Tag: internal (Page 3 of 21)

Joanna swimming in clear blue water surrounded by rocks — Snorkelling in Greece

Introduction for Tel Tales – Joanna Clarke

October 31, 2022 / Joanna Clarke / 1 Comment

Hi everyone 😁

I’m Joanna Clarke and I started in the Technology Enhanced Learning team as an eLearn Support Analyst this summer. I did my MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL here a few years ago, and my favourite module was on the use of technology and corpora in language teaching. Now I’m thrilled to be joining the team here, learning even more about technology and pedagogy, and applying what I already know.

I’ve taught EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and trained teachers for over 20 years (as well as having some pretty varied earlier work experience including a data assistant for clinical trials, a receptionist in France, and a thankfully short stint in a chicken factory).

Back in 2000, photocopiers and OHPs were the extents of the technology available in my college – and laminators if we were lucky, but you had to fight for those! I loved experimenting with new tools and finding new ways to engage students with lesson content. This led me to take on an ILT training role at Chichester College to find ways of supporting my colleagues in the use of technology. Initially, I was focused on how Moodle and other online resources can support individual study. As technology has evolved, it’s been fascinating to see the emergence of a wealth of resources for highly motivating competitive and cooperative activities, as well as new ways to help students express themselves and become more comfortable with sharing their ideas.

The pandemic took me to a new role at Chatterbox, a social enterprise that provides employment opportunities for marginalised people such as refugees in corporate language teaching. I was responsible for online content development and it was here that I really started to be interested in the data available for measuring student engagement and progress. In a classroom, I could always adjust my lesson content in response to students’ needs and reactions, but it’s very different from online material. At Chatterbox, I loved exploring the data available and then conducting user testing to investigate my hypotheses about student experiences. Working within the TEL team at Portsmouth will hopefully give me plenty more opportunities to use user data to inform module development.

What else can I say? You can probably predict from my work experience that I love languages – I’ve variously had passions for French, German, Greek, Czech, Japanese, and Spanish, although French is the only one that really stuck. My love of languages has also extended to programming languages. If anyone else out there is interested in learning these, I’d thoroughly recommend W3schools as an amazing resource for things like HTML, CSS and Javascript.

In my free time, I love going to the beach – particularly snorkelling around looking at the weird and wonderful underwater world. I’m lucky to have joined a very musical department. I used to play the piano and accordion, and the conversations around me now have given me a much-needed push to start playing again (and to take up the guitar – just have to toughen up my fingers first 😬).

Anyway, that’s plenty for a first introduction. If you want some company diving into the data on your Moodle site, please get in touch – we can go snorkelling for stats together 🤿😊.

Joanna is based in Mercantile House within the TEL team.

Welcome to the team, Joanna!

Guest Blogger: Rugaiya Ally with Tom Langston – Student Opinion of the University

October 24, 2022 / Tom Langston / 0 Comments

Introduction:

This is part one in a series of four blog posts conceived by Tom Langston and Rugaiya Ally as part of Rugaiya’s work placement within DCQE’s Academic Development and Technology Enhanced Learning teams.

Tom and Rugaiya wanted to explore students’ feelings about higher education and their expectations about life at university, and therefore devised a set of questions to ask students about their experiences. Rugaiya then interviewed 14 fellow students from across the university faculties (with a predominant number studying in the Science and Business faculties) with most studying at Level 5. This series of posts constitutes a condensed summary of the thoughts and opinions of those 14 students.

Here, in part one, we investigate what areas of their course students find to be a strength and where they struggle with the progression through their course. In part two we explore student expectations prior to coming to university. In part three we examine students’ attitudes toward their future careers. Finally, in part 4, we look at university life in general.

Strengths and weaknesses of the course

Strengths

I asked: “What are the major strengths of this course”.

The general feeling from most students was extremely positive. One response was: “Being in the second year made me realise how much this course was not only theoretical based. This is because of the placement team that is always there to offer its help. Even though I did not manage to land a placement, the placement team helped me learn more about my future career.”

Another student mentioned that providing a safe space to learn is key: “To be able to practice in a simulated environment and the availability of many placement opportunities for gaining practical knowledge and skills.”

A couple of students found positives in the content but also found that the course developed their wider skill sets: “The major strength of this course will be that it covers a lot of areas regarding management and business. It also investigates different perspectives of decision making.”

In the next 30-second clip of audio, a student mentioned that developing their skills, both subject-specific, as well as more general, transferable skills, was important to the course. Strengths (0:29)

For some students, their subject interest was enhanced when they could see instant real-world implications: “Being able to learn about the patterns people have and apply that to real life immediately … I like how psychology allows me to explore different fields and learn about different ways of associating those fields, for example, perfumery and psychology: psychology helps us understand the emotions perfumes trigger and the moods each perfume may create on different people.”

For other students, the opportunity to engage with the subject was a key advantage: “It gives you the ability to relate to all global political and diplomatic affairs.”

An obvious strength is the role the lecturer plays in engaging the students: “The lecturers are really good and some of them make the lectures more enjoyable to listen to and pay attention to.”

Weaknesses

The next question related to the potential negatives of their experiences. Asking “What were the major weaknesses with your course?”

Several students noted that they identified the weaker areas of their course to be when they struggled with specific skills or places where they might need help and support. For example: “The weakest aspect of this course will be the financial area, mostly because the calculations are quite different.”

The idea that students are required to have a certain level of self-efficacy is important, but not to the detriment of well-being: “… it is the student’s responsibility to keep track of their studies, but the university needs to also follow up on students’ performance – especially those that wouldn’t normally do well.”

It should also not be taken as a given that a lecture or seminar space provides complete clarity of the subject: “Having a lecturer who lacks the ability to explain his module explicitly in lectures.”

A common problem raised by students (as heard in the next 45-second audio clip) relates to the structure of not just one module, but multiple modules, and how their assessments are often grouped together. This can increase the pressure of a student’s workload. Weaknesses (0:45)

Some students found that Covid led to difficulties (as everyone expected). The transition to online working, however, raised problems not only with the loss of face-to-face interactions but, more importantly for the future of the blended and connected experience, how online activities were structured into the learning process. The following 27-second clip highlights the issue that students faced. Weakness (0:27)

Conclusion

As demonstrated above, there were many positives to a student’s experience at the University. In particular, students liked to see that they were learning more than just content but how the overall experience of university life was developing them personally. Despite the positives, however, the students identified areas for improvement, particularly in how courses and modules are designed and structured to create a manageable and achievable workload. Students wanted to achieve good grades and have a great social experience at university; inevitably, Covid impacted this.

Credit Image: Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

Introduction for Tel Tales

September 26, 2022 / Chris Wood / 1 Comment

Hi, I’m Chris Wood and I am one of the new eLearning Support Analysts for the Department of Curriculum and Quality Enhancement (DCQE).

In my previous role, I taught Music Technology and Media Studies at Portsmouth College for nearly 12 years. I also lead the College’s 1:1 “creative and curious” iPad project, resulting in Portsmouth College becoming one of only two colleges in the UK to be recognised as an Apple Distinguished School. In 2019, I became an Apple Distinguished Educator – a recognition of how I continued to use Apple technology to transform teaching and learning. This has taken me all over the world and I have met so many amazing friends and colleagues because of this. Over the past few years, I’ve had many incredible opportunities to present my work at worldwide events such as ISTE, Apple Distinguished Schools events, Mobile Learning Conference, JISC, and BETT as well as local education technology events within Portsmouth.

I have thrived on creating a culture of teaching, learning and innovation. A place where staff and students are risk-takers, sharers of good practice and digital advocates. I believe that providing a safe environment for teachers to share, explore and be brave can lead to incredible moments of learning. Last year, I released my first book “Throw away your whiteboard”, which documented my journey of switching from a traditional whiteboard to using an iPad, Keynote and an Apple Pencil. This revolutionised the way I taught and more importantly, the way my students learnt.

The book has achieved great success worldwide and has been featured in many online book talks/events. You can download it from Apple Books for free.

I’m hoping that I will be able to bring this experience, passion and innovation into my new role at the University of Portsmouth.

I believe we are in an exciting time for education, particularly as we emerge from the pandemic. The pandemic has taught us that we can transform education for all and develop new ways of teaching and learning. The modern classroom should no longer consist of rows of desks: technology allows students to design their own learning path and allows educators to push the boundaries of their work by extending the classroom beyond the physical institution. Having supported many teachers throughout the pandemic I strongly believe in the importance of equipping students and staff with the correct tools, resources and training to deliver effective lessons. We still have a lot to learn about the impact the pandemic has had on learning, but I am sure that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will not work. We must adopt a ‘no-one left behind’ approach and offer students differentiated paths to the same outcomes as we move forward into this new normal.

Outside of work I have played the guitar for over 22 years and also become a successful music producer. I sit on the governing board at Leesland School in Gosport, which is incredibly rewarding and allows me to give back to these amazing schools that I attended as a child. I enjoy days out with my family; taking our whippet “Twiggy” for a walk (although, not when it’s raining as she refuses to go out without a coat!); paddleboarding; snooker; DIY; and getting up at the crack of dawn to chase sunrises.

If you’d like to connect and share ideas around technology-enhanced learning, I’m always open to talk! Feel free to connect with me and follow my adventures on Twitter @ChrisWoodTeach

Chris is based in Mercantile House within the TEL team.

Welcome to the team, Chris!

TEL in 2021

January 10, 2022 / Stephen Webb / 0 Comments

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.

Guest Blogger: Co-Creating Expectations with Vevox

October 18, 2021 / Rachel Chan / 0 Comments

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.

It enables you to better meet expectations (the students’ expectations of you, your expectations of the student and more subtly but equally important, the students’ expectations of each other). An important tip Tom shared was setting these expectations as early as possible so that everyone knows the playing field from day 1.
It facilitates a dynamic approach to your teaching practice, encouraging you to reflect on what you do and allowing you to evolve as an educator. CPD in action!
It gives the students’ a voice – of course, it is impossible to accommodate all of their suggestions, no one is suggesting that you do. Phew! But listening to students, and showing them that you will try to accommodate some of them, opens the channels of communication – they know that you care and that you have heard them. This is SO important.

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

A tablet on a table set up with a microphone ready to record.

Using video (Panopto) feedback to encourage student engagement with assessment

October 11, 2021 / Tom Langston / 0 Comments

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.

Tom:

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.

Jo:

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

Explore – A guide for academic staff

August 2, 2021 / Marie Kendall-Waters / 0 Comments

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!

What’s Explore?

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.

Learning types

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.

Acquisition – Learning through acquisition is what learners do when they listen to a lecture or podcast, read from books or websites, and watch demos or videos.
Collaboration – Learning through collaboration embraces mainly discussion, practice, and production. Learners take part in the process of knowledge building itself through participation.
Discussion – Learning through discussion requires learners to articulate their ideas and questions, and to challenge and respond to the ideas and questions from teachers, and/or from peers.
Investigation – Learning through investigation guides learners to explore, compare and critique the texts, documents and resources that reflect the concepts and ideas being taught.
Practice – Learning through practice enables learners to adapt their actions to the task goal, and use the feedback to improve their next action. Feedback may come from self-reflection, from peers, from teachers, or from the activity itself.
Production – Learning through production involves motivating learners to consolidate what they have learned by articulating their current conceptual understanding in the form of an artefact, product, display or another deliverable.
Assessment – Learning through assessment is the way the teacher can gauge the knowledge of the learners, formatively or summatively, and give feedback designed to improve the learners’ performance.

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.

Feedback

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.

To conclude

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 is a secondary consideration for online assessment…

July 26, 2021 / Mike Wilson / 0 Comments

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.

Where should we be focusing our effort at UoP?

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?

Innovative assessment workflows

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.

Traditional paper-based exams (potentially bring your own device)

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.

Assessment feedback

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.

Wellbeing in difficult times

July 19, 2021 / Marie Kendall-Waters / 0 Comments

Festival of Inclusivity & Wellbeing resources with a £100 prize draw for completing a personalised wellbeing reflection tool

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.

Festival of Inclusivity and Wellbeing

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
Creating brave learning spaces
Universal design for learning and assistance technology – creating an inclusive classroom
Accessible and inclusive examinations and assessments
Report, support and safeguard – managing disclosures of serious issues
Cultural competence for academic staff
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.

Two people standing at a board, both looking at it. One person holding a marker at the board as if to write on it. On the board there's already a diagram on it

Digital Learning Plan (Tom and Aron chit chat)

July 5, 2021 / Tom Langston / 0 Comments

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.

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.

AT:

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.

Credit Image: Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash

Introduction:

Strengths and weaknesses of the course

Strengths

Weaknesses

Conclusion

Tom:

Jo:

What’s Explore?

Learning types

Feedback

To conclude

Where should we be focusing our effort at UoP?

Innovative assessment workflows

Traditional paper-based exams (potentially bring your own device)

Assessment feedback

Festival of Inclusivity & Wellbeing resources with a £100 prize draw for completing a personalised wellbeing reflection tool

Festival of Inclusivity and Wellbeing

How did you get involved?

TL:

AT:

What have you found most interesting about the project?

TL:

AT:

What do you think 2020 (lockdowns) have done to shape the Plan?

TL:

AT:

What does the Plan offer going forward?

TL:

AT:

What is the next step?

TL:

AT:

Final thoughts:

TL:

AT:

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