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).
Hello! My name is Stuart Sims and I’m a relatively recent addition to DCQE in the Academic Development team. I’m a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education with responsibility for Staff-Student Co-creation and the Academic Professional Apprenticeship (both of which I’ll explain shortly). I joined Portsmouth a few months ago from the University of Winchester where I worked as an Educational Developer and Head of Student Engagement.
Portsmouth CoCreate
One of my main activities in DCQE is to develop Portsmouth CoCreate, an ambitious attempt to promote and embed staff-student partnership in the co-development of the curriculum cross institutionally. Co-creation has grown as an agenda for many universities in recent years, not least of all because it can operate as a way forward from a more transactional relationship with students. Many of us are familiar with the well-trodden arguments about students as customers and consumers which have emerged since the introduction of and increases in tuition fees (for those who aren’t, thisarticle from Molesworth, Nixon and Scullion from 2009 is a good starting point). To cut a long story short, if students are paying an eye-watering amount to study with us they may have changed expectations about what that means. The principles of co-creation are not about giving more student choice (as you may expect in a market-driven system) but rather giving students more responsibility and investment to mutually develop or agree the nature of their learning with staff.
An essential part of this work is to discover and highlight what is being done already in this area here. In a relatively short time I have discovered a wide range of innovative practices at Portsmouth ranging from co-developing assessments to collaborative peer mentoring schemes. In the coming months we will be profiling effective practices from Portsmouth and beyond to support others in taking a co-created approach with their students.
We are taking a multi-faceted approach to developing co-creation, this includes training and support for course teams to apply these principles in their context (including in line with the newannual monitoring processes) and the development of a new cross-intuitional module around co-creation.
Academic Professional Apprenticeship
The other half of my role is teaching on our newAcademic Professional Apprenticeship (and PgCert). This is a course aimed at staff new to Higher Education and is part of our institutional shift to prioritise Degree Apprenticeships. A new standard in the sector, we are one of the first institutions to develop a course for new lecturers around this apprenticeship model.
The course is mapped to theUKPSF and course members not only receive a qualification, but Fellowship of the HEA upon completion. This course therefore provides an alternative and complementary approach to theAPEX programme to support colleagues in achieving this internationally recognised award.
Our first cohort of around 50 course members are just completing their first year and about to progress on to the Research Informed Teaching module which I lead. This module is focused around the conduct of an enhancement or research project which the course members have developed in the first year. The taught elements relate to Educational Research Methods and key learning theories to support this. As well as supporting the development of colleagues, this will lead to a huge range of innovative practice in learning and teaching emerging across the institution.
Stuart Sims is based in Mercantile with AcDev and the Tel team.
Welcome to the team, Stuart! We look forward to hearing more about your projects in the not so distant future on Tel Tales.
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.
There is now an in-line reply box, making it quicker to respond to a post. Important discussions can be ‘starred’ at an individual level. This will sort your favourite posts to the top of your list (under any pinned posts). Discussions can also be sorted by reply, latest post or creation date.
There is a new personal messaging space, that allows conversation between users. Conversations can be ‘starred’ and filtered according to importance. The tool also allows for live chat to take place similar to GChat in Google.
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.
At the beginning of each new academic year Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) receive many Moodle queries from staff – here are the top four that we’re asked:
Q1) I can’t see my module(s) on my Moodle Homepage, why not?
A1) Are you a new member of staff or have you recently taken over the module? Has the module changed name/code and has it had a Moodle presence previously? These are some of the reasons you may not be able to see a module on your homepage, to help us resolve the issue for you we will require some details about the module(s) – the module title and/or the module code, the level of access that you require for the module(s), and your username. With this information we can add you to the module or create a blank module (or clone an existing one) for you to build.
Q2) My students are not attached to my module(s), why not?
A2) Students are added to modules in Moodle by mapping course codes and registration instances, or modules codes and attendance groups against Student Records. We do not manually add students as this access will not update should they change their modules of study. Let us know if you are missing students and we will try to see if we can resolve this problem for you or bring it to the attention of your course administrators if a change needs to be made in Student Records.
Q3) I can see my students are attached to my module, but they are saying that they can’t see the module on their homepage, why not?
A3) It could be that your module is still hidden from student view. To unhide your module, go to the module, click on the ‘Actions Menu’ (top right hand-side), click on ‘Edit settings’, click on the drop down arrow in the box alongside the ‘Course visibility’ title, click on ‘Show’ scroll down and click on ‘Save and display’. Once your students have refreshed their Moodle page, students should be able to see the module. If students still cannot see the module, please supply the module’s details and we will investigate to see if we can resolve this issue.
A screenshot of the drop down box, if it says Hide click on Show.
It is also important to remember that modules ending in JAN stay hidden from student view until January (or until the module is unhidden). So you’ll see the students, but the students won’t see the module.
Q4) My colleague needs access to my module, can I add them myself?
A4) Yes you can – on the module page click on the ‘Actions Menu’ (top right hand-side), click on ‘More’ at the bottom of the list. Click on the tab ‘Users’, then in the ‘Users’ section click on ‘Enrolled users’ (first title). This will take you to the participants page, click on the box that says ‘Enrol users’ a box will appear, first assign the role you wish your colleague to have from the drop-down menu, then type their name in the top search box, were it says ‘Select users’. When the name you require appears click on it, so it appears above the box, then click on the ‘Enrol selected users and cohorts’ button.
A sample of the Enrol users box.
When your colleague refreshes their page or logs into Moodle the module will appear on their homepage.
With Lecturer access you can give another colleague a ‘Lecturer’, ‘non-editing Teacher’ or ‘Guest’ role, you cannot assign the ‘Student’ role.
Alternatively, complete the Moodle Request form on My Services and we’ll add new users for you.
Rather than just us rambling on, we’d like to invite colleagues from within the University community to write a blog for us. We’d like your blog to be associated with technology in some shape or form, but that’s not always necessary.
It’s often difficult to get started, so we’ve detailed some types of content that we’re interested in publishing in the hope that it might prompt you to tell your story:
Have you tried a piece of software that you found amazing? Or started using a new App that you want to shout about? It could help you with your studies, get you ready for the exams period or calm you down after a really stressful day.
Have you attended a conference where new technology was demonstrated and you’d like to share with colleagues across the University.
Have you produced a course introductory video with us, and want to encourage others to do the same? You could embed this video into your blog post.
Have you attended a TEL training session or an Academic Development (AcDev) workshop and then incorporated what you learnt into your teaching? How has our help and support prompted you to go on and put your learning into practice. Tell us how your audience responded, was it a success or a failure?
Have you taken a LinkedIn course and want to write your verdict on it? How did you feel using LinkedIn? Would you use it again? Will you/have you implemented what you learnt into your teaching?
When you start to think about writing a blog, even one on a topic you’re familiar with, does your mind go blank? If so, you’ll find some help and tips on what makes a successful blog in our first ever post Why Blog? Good question, why blog indeed?. If you want to gain more confidence and knowledge before tackling your first blog try taking a course on LinkedIn, there are a wealth of informative videos on blogging, and also some aimed at creating a blog, and finding images for blogging. Some of these are videos which are only a couple of minutes long, so go on, take a look, you know, you want to! 😉
For a slightly longer course take a look at the Writing a Compelling Blog Post by Starshine Roshell. Starshine is an award-winning journalist and writing coach, her course covers areas such as, content, structure, style policies, much the same as other courses, but she also demonstrates how to personalise your blog “by developing your own voice” and how to turn your knowledge into a brief, passionate, but sensitive blog that will make people want to read it. Starshine includes a Blog Checklist, which reminds you of things to keep in mind when writing your own content, and is certainly useful to look at once you’ve completed your writing.
If you’re interested in writing a blog for us, email elearn@port.ac.uk with your ideas on a subject, we are always happy to hear your suggestions and discuss with you.
My colleague Tom Langston recently visited a session hosted by Learning on Screen, The British Universities and Colleges Film and Video Council (https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/) and it reminded me of a previous visit I undertook a few years ago (before Instagram!) which I thought I’d use to form the basis of this blog. One of the great things about escaping the university is the possibility to network and have discussions with professionals from other institutions and companies. Spanning business and education, it is amazing how views match or differ and hearing a different take on modern university life is insightful.
Technology is a “new” problem
A concept I encounter on a near daily basis is the trouble of meeting the modern demands of the student with technology as it has progressed at such a rate of knots, that we are struggling to keep up. Interestingly, the minutes from the council’s meeting in 1954 were shared with the attendees and the main themes and issues raised were assessing our own pedagogy, how to use new mediums in education and the advancement of technology. Issues that are very topical even in 2019.
A concept also levied at us is that the “modern student” has never been so technologically advanced. They were raised in the age of the internet and the school years were entwined with handheld device usage. They have not necessarily needed to phone up Uncle Ray or another assigned family expert to ask him about 17th century monarchs as they can “google” it. This Generation Z or iGen, as they may be referred to, use and naturally access technology in a very different way to their predecessors or their more ancient educators.
However with this is a common misconception about levels of understanding. Just because a student can use an iPhone and access film, does not mean they “know” or are experts in it.
Access does not automatically equal knowledge
Are these digital natives as savvy as we think they are? Or is it a gross assumption based on our observations of them accessing technology. HE Institutions (as well as our team) are looking closer at digital capabilities and providing support for those who need it, but do we as educators need to consider assessing the digital needs of the students rather than naturally assuming that they would want VR tours and interacting with embedded H5P content.
It draws me to the constructivist approach when teaching Primary Science in my previous life, where you would have your topic but it’s ultimately the students who govern how they are going to learn and find out things and it can result in an outcome at a far greater depth due to their immersion in the process.
A tension between form and context
Visual Literacy and the use of audiovisual also opens up an array of issues to consider. Take for example the BBC , which has an unbelievable bank of resources. The issue of copyright and ownership is a topic we have had blogs about in the past. There is a view that we need to have some buy in from the broadcasters and content owners to serve education. This would open up the concept of not just reusing sources but being creative beyond the content’s initial use. The idea of repurposing the material, taking an old thing a part and making something new with it. The BBC Archive, was created to be used by film-makers and was not necessarily intended for public consumption. It opens up a can of worms that perhaps material that looks fairly inconspicuous today, can have a massive impact in the future. This is evident due to the scandals raised by historical tweets being uncovered and the use of archived film footage in investigations into high profile court cases about abuse.
There has to be some education for students about not just the technology and media we use but the context around it.
Final Thoughts
The more we look to bring audiovisual into our teaching, the more we are going to have to look at ourselves and change how we teach. The idea that people sit in blacked out rooms watching films is an old school pedagogic view, just as the days of students being sat down talked at are no more.
There is an element of Audiovisual that gets their eyes off of their screens and onto the intended one at the front. We can use technology and platforms such as Twitter to allow students to engage on an individual basis. We must ensure that it is not a passive viewing experience but allows students to research, reference and back up their own point of view, offering the stimulus for a voice that otherwise may have stayed quiet.
The final thing to consider is the danger that if we spend too long of today worrying and focusing on “how to use technology and film” and it prevents trial, implementation and reflection, in ten years time those concerns will be obsolete and new issues will have replaced them.
Learning a new skill can often feel daunting, especially if it’s one that doesn’t particularly spark interest or enthusiasm – we’ve all been there right? You can feel bombarded by information and overwhelmed with the task of learning and feel like giving up before you’ve even begun!
So, how can we overcome this? How can we find the opportunity to put our learning into practice and how can practice lead to success?
Knowledge Vs Practice
When we think of learning we think of gaining knowledge:
Learning /ˈləːnɪŋ/ – the acquisition of knowledge through study, experience, or being taught.
However, as Anton Chekhov once said: ‘knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice’. This is true, we can study and gain years of knowledge, however if we don’t put the information we’ve acquired into practice then it’s meaningless and often forgotten over time. I’m sure we’ve all attended a workshop or studied a course that we later haven’t put into practice and our learning has been lost. I studied French and Spanish at GCSE and A-level, however without speaking the languages on a daily basis, I wouldn’t say I was particularly fluent in them now – I expect, if we all think back to our school subjects, how many of us can remember and are actually using those skills now? I doubt many of us are.
Gaining knowledge in learning is only half the battle won, the other half comes from practice and of course feedback – as otherwise how do you know if you are doing something right? And most importantly how can you improve if you don’t know where to begin? So how can we improve practice in our students’ learning?
Can deliberate practice aid learning?
Deliberate practice involves attention, interest and motivation, this is the important bit and how we, as educators, can help our students understand the benefit of practice in the long run by making our learning materials fun and interesting!
It’s important because practice can help improve skills. If you practice a new skill on a regular basis then you will get good at it, learning to ride a bike, drive a car, play a musical instrument, these are all skills that take time, commitment and practice and this is exactly the same for studying too. Practice helps you implement what you have learnt and get better at it.
Practice can also boost self-confidence. When you practice something and see results, it makes you feel happy and confident; when you’ve finally learnt to ride your bike, passed your driving test, play a music instrument – you’ve done it! You feel a sense of achievement as all that hard work has paid off!
As instructional design expert Barbara Seels (1997) says:
“Practice is the most important ingredient of effective instruction; it speeds up learning, aids long-term retention, and facilitates recall. Instruction is less effective when there is no opportunity to perform the task or when practice is delayed . . . . Unfortunately, much of the instruction in our classrooms provides little or no opportunity for practice.”
Learning will most likely occur with the opportunity for practice and feedback. Creating an environment or providing opportunity for our students to practice what they’ve learnt is paramount in the learning process. Whether this be on an online platform i.e taking part in a chatroom or taking a quiz. Giving feedback is also crucial. Providing students with feedback or vice versa, students giving their course leaders feedback on their learning experience, helps to confirm their knowledge and also provides ways in which future students’ experiences can be improved.
Retrieval Practice
One way we can help our students put their knowledge into practice is through retrieval practice. Retrieval practice focuses on bringing information to the mind, retrieving knowledge and then putting it into practice, by doing this students can strengthen their learning.
Are there any ways you can use retrieval practice in your learning materials?
The Mastery Approach – how can we achieve this?
There are lots of ways deliberate practice can lead to mastering a skill, which is primarily what the mastery approach to learning is.
The next time you learn a new skill, whether it be learning a musical instrument or a work-related task, think about the following things:
Establish specific goals – Firstly, what do you want to achieve? How will you know when you’ve achieved it?
Practice plan – break your tasks down into parts – Break your task down into different areas, then make a specific plan of how long you will spend on a specific part and when you will do it.
Give your full attention to each part – You won’t become a master by multi-tasking. You need to be focusing on each part, practice slowly until you have mastered each section then put it all together. This is why breaking down our learning material into bite-size sections is so important, rather than text heavy documents!
Get feedback from a master – No one masters a skill by themselves. An expert outsider can help provide you with feedback and direction. Surely it’s better to have feedback to correct or improve and help aid perfecting the skill.
Move out of the comfort zone – No one becomes a master by doing what they already knew. Stretch your expertise by stepping away from your current ability.
Maintain your motivation – You’ll need to have three things for this, emotional, logical and logistical reasons to continue:
Logistical – finding the most convenient time and place to practice.
Emotion and logic – what drives you? Maybe you want to succeed due to a negative experience you’ve had or maybe it was something positive, someone’s praise and this drives you to work hard – only you will know this.
To summarise, knowledge is important in learning. However, unless knowledge is put into practice then it will lack value and in time will be lost. Knowledge, deliberate practice and feedback lead to acquiring and mastering a skill. Practice does make perfect!
Thank you for taking the time to read my post, I hope you’ve found it interesting! I would love to hear your experiences on putting new skills into practice, have they been successful – if so how did they become successful and if not, why?
On 25 June I attended an Adobe/Times Higher forum called “Making digital literacy a pillar of education”, along with representatives from 40 or so other HE institutions.
There was no disagreement at the forum about the recent recommendation from the DCMS Select Committee that digital literacy should sit alongside the “3R’s” as a fourth pillar of education. Everyone agreed that, as the pace of technological change quickens, employers are less interested in a student’s knowledge than in their personal qualities – and in particular their ability to engage in lifelong learning. But there was no consensus on how universities can best prepare their students for life in a world in which digital technology will play an increasingly important role.
Of the institutions present at the forum, undoubtedly the most innovative approach to Education 4.0 was that adopted by the Minerva Schools. Minerva built a first-year undergraduate curriculum from scratch, but rather than base the curriculum on subject-specific knowledge they built it around 81 “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts”. Students engage in cross-contextual learning activities in small-seminar format, all of which require or exercise the use of those foundational concepts. Through these activities students pick up subject knowledge, but they are assessed on how well they satisfy the foundational concepts.
In the first year of study the Minerva School’s students are based in San Francisco. Subsequently they spend time in Seoul, Berlin, London, Hyderabad, Bangladesh, Buenos Aires and Taipei. Sounds terrific! (And expensive…) And all of this is made possible using digital technology – it’s a fundamental enabling technology for Minerva.
Minerva Schools were able to take this approach because they were small, well resourced – and also because they were starting from scratch. It would be a huge task (probably an impossible task) for an existing university with thousands of students to change its curriculum in this way. But there might be elements of the approach that universities can adopt. It’s interesting that the Minerva project have recently opened its bespoke educational technology platform, called Forum, to partners: they claim that the platform, which was designed for use in a small-seminar format, can scale to support up to 400 students. It will be worth keeping an eye on this development.
Image Credit: Commons Wikimedia: The Greek Goddess Minerva
TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) will be offering bespoke training sessions over the summer period, timetabled TEL training sessions will resume in September.
Informal 1-2-1 bespoke sessions can be held at your desk, or if there are several of you interested in a session we have a room available where you can request a more structured group session. Topics for bespoke sessions can be based around our traditional TEL programme, or we can tailor the session to answer any specific questions or needs that you require.
Please complete a Bespoke Training Request form (see below) and simply tick the box next to the session you would like training on. If you tick ‘Other’ please give a brief explanation of the topic you wished to be covered in the session. Complete with the date on which you would like your training session to take place, along with your preferred time and finish it by clicking ‘SUBMIT’.
Please click on the link below for the Bespoke Training Request form:
A recent visit to Oxford University for a conference on the use of video in Higher Education provided an excellent opportunity to pick up insights into how video is being used in universities across the country. In the words of conference organiser Dominik Lukes:
“Since the advent of YouTube, video has gained in significance as a medium of instruction. It has become an invaluable resource for informal learning and teaching, professional development, and formal instruction”
The morning session consisted of a series of ‘lightning’ presentations, each no more than around 7 minutes. This allowed for a good number of issues and ideas to be presented from a wide range of universities. In the afternoon we could choose from a variety of topics to discuss in small groups, such as student created videos as assessment, accessibility and inclusion, and how to tell a story.
Among the highlights from the day was a lightning talk covering lecture capture. The presenter (James Youdale, University of York) considered the difficult issue of whether lecture capture was changing how teaching takes place and how students engaged with the video lecture. The thorny issue of whether to have lecturers opt-in to have their lectures captured or an opt-out option with all lectures captured unless the lecturer chooses otherwise was also touched on. Among statistics James’ research had found was that 41% of students watch the whole of the captured lecture, 23% skip to what they regard as the important points and 96% watch on their own. This talk raised, without necessarily answering, a few interesting questions such as
Should lecture capture change pedagogical practice?
Do students need better guidance/help in note taking?
How can lectures be made less passive?
From the work done at York, it would seem students generally do value lecture capture and would like more of it.
Taking lecture capture one step further and actually replacing lectures with video was the theme of a presentation by Chris Evans from UCL. Two studies were carried out to gain insight into what students thought about such a bold move. In this case a 2 hour lecture was replaced with a 1 hour interactive video lecture (Xerte was used to provide the interactivity but H5P could also be used). Student feedback was very positive, and to help ensure engagement with the videos assessments were used every two weeks.
Certainly lecture capture and substituting videos for lectures allow students to learn at their own pace but not sure either are a real replacement for direct human interaction
In the late nineteenth century the Psychologist Ebbinghaus created his now well known forgetting curveillustrating how quickly information is forgotten. More modern studies tend to confirm that students quickly forget what they are told in lectures. However, they also show that going back over materials in short bursts can greatly help information retention, perhaps that is the context in which lecture capture can be viewed. In terms of replacing lectures with videos, personally I am not convinced entire courses over a sustained period of time could be delivered this way.
The afternoon discussions developed some of the themes from the morning, of particular interest were views on overcoming barriers to the greater use of video. These barriers seemed to fall into two broad areas – time and skills. Making a video can be time consuming when all production factors are taken into consideration, from writing the script, to editing the raw footage and, many lecturers may feel they have neither the time or the skills to devote to creating videos. In terms of time, what needs to be emphasised that once the video is made it’s there to be used over and over again and down the line can actually save time – students can revisit the videos which can leave time for discussions on critical analysis and evaluation without having to go back over content. For as long as a course module exists, then the video will continue to be a useful teaching and learning resource. In terms of editing, lecturers would not be expected to necessarily have the skills required, but that is where developers are key, and they can be called on the handle the technical side of things.
Overall, the key message I took away from the day is that the research presented indicated videos can be a very useful tool but it’s simply not being used enough – maybe the carrots need to be made more obvious and possibly a few sticks as well?
