.
I then probably broke numerous copyright laws and spent a couple of hours after school photocopying the whole book and actually learned quite a big lesson in respecting the input of others. This particular resource helped me throughout my career, in 3 different schools for years and when I started leading Early Years, the ideas behind the resources became a staple part in providing children with the building blocks to begin their writing journey on.
This probably seems a very convoluted way in which to start a blog post for a University but currently, I am working through moving old Ubicast videos over to Panopto. While this is a long-winded process (I have to download them and reupload them on an individual basis), watching some of the Learning and Teaching Conference videos from 4 years ago has made me realise that a lot of the pedagogic messages ring true today.
I won’t use the blog to explain how to upload videos to Panopto as it is all outlined on the relevant page of the Content Capture part of the Preparing for Teaching in a Blended Learning Context.
The process of uploading videos to Panopto is fairly straightforward and perhaps a key element of it is that on a video’s upload, it inherits all of the features of a newly created Panopto video. This includes Automatic Speech Recognition, which is essential for the video to adhere to modern accessibility standards. It is worth stating that it is dependent on the sound quality of the recording itself (particularly if it is an older video or one of a live event) and the captions will need to be reviewed, just as any should before the video is used publicly.
Also within Panopto, there is an ability to add clips from other Panopto videos and you could also take this one step further and splice multiple video clips together to make a whole new creation.
We will be looking to automatically migrate videos from the University’s repository, Compass in advance of the next academic year, however, due to the scale of the operation (there are nearly 30,000 videos) and the complexity (not every video has a clear owner), it needs to be actioned after periods of activity such as the assessment period.
That does not mean you have to wait! If there is a video in the Compass repository that you feel would be immediately beneficial to your teaching, please contact eLearn@port.ac.uk with all of the relevant information as they have administrator access to both systems and would be able to assist with moving this content over. Equally, you may feel more comfortable talking to the faculty Online Course Developers local to you as their role is to assist with Moodle content and they may have some excellent advice regarding it.
Most importantly, really consider why you wish to use a video and what the learning intention is behind it. The TEL Training session Content Capture and Distance Learning will promote the idea of using shorter videos to efficiently get your message across and engage the viewer more. Just because it is possible to upload an old 4-hour conference video, does not necessarily mean that you should. However, what it can do is to provide a different focal point to affirm a concept or to address a misconception.
We’re pleased to announce the launch of RISE, a new online journal to showcase students’ work. RISE has been developed as a platform for publishing and sharing the exciting work of our students, from all disciplines, with a wider audience.
Across the University, our students are engaged in exciting and innovative work, which ranges from disciplinary research as part of their course to their own artistic and creative endeavours. Our editorial team is keen to showcase these efforts (their work?). Particularly during the pandemic, when opportunities for students to feel as if they belong to a learning community might be few and far between, RISE provides a platform for sharing and engaging with others.
There are many benefits for students in getting their work published. Not least of which is to have your achievements celebrated in a public forum. RISE is designed to showcase what our students are doing so that it goes beyond the world of assessment and is appreciated by everyone at the University.
While we’re open to a range of different media and formats for publication, in terms of research, there is an imperative to disseminate original work:
“Every university graduate should understand that no idea is fully formed until it can be communicated and that the organisation required for writing and speaking is part of the thought process that enables one to understand material fully. Dissemination of results is an essential and integral part of the research process.” (Boyer Commission, 1998:24 in Walkington, 2015)
Most students’ research at the taught level ends in assessment; students are therefore missing out on a key aspect of developing as a researcher. This is an opportunity for students to experience disseminating their work, exposing them to the processes of academic publication as well as the wider attention and scrutiny that this brings. At the very least, it is an interesting line on the CV for anyone to say they were published in the University journal!
Our website gives further guidance on how and what students can submit. If you teach undergraduate or taught postgraduate students, please share this with them. If you are aware of particular students who have done an interesting piece of original work, please recommend they publish with us or contact the RISE team to discuss – we’d love to hear about it. We are very open to creative, interactive and original pieces as well as written articles.
The current deadline for submissions is May 14th, 2021 at 5 pm. Please send any queries to risejournal@port.ac.uk.
Due to covid, students have unfortunately missed out on a lot of practical aspects of their courses, which may have been the main reason they decided to take the course in the first place. The Branching Scenario tool in H5P can be used as a substitute of sorts to allow students to have a more meaningful learning experience.
How have we adapted since last March to try and make our courses more content-rich? The use of videos is far more prevalent than before. Videos are great! BUT we need to also use them in conjunction with other learning tools. If you’re asking students to watch video after video it becomes a passive experience and then we fall into a similar situation when we ask them just to read ppts, notes, etc.
Interactivity is key here, good synchronous sessions can help engage students, but often there are issues that mean students are unable to attend or the experience of the session is spoiled by a student’s connectivity issue. It’s important not to neglect asynchronous resources. A mix of both makes for a good module and better student feedback!
The following branching scenario is more of an asynchronous activity but you could also deploy it in a live session if needed.
In late October 2020, I was approached by a member of the nursing academic team to film some scenarios within our own simulation suite, to be used as an online resource/substitute for activities that could not go ahead due to covid restrictions. The three scenarios involved a student nurse and a patient (played by actors) and covered various aspects of Patient focussed care.
Being interested in filming (Read my previous blog post), I jumped at this opportunity but I further suggested that we make certain elements interactive, to put the student in charge of making decisions. They would play the role of the student nurse and based on how the scenario panned out they were given 3 key decisions to make with one “good” and one “bad” choice at each decision point.
The filming was set for the end of November in Covid secure conditions and two of the three scenarios were scripted to have these decision elements within them. In terms of filming style, I decided to go with a three-camera setup, one on the patient, one on the student and a wide-angle also so that students could see the whole environment these characters were in. If I could do it again I might go for a POV (Point of View) style which might give an even more immersive experience.
The editing process was interesting as I had to be creative in some places where audio quality was not as good as I’d hoped and splicing the scenes to make them run more smoothly.
Creation of the H5P object was in itself very easy to do. Once I had exported the individual video files, it was a case of dragging and dropping them into place within the Branching Scenario editor. I would certainly advise anyone who’d like to do this, to map out exactly how you think it will look beforehand so it makes the actual building of the resource much quicker.
I received some fantastic feedback from both the academic in charge and the students who used it. I honestly believe that this could be a way forward in bridging the gap between practical elements and online learning. Whilst these types of resources lend themselves well to medical courses where students will need to take important decisions in their future careers, I can also see that this has a broader appeal in Languages, Law, Criminology, Coaching/management and many others.
If you want to have a go at one of the resources I’ve made, check out this link:
https://portsmouthuni.h5p.com/content/1291197333648269337
(You don’t have to be a student nurse to complete this! There’s no difficult terminology or complicated procedures to understand.)
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