Tag: internal (Page 8 of 21)

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

Working Down Under

April 9, 2020 / Mandy Harcup / 2 Comments

On the second week of our holiday Down Under visiting family in Australia, it became apparent that getting home was going to be a problem! No matter how long we stayed on the phone or how many people we contacted online, the reality of getting back to the UK, to be back for work for Monday 30th March, was getting further and further away – what was I going to do?

Having worked from home in the past, I knew what I was going to need a laptop and wifi – easier said than done from Australia! By then the country had started to lock down, shops were shutting, those people that could were asked to work from home and social distance was the name of the game. The news reports on the TV were saying prices of laptops were increasing, and a shortage may occur whilst shops restock. Two shops later we found a laptop in our price bracket, then the hunt for a dongle or wifi, one way or another, commenced. Five shops later with a dongle securely in our pockets we went ‘home’ to see if I could access all the relevant areas I needed to be able to start work on the Monday.

The first thing I did was add the Virtual Private Network (VPN) onto the laptop. Connecting to the VPN allowed me to access University services as if I were on campus. After adding this and connecting to GlobalProtect, I went to AppsAnywhere. Here I could start checking to see if I could access the applications required to do my work. The only site I seemed to have problems with was getting onto the Employee Self Service, as I wanted to check to see what annual leave I had left, as when (and if) we were able to get flights home, I knew I’d need time off. However, I’d been in contact with my manager since 23rd March giving him updates on our predicament and letting him know of the procedures I had put into place to start work on Monday 30th March.

Logging in on Monday 30th March was a little surreal, knowing that my colleagues were either in bed or just going to bed! As you can imagine there were loads of emails to start working through and information about COVID-19 – the main topic. My plan was to work for so many hours, take a break, have lunch, get some exercise, then log back on to work the last few hours at the same time as my colleagues so I could touch base with everyone. This system worked very well for me, I’ve been able to access all areas and I’ve messaged my colleagues using ‘Slack’ and even had a few GMail Hangouts video calls which were great, but made me homesick.

On Friday 27th March we were lucky enough to purchase tickets for Saturday 4th April, so fingers crossed by the time this blog is published I’ll be home.

Credit Image: Photo by Ondrej Machart on Unsplash

First Image: Casarina Beach where I took my daily exercise

Second Image: On Google Hangouts chatting with Marie Kendall-Waters

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

Digifest 2020

March 30, 2020 / Andy Taggart / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image by Klaus P. Rausch from Pixabay

Into the unknown – part 2

March 26, 2020 / Tom Langston / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you a digital Imposter? #digifest2020 Unrealistic personal expectations lead to people thinking they can’t do something digital. It’s about trying to break down the walls of fear for each other so that experiences become enjoyable and help give us “quick wins”.

— TEL Portsmouth (@TelPortsmouth) March 10, 2020

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

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

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

Are you ready to work from home? – Tips from TEL

March 23, 2020 / Marie Kendall-Waters / 1 Comment

As the UK prepares to work from home this week, many people might be feeling a little anxious and overwhelmed by the sudden thought of working remotely. Although working from home is a common practice for most of us within the TEL team, we are aware that this isn’t the case for everyone. Working remotely can provide benefits but it can also pose challenges. The TEL team have been working hard to develop an eLearning Tools Site which features useful resources and information on working from home, particularly teaching remotely for staff at the University of Portsmouth. Throughout the weeks we will be reflecting on the benefits and challenges that we experience through working from home, the tools we have used, and how those tools may have helped or hindered us!

Here are some tips for the week ahead. I hope you find them useful for working from home.

Create a dedicated work space

Some of us are fortunate enough to have a spare room that we can easily transform into quiet office space. For those of us who don’t (myself included!) it’s important to find an area that can be used for working. For me, it’s the dining room table, where I have my desktop set up and space for books, notepads etc.

Use to-do lists

It’s useful to have to-do lists – things you want to get done every day. This keeps you focused and on track. However, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get everything completed: tomorrow is another day and some days can be more productive than others. I always have a list of to-dos on the go, whether it’s on my phone, on a note pad or on post-it notes. This way I feel a sense of achievement when I can tick off the items.

Learn to deal with distractions

It’s easy to get distracted at home and, for some of us during the covid-19 outbreak, it will be even harder while our families are at home too. Allow yourself to surf the internet for 5 minutes – it might provide some inspiration and fuel you to return to your work – but don’t binge-watch box sets on Netflix!

Take regular breaks!

Make sure to take regular breaks from the screen: sit in the garden for 5 minutes and get some fresh air, or go and make a cup of tea. If you can, go for a little walk: it’s so important to move and exercise – you’ll feel so much better for doing so!

Don’t lose touch with your work colleagues

As a ‘veteran’ of working from home, Slack has been brilliant in connecting me with my work colleagues. You can set up channels for different discussion topics and receive notifications as a when people post. There are other apps you can use, such as Zoom and House Party (which is great to use with friends and family whilst social distancing). Working from home can often feel isolating so staying in touch is essential for your wellbeing.

Make sure to drink and eat

It’s so important to look after yourself and ensure you make time to stop for lunch and drink enough water. This is something that I need to personally work on in the coming weeks, as I often skip lunch, snack and don’t drink enough water! It can be difficult to consciously stop when you are engrossed with work.

Make working comfortable

Do what you can to make your workspace at home as comfortable and functional as possible. Working an eight-hour day in a bad chair is uncomfortable for your body and your mind!

Deal with being disconnected

All technologies can be glitchy at times. Remember: if you do lose your connections, maybe in a video conference, don’t worry – everyone is in the same boat and we’ll muddle through together!

Don’t be too hard on yourself

We’ve all found ourselves in a new situation, even for those that regularly work from home. It’s going to be challenging for all of us in lots of different ways, so it’s important to not be too hard on ourselves. We may find some days are more productive than others. We all need to adapt to a new routine, a new way of working and living.

and finally . . .

Good luck to everyone – remember there is s upp ort within your facult ies and departments so make sure to use them.

Please continue to follow us on Tel Tales, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram where we will be sharing more tips and information. If you would like to share your experiences of working remotely on Tel Tales then please get in touch with me at marie.kendall-waters@port.ac.uk

Credit image: Photo by Agnieszka Boeske on Unsplash

CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) UPDATE: learning, teaching and assessment during enforced absence

March 17, 2020 / Marie Kendall-Waters / 0 Comments

Calling all UoP Staff!

In light of recent events the TEL team have been busy collating and developing a resource for staff on how technology can be used to support learning, teaching and assessment during a period of enforced absence.

This eLearning Tools Site – https://sites.google.com/port.ac.uk/elearning-tools/ is a work in progress. We are updating it as and when we receive feedback from staff about what they need in terms of eLearning.

This site is not intended to be the sole resource for working remotely. We hope, though, to draw together relevant resources to help you create and deliver online learning.

As always, we would like you to feedback to us and tell us what you need. Please do so via elearn.port.ac.uk

Thank you!

The TEL Team

Image credit: Photo by Alex Simpson on Unsplash

Into the unknown – part 1

March 17, 2020 / Tom Langston / 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest Blogger: Emma Duke-Williams – On changing from academic to educational Technologist

March 16, 2020 / Emma Duke-Williams / 0 Comments

Some of you may remember me – I spent about 16 years at Portsmouth, lecturing in the School of Computing. I’ve now moved to be an Educational Technologist in Dundee University, working as part of a central team. In many ways it seems only yesterday that I left; in reality, it has been more than four years!

The change wasn’t entirely planned. I moved to Scotland for personal reasons and was therefore looking for a job. A combination of 16 years of lecturing (and a few more of school teaching before that) and a lack of a PhD made me decide that I didn’t want to lecture again. However, I did like the contact I had had with staff and students at Portsmouth, so the opportunity of a sideways jump appealed. Those who knew me at Portsmouth will remember that IT to support learning was a key area of interest for me. Indeed, my PGCE in the 80s had included “Computing in the Primary Curriculum” – those were the days of BBC Bs, Granny’s Garden and the Domesday project!

While at Portsmouth I was keen to experiment, and no doubt I drove some in the eLearning team mad with my “why won’t it do …” questions – but I also was free to experiment to see whether something could be done, and students generally went along with my ideas.

All of that experience has really helped me here! I understand those wanting to push a tool to its limits, to get it to work for the way they want to teach, and that it’s rare to find ‘one size fits all’ solution. That aspect of my role is fun, challenging, and forces me to think about both tools and pedagogic practice.

However, the greater challenge is supporting all staff to have a good understanding of the tools we have, the functionality on offer, while helping staff decide what’s really needed for their students. When teaching I came across students who found aspects of the subject hard, or didn’t understand why they had to do various things. Academics are no different!

Do I miss teaching? Not often. I do miss the buzz of enthusiastic students, but I don’t miss the pile of marking – but I’d find this role 100 times harder, had I not had that experience of being on ‘the other side’.

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

Tag: internal (Page 8 of 21)

Starting a part-time degree as a mature student

Working Down Under