Tag: digital learning (Page 2 of 5)

Starting a part-time degree as a mature student

April 14, 2020 / Becky Holman / 3 Comments

Hello and welcome to my introductory blog which will serve to document my journey into higher education as I undertake a part-time, fully online degree in Graphic Design, which will hopefully only span over the next 6 years, and not the rest of my life. Every few months or so you will see me pop up, documenting my latest module adventures and letting you know what I’ve been up to.

For a bit of personal background, I went to college for 6 months before deciding it wasn’t for me, fast forward 4 years I found myself working at the University of Portsmouth. 13 years later I’ve worked my way up the ladder into the role of Online Course Developer, a role which I truly enjoy. However, over the years I have looked at my peers and silently wished that I had pursued an academic path after all, but I had accepted that life doesn’t always go the way you expect it to and buried the thoughts back down when they popped up, telling myself that I had too much going on in my life to consider trying to get back into education (and for those that know me will know that this is true for the most part, my life is nothing but hectic!).

In 2019, I gained my Mathematics GCSE, after attending night school for 9 months, which I had been putting off due to struggling with dyscalculia and the fear of failure. Succeeding in this triggered such a sense of achievement that I started to consider enrolling on a degree, for real this time. I spoke to friends and colleagues for advice and their thoughts as to what they thought I should do. Some felt that it was wise to add to my qualifications, when others would say, well you’re already doing the job and have the work experience, so what’s the point?

In the end I decided it was now or never, and time to just dive in – I’ve navigated so many major life events as a baptism of fire – so why stop now? I want to undertake this degree not just to better my job prospects, or to become better at the design aspects of my current job, but for me. Because this is what I’m truly interested in and I know I can do it and be great at it.

So where am I studying? After doing lots and lots of research, and becoming disheartened many times, I discovered the Open College of the Arts (OCA), somewhere I had never heard of before, and after learning more about them, I’m really surprised it isn’t more well known. The OCA was founded in 1987 by Micheal Young, who was one of the founders of the Open University. They specialise in creative degrees delivered entirely online, something that I’ve discovered is very thin on the ground. In 2016, the OCA became part of the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), which in 2019 was named Modern University of the Year by the Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, and is ranked number #13 on the UK’s Guardians University League Table and listed as TEF Gold.

As the degree is delivered fully online, which is perfect for me work-wise, it means that my motivation and time management skills are going to have to exceed my usual levels by tenfold. I know myself well enough to know that my main challenges are going to be just sitting down and reading, and balancing my social life with study time … I’ll have to start taking the advice that I give to students, and like most people I am terrible at taking my own advice!

However, through the power of social media I already have a ‘study buddy’ that I met through the OCA student community Facebook group. It’s already been a huge help, regardless of the ‘real life’ support that I have, and we are helping each other by sharing ideas and just motivating each other generally. She’s started slightly earlier than me (I’m starting in April) so has let me know what the first assignment is, which is to design three postcards based on your interests and hobbies. Naturally they are going to be the nerdiest postcards ever seen, and I’m super excited about getting started on them.

I’m also very interested to see how this degree is delivered from a professional viewpoint. The only contact I will have with my tutors is via Skype or Google Hangouts, I will be sent my assignments online and will be expected to maintain a learner log. I’m not sure yet what Virtual Learning Environment will be used if any, but the feedback I have read from other students has been very positive, so I’ll also be feeding back on this blog on how the OCAs way of teaching could improve my own practice in certain areas as an Online Course Developer.

I’m under no illusion that this is going to be hard work, lots of hard work, but I’m ready for the challenge!

Image credit – Photo by Flo Dahm from Pexels

On a table a mobile phone showing a list of courses on LinkedIn Learning app, next to earphones and a mug filled with a dark beverage

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – LinkedIn Learning – Collection and Learning Paths

April 6, 2020 / Adrian Sharkey / 0 Comments

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning contains over 40,000 courses on technical, business and creative skills and is free to all University of Portsmouth students and staff. Many of the courses will map directly to studies, others will be on tools such as Autocad, MatLab or SPSS which are essential for study. The courses on a wide range of business skills can be used by staff for CPD and students for employability skills.

Collections and Learning Paths

With that amount of courses in the library, searching for exactly what is relevant or required can sometimes seem daunting. LinkedIn Learning will offer recommendations based on the skills and interests you have setup as part of your profile. If you’ve connected a personal LinkedIn account to your University LinkedIn Learning, you will also get recommendations based on your professional network. One way to organise courses is to use personal collections and learning paths. Everyone can create these, collections work for a group of courses or videos related to one particular topic or skill, learning paths when you want to work through courses in a particular order, building skills and knowledge. If you create personal collections and learning paths you can share a link to them so others users can access them.

With Admin access however, it is possible to create ‘University of Portsmouth’ collections and learning paths centrally. You’ll see these in LinkedIn Learning in the main library, under the browse button. As well as being available here and shareable via a single sign on link they can be recommended directly to users.

Custom Content

Another advantage of Admin access is that you have the ability to upload custom content into the University of Portsmouth LinkedIn Learning platform. These can be videos, PDFs, PowerPoints, links, pretty much any type of file. It means you can then create collections and learning paths with a mixture of LinkedIn Learning content with bespoke University content alongside it. Great if you want some specific explanation or demonstration alongside the expert industry standard content provided by LinkedIn Learning.

LinkedIn Learning Mapping Service

LinkedIn Learning provides a mapping service where they map their content against a list of competencies or skills in a particular area. We have done this for a number of areas: the CCI Placements team created a learning path based on competencies students need for finding a placement, a similar exercise was done for the student sports club committees. LinkedIn also provide mapping against frameworks used in Higher Education, such as the Jisc Digital Capability Framework and the framework for Researcher Development and Doctoral Skills. As well as this LinkedIn have developed course mapping against the range of activities for a typical university, things like teaching skills, skills for student success, professional development, project management and many other areas.

Next Steps

Have a go at creating your own collections or learning paths or using some of the ones set up by Linkedin Learning. If you think you could benefit from the Admin access and you want to create collections and learning for groups of students or staff contact ittraining@port.ac.uk for further help. Let us know also if you’d like to take advantage of the mapping service and get LinkedIn Learning content mapped to specific skills and competencies for your areas. Lastly check out the Linkedin Learning landing page and the collections and learning paths created by University colleagues.

For further reading on Linkedin Learning, then check out these previous posts:

LinkedIn Learning – Change

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – University of Portsmouth LinkedIn Seminar

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – Goodbye Lynda, hello LinkedIn Learning

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – Digital Capability Discovery Tool

Adrian Sharkey: @adrianjsharkey

Peermark – a tool for group feedback.

March 9, 2020 / Tom Langston / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peermark is currently on a test installation of Moodle.

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

Image taken from Unsplash :John Schnobrich
John Schnobrich

Some comments on “The future of assessment”

February 17, 2020 / Stephen Webb / 0 Comments

The Curriculum Framework Specification document, which provides detailed precepts and guidance for the design, development and review of all new courses at the University, contains UoP’s policy on assessment. The policy’s authors made a conscious choice to call it an Assessment For Learning Policy: the policy advocates assessment for learning rather than assessment of learning. As the policy states, assessment for learning enables a culture in which:

students receive feedback from academics and peers that helps them to improve their work prior to final/summative assessments;
students understand what successful work looks like for each task they are doing;
students become more independent in their learning, taking part in peer and self-assessment;
formative assessment is, where possible, aligned to the module summative assessment, in order to facilitate cyclical feedback opportunities which will clarify expectations and standards for the summative assignment (e.g. the student’s exam or portfolio submission).

As the University considers how to implement its new five-year strategy, however, and how to meet its ambitious vision for 2030, might we need to rethink assessment? Not rethink the approach of assessing for learning, but look again at some of the details of how we assess?

The changing nature of assessment over the coming five-year period happens to be the subject of a recent publication from JISC: The Future of Assessment: Five Principles, Five Targets for 2025. This report, the output of a day-long meeting held in 2019, identifies five key aspects of assessment and the role that technology can play. The report argues that assessment should be (in alphabetical order, not order of importance):

Accessible – taking an inclusive approach to assessment is the ethical thing to do, of course, but we now have a legal requirement to meet certain accessibility standards. Digital technology can certainly help with accessibility. Contact DCQE if you would like further advice in this area.
Appropriately automated – it hardly needs to be said that marking and feedback, although crucial elements of the assessment process, is time consuming. Technology can help here, too. Technology can be used to automate the process and, if the assessment has been properly designed, students get the benefit of immediate feedback. Technology might also be used to improve the quality of feedback: in this regard TEL is currently exploring the Edword platform.
Authentic – this is, I believe, a key area for the University to develop. How does it benefit students to make them sit down for three hours and hand write an essay under exam conditions? This doesn’t prepare them for the world beyond university. Surely it’s better to assess students’ ability to work in teams; display their knowledge in a realistic setting; use the digital skills they will undoubtedly need in the workplace?
Continuous – in order to be successful in their chosen careers, our students will need to keep up with changes wrought by technology. So perhaps the most important skill we can teach our students is how to be independent, self-directed learners. An over-reliance on high-stakes, summative exams does not help. Of particular interest to me, in the JISC report, was the mention of using AI to personalise learning and assessment: the technology is not there yet, but it might come in the next few years.
Secure – if we are going to assess a student then we need to know we are assessing the right student! For a long time the focus in HE has been on detecting and deterring plagiarism. Nowadays, though, we also face the threat of essay mills and contract cheating. Once again technology can play a role: data forensics, stylistic analysis tools and online proctoring platforms can help tackle the problem. Such tools are best used, however, in a culture that promotes academic integrity: we should use technology to help promote a sense of academic community rather than to “catch the bad guys”.

The five principles identified by the JISC working group seem to me to be realistic and practical. They are also, if I’m being honest, slightly unambitious. I think mixed-reality technology, for example, opens up many opportunities to develop assessment for learning. But perhaps that is more for a 2030 vision than a 2025 strategy.

Credit Image: Needpix.com

12 Days of Christmas – Learning and Teaching Advent calendar

November 29, 2019 / Alana Aldred / 0 Comments

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

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

Yellow background, with black items on it, including a mobile and an orange book titled Change by Design

LinkedIn Learning – Change

November 25, 2019 / Mandy Harcup / 1 Comment

The definition of the word change says: “an event that occurs when something passes from one state or phase to another”, other words that could be used are adjustment, development and modification. These are all words used daily in our vocabulary and are words that reflect what is happening within the university as a whole, but mainly within our roles.

Who else looks at their original job description and specification and can only see a few responsibilities that look similar to the work that you’re carrying out now? For me, some areas have disappeared altogether, whilst others have been replaced by new processes and procedures. People are all different, some seem to embrace change easily, whilst others stick their heads in the sand and hope it doesn’t affect them or their role. I’m one of those people who like to digest (in my own way) what’s been said and then find out more information e.g. Where do I fit into the change? What part will I be expected to play in making the change happen? What knock on effect will it have elsewhere? Is there training that I’ll need to undertake? etc. etc.

During this period of adjustment when we find our responsibilities have changed and we’re expected to ‘step up to the mark’ and embrace whatever is required to make these changes happen, this is described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross as a ‘Change Curve’. Kubler-Ross ‘Change Curve’ explains the emotions that most people go through when change is in the offering, although the original theory was in relation to the grieving process and describes 5 stages (see image below). In business it is now applied to any kind of change.

Stage 1, Denial were we blame others, which is preceded by blaming ourselves, “What have I done wrong?” and “Why me?”

Stage 2, Doubt follows quickly afterwards causing self-doubt, uncertainty and confusion, this happens normally when you’re at your lowest ebb.

Stage 3, Acceptance, the turning point, when you start to accept the change, think more rationally about everything and can start to work to solve problems that may arise to make the change work for you and others in your team.

Once you’re through the ‘Change Curve’ it’s only then that you can start to move on, and it soon becomes the norm. The length of time it takes for an individual to experience the ‘Change Curve’ varies from person to person and can depend on what the change is and how much this change is going to affect the person.

(https://www.cleverism.com/understanding-kubler-ross-change-curve/)

I bet you’re wondering what all this has to do with LinkedIn Learning? Well I’m not talking about the change from Lynda.com to LinkedIn Learning, although that has happened (see blog post Goodbye Lynda, hello LinkedIn Learning) but about the courses that may be of benefit that provide an insight into the processes that happen when change occurs. The courses (or individual videos if you’re short on time), look at change from different angles and perspectives, giving you the techniques to help you cope with change, before it happens, while it’s happening and how to come out the other end and to keep altering and growing until the process produces the end results.

When you have time, just type ‘change’ into the search box, you’ll see a list of over 48,000 items will appear, this can be filtered down by using the block on the left-hand side, to make it more manageable and tailor made to your requirements. Of course the university hold workshops on this subject as well, but we don’t always have the time to attend.

In case you were interested in the courses that I looked at, here they are:
Building Resilience by Tatiana Kolovou
Embracing Change by Todd Dewett
Managing Stress for Positive Change by Heidi Hanna
Leading Change by Gary Bolles

So go on, have a go, log into LinkedIn Learning today!

Further Reference: https://www.cleverism.com/understanding-kubler-ross-change-curve/
https://www.definitions.net/definition/change
Image Credit: Photo by Krisztian Tabori on Unsplash

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – University of Portsmouth LinkedIn Seminar

November 11, 2019 / Adrian Sharkey / 0 Comments

LinkedIn Services to Support University of Portsmouth Students and Staff

On Friday October 25th we had a visit from Ralph Blunden the Relationship Manager for LinkedIn. Since 2017 the University has been using Lynda, an online resource with thousands of courses on business, creative and technical skills. Lynda had been owned by LinkedIn for sometime and this summer, Lynda moved over to the LinkedIn Learning platform. Ralph offered to present on how LinkedIn Learning and LinkedIn could be used to support both students and staff and we had a great turnout from all around the University willing to listen.

There are now over 30,000 courses on LinkedIn with up to 40 new ones being added every week. The new platform personalises learning by making recommendations a lot more relevant, these are based on previous learning, on what is popular in the University and if a LinkedIn account is connected – recommendations are based on the skills shown on the user’s account. When courses are completed a badge can be added to a LinkedIn profile, which is particularly useful for students in order to show employability skills to potential employers.

LinkedIn have 23 million accounts in the UK, while only around 10% of these are active at any time it represents a significant section of the working population. Around 70% of employers recruit using social media showing a professional presence for employability and making connections is essential. With Industry 4.0 and changes about to happen because of emerging technologies like AI – skills requirements are increasingly fluid – Linkedin data shows the average skill having a shelf life of 5 years. While hard skills are still important, the most in demand skills for employers is creativity along with other soft skills such as critical thinking, being able to learn, teamwork and adaptability.

LinkedIn are aiming for their services to compliment learning for students and staff in HE. LinkedIn Learning can supplement in class learning, allow opportunities for flipped classrooms, support accreditation and professional development for staff. It can promote employability and placement skills for students and encourage engagement with alumni, allowing students to make important professional connections.

There a number of ways we could leverage LinkedIn Learning to target certain areas by packaging courses and creating collections/playlists or utilising the existing learning paths. Teaching excellence could include blended learning, flipped classrooms, instructional design and VLE training. Digital capabilities can be packaged, staff development and employability for students also. LinkedIn offer a mapping service, where if we supply the competencies we’re looking to develop they will map the appropriate courses against them, allowing the creation of collections/playlists.

For further support/assistance with LinkedIn Learning contact:

adrian.sharkey@port.ac.uk

Twitter: @adrianjsharkey

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/adrianjsharkey/

Image Credit: supplied by LinkedIn

boy singing on microphone with pop filter

Accessibility: Investigating Automatic Media Transcription

November 4, 2019 / Rich Heath / 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

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

Great feedback is essential

October 3, 2019 / Mike Wilson / 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

Moodle 3.7 – New Features

September 23, 2019 / Tom Langston / 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.

Upgrades to the Forum boards.

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.

Enhanced Messaging Features

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.

Clear a Quiz Choice

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

Hidden pages in a Book

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.

Tag: digital learning (Page 2 of 5)

Starting a part-time degree as a mature student