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Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP

Tag: Digifest

A collage of images taken at Digifest 2020

Into the unknown – part 3

May 26, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Digifest (#Digifest20) runs across 2 days and provides a wide range of thought provoking sessions to engage and challenge the audience. 

Day 2 started with a keynote from Hayley Mulenda (@hayleymulenda on Twitter) that was one of the most heartfelt and eye opening talks I have ever watched called “The Hidden Filter”. Hayley talked about her experiences at university, her journey through depression and anxiety. How she felt while having to deal with family and friends all the time maintaining the focus on her learning. This is something that I can not do justice to with my attempt to write about it now. Just to say that if you ever get a chance to hear her speak, I would take it. It will demonstrate how many students are facing challenges that (depending on your age and year of study) you may never have even considered. It equally demonstrated to me that there were times in my life where I was depressed and emotionally raw but not realising it because I was in the middle of the situation, it is only when I think back and reflect that I can see the damage I was doing to myself. 

She concluded her talk with the notion that we should not rely on technology in this ‘technology driven world’ (which has become an even bigger issue at the time of writing during the COVID lockdown). We now face an even greater challenge to support each other those who may be isolated, not only literally but figuratively. (I will provide some wellbeing support and guidance at the bottom of this blog for extra reading). It is with the “Hidden Filter” that Hayley addressed that our reliance on presenting a show of permanent strength and happiness in a digital world can ultimately lead to a rise in negative and harmful experiences in the “real” world. My favourite quote of her session was “You don’t need to listen to respond, you need to listen to understand”. 

The second day was just as inspiring as the first, with sessions covering a range of ideas, however the last one, I want to mention for this series of blogs is the one hosted by Michelle Capes and Sean Randall of the Wiltshire College and University Centre. This session was on digital escape rooms and demonstrated how you could use Microsoft OneNote to create pages of questions, restricted by passwords that require you to challenge your students and get them to investigate the material. Creating riddles and puzzles that can be discovered through online research as well as having to work around physical locations to find the information. 

During this session, I was inspired to look at how Moodle may be a potential option in creating ‘Digital Escape Rooms’. I found that it was possible to recreate using a Moodle book to house H5P activities that are all set with restrictions that require a set score from a previous question. It was a quick test I did during the presentation but with more work, the idea could be developed using a range of activities and conditions within Moodle that create more a more in depth experience. What it demonstrated to me was the idea that we are often limited by our own creativity and not the technical limitations. The OneNote option being demostrated was simple but very effective!

What I realised is that often we are all working on creative solutions to problems or have ideas that we don’t elaborate on and this can lead us to the point where we are not always great at sharing those ideas that we have. With that in mind, if you have worked on something in Moodle that is slightly more interesting, or have an idea that you are not sure what to do with, please do get in touch with myself, your Online Course Developer (many of whom have kindly written for the blog) or the TEL team, and we can discuss these ideas and potential solutions. 

To close this post and my experiences of DigiFest 2020, I would recommend to everyone that can attend this event in the future, they do! It is a fantastic example of creative minds and inspiring innovations that demonstrate learning and teaching within the FE and HE sector. It has made me think about things we should be looking at for our institution and what I can personally do to inspire others with the technology we have available. It demonstrated to me that there are more aspects to the life we lead within a university that we might miss from the students perspective (thanks @hayleymulenda). We traditionally work in silos a lot of the time, and it is an easy trap to fall into, but we should be looking at how best we can connect our work with others throughout the university. There is more we can offer, but we might not see the direct value elsewhere or how others might also be able to apply it to their subject. It is a very easy mindset to create, isolating ourselves and not sharing our work or innovations. Often this is not deliberate but just one factor in how we approach what we do in our daily working life. Digifest has shown me we should be singing each other’s praises and looking at ways to connect and integrate our best practice around the university and also what we can offer the wider community (be it learning and teaching practice or what we can offer others who might use our teaching ideas in the outside world). 

Guidance and Support for Wellbeing:

Digifest 2020

Digifest 2020

March 30, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Although a regular delegate at Jisc’s annual Digifest I had never before given a presentation so was excited to have had my presentation proposal accepted. The topic for the talk, naturally enough, covered my work as an Online Course Developer on the university’s degree apprenticeship programme. Since the university launched its first degree apprenticeship in 2016 with just 7 Business and Management students, numbers across the university have grown to over 600 involving all faculties and 17 different courses. 

With a long history of involvement in work based learning, the university’s early involvement in degree apprenticeships would have been a natural progression along with a small handful of other trailblazers. Roll forward to 2020 and there are now over 90 HEIs delivering degree apprenticeships including Russell group institutions. 

Anyway, back to Digifest! Given the rapid growth of our degree apprenticeship programme I knew I had a good story to tell and, hopefully, some useful experience to pass on and for me this reflected a shift in emphasis of this year’s conference. I have always enjoyed the two days spent at the ICC every March but this year I was particularly looking forward to sessions looking at the practical application and development of eLearning tools and methodologies. In this respect two sessions in particular stood out. The first was a panel discussion titled “How do we address the digital skills gap” the second a presentation on how staff and students are actually using technology.

Having worked in the field of eLearning for some time, I’ve found one of the main barriers hindering the greater use of technology has been, and continues to be, time. After demonstrating a particular piece of technology, a frequent, and understandable reaction is “Yes, that looks great but I just don’t have the time to create resources using it…” Coming from a teaching background I can empathise, with preparation, marking, meetings and actual teaching, time is often in short supply In the sessions mentioned above different strategies were discussed in addressing the issue of time. One involved recognising and rewarding digital development, thus partly overcoming the digital skills gap with a carrot based approach. The other approach involved a more stick based strategy whereby developing digital skills becomes part of the standard annual appraisal.

In terms of the contrasting approaches proffered, my starting point is very much carrot based, which doesn’t necessarily need to be physically tangible. The use of technology in teaching can bring measurable gains, with some upfront investment in time, resources can be created that can be used multiple times and thus be time saving in the long run. For example a Moodle quiz can be used for either formative or summative assessment and is self marking. A short video can be quicker to produce than a handout and be a more effective learning resource. Use of tools such as Padlet, Nearpod and Vevox can add meaningful participation and interaction in lectures and seminars with the same resource being re-usable for as long as the modules are taught.

For students the greater use of technology can bring real benefits and Jisc’s digital insights survey regularly shows that students do want greater use of technology even if it is just lecture recordings. Moreover, according a report produced by the European Commission (Human Capital: Europe’s Digital Progress Report, 2017) 38% of workplaces stated that a lack of digital skills was harming business while in the panel discussion mentioned a performing arts student explained how the use of technology in his course had helped him develop the skills he needed to be able to gain employment in his chosen field. One suggestion I am a little unsure about is the rewarding of staff with badges they can wear when they achieve a given level of digital skills, a strategy used by one college, but some kind of recognition for digital development can only help spread good digital practice.

The presentations from Digifest 2020 are now available online to view, along with Andy Taggart’s: Degree apprenticeships – meeting the technical and teaching challenges

Image by Klaus P. Rausch from Pixabay

 

Into the unknown - part 2

Into the unknown – part 2

March 26, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Digifest (#digifest20) as a conference is awe inspiring, Jisc really know how to create that wow factor on entering the central auditorium. It was an area divided between trade stands, a village green and a futuristic stage. Next to it housed a massive screen that projected holographic messages signposting exhibits like AR, as well as when sessions were due to start. 

The first two sessions of Digifest were thought provoking and relevant to what we are all facing, a greater need to work online and provide a digital solution to our traditional working practices. Unsurprisingly enough, this is even more relevant now! Since I wrote part 1, we have gone through a seismic shift in learning and teaching, and had to adapt at a rapid pace to the new ways of working. 

This ties nicely to the third session that I attended called Digital Imposter Syndrome in Pracademia. We are all now facing a new way to interact with colleagues, students and our families. The fact that in the not so distant past, people would shy away from attempting new ways of using technology, yet are now being forced to change and adapt. This session had the perfect message for our current working environments. 

Just give it a go! It might fail. If it does … so what? 

We are a diverse community of practitioners and academics that are rallying, more than ever, to provide support and resources for each other and our students. 

The previous worry and the point I would have made, had I written this when Digifest was fresh in my mind, was that our students know more than us. That might well be true in certain technological areas, but actually, this is also a challenging time for them too. We are in a prime situation for students to give us their feedback, which can only benefit us and them in collaborating going forward.  This idea of digital support and digital co-creation is something that the TEL team are happy to discuss so please let us know if this is something you are doing or want to know more about (you can start with me tom.langston@port.ac.uk or the general help email elearn@port.ac.uk ).


At the time I made this tweet, it summed up nicely where we stand today. At the moment quick wins are the name of the game, being adaptable and using new tools to try something new. 

Back to the wider Digifest angle, and each session I attended, offered new and creative ideas for teaching. Harlow College provides their students with an iPad for their studies and with it they are creating digital scrapbooks to help with dementia patients in the community, writing and directing drama performances for the community around evocative subjects like cyber-bullying. It lets the students’ creativity flow through all their studies and is not fixed to traditional technical subjects. This is key when thinking that ‘they’ know more than we do. We, as academics, understand that the generations surrounding us have different skills to offer, and to ignore that is only going to slow innovation. If we develop why we want to use the technology and think about the pedagogic rationale, maybe the students can run with the theme and ideas and inspire us in how we work, assess and challenge our previous norms. 

Digifest was an amazing space to share ideas and hear about innovations in teaching that are surprisingly easy to implement. So far I have written only around day 1, day 2 was equally fruitful. The final blog post in the series will look at the highlights of day 2 and what we can do going forward with the enforced digital revolution that we are all now part of.

into the unknown - part 1

Into the unknown – part 1

March 17, 2020 / / 1 Comment

Just like Elsa being called by unseen voices into an adventure as yet undefined (for those that don’t know, this is a reference to Frozen 2 and Elsa’s new and improved version of Let it go), Digifest 2020 or #digifest20, if you want to track it on social media, opens its doors and I step into the unknown, exciting event hosted by Jisc. Digifest is new to me, but to those that have been before it offers innovation, inspiration and opportunity. 

This two day conference that Jisc organise every year at the Birmingham ICC is a window into the latest ideas that help create and shape fantastic innovations in learning and teaching. 

The conference opened with, what would turn out to be, a controversial keynote from Jonah Stillman (@jonah.stillman on instagram), firstly outlining how the generations were categorised and then with a look into Gen Z and their approach to learning. It was an interesting insight into how Gen Z are not like the Millenials (who started in 1980!) and are being told they are winners and losers, it’s not about the taking part anymore, it’s about the winning. This, he argues, will be a potential hurdle through their learning and into the world of work as they are not able to collaborate (while admitting this was a wide generalisation). 

For me the biggest take away was that you can’t wow Gen Z with technology. They quickly investigate and analyse a tool and quickly decide if it is useful or redundant. Where the older generations would see themselves as technology inept and the problem is with them, the Gen Z learner sees it as a problem with the product and that it either works for them or doesn’t. 

We are all at that point where we have technology or using technology in some way as part of our lives, but for Gen Z there is the expectation it is there. It should be integrated and seamless to their experiences. Jonah Stillman expanded on this with the concept of Weconomists. The simplest example of this is Uber, but it is the shared economy. If you need something there will be someone available that can offer that service. How that fits educationally is going to be the next big sticking point. At worst we have the idea of buying essays, but how can we turn this into a positive? How can the shared economy of learning be expanded? 

For me it fits into the idea that was presented by Rachel Hall (@rachela_hall on Twitter) at the next panel “Changing the world of work in the digital age” and how The Guardian has focused their future on the digital output of their journalists. They have looked at how people access the news depending on the time of the day. Headlines in the morning, just short sharp bite sized pieces of information that people can choose to discover on their commute to work. At lunch a more in depth article that expands on their day while they have a larger chunk of time to be critical of the stories that hold the most interest to them. By the evening they are looking at more lighthearted content that relates to their social experiences and lifestyle. This for me presents one potential solution to the shared economy, where students can share their stories and knowledge. They each process that information differently but if they can help interpret that to their fellow learners they will adapt the material and help reframe learning in a way that makes it accessible to everyone. 

Just from the two opening sessions of this year’s Digifest, I feel inspired to think about my own practice and how as an educator I am trying to predict what is going to be useful for students in their learning. I am now more aware than ever that I am using technology in such a different way to that of the students at the university. The change we are seeing should not be seen as a problem. It should be seen as an opportunity, while we are taking a step into the unknown (just like Elsa!). We can take the challenge and channel our current students desire to learn and look at how we facilitate that desire in a way that may not be comfortable to us. 

Stay tuned for Part 2, when I will focus on academics who are facing this challenge of a student body that potentially knows more than they do in terms of technology!

All the notes taken at #digifest20 can be found on Twitter @TelPortsmouth

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