Tel Tales

Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP

Category: Online Learning (Page 3 of 4)

The icon which says In Learning with Lynda.com content

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

July 15, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Two years ago the University implemented Lynda.com, an online library containing over 14,000 courses on business, technical and creative skills. Over 7,500 staff and students have taken advantage of around 19,000 hours of learning and nearly 280,000 individual videos. Sadly, however, from August Lynda is no more.

Fortunately, none of the great content accessed by staff and students is going. It is simply being moved to a new platform – LinkedIn Learning. This has a lot of new features and advantages, which will be outlined in further communication. Before seeing LinkedIn Learning though, it is worth having a look at some of Lynda’s greatest hits.

Top Courses

For the whole University, Excel Essentials comes out on top of the most viewed courses. This is followed by programming courses, which make up a few in the top 10. The trend in the most-used courses is for programming and understanding data, although it’s good to see skills like Critical Thinking and Project Management featuring. The skills that are in demand mirror the skills that universities should be developing in students and staff around Digital Capability. For more information on the Jisc Digital Capability Framework, and to help students or staff get a tailored report on their own strengths and weaknesses, check out the Digital Capability Discovery Tool.

Use By Faculty

All Faculties have adopted the use of Lynda, but usage is highest where the content relates directly to taught courses. 

In Technology and CCI many courses relate to specialist software such as AutoCAD, design, animation or programming – skills directly related to the type of courses taught.

Lynda contains a big section of courses on Business skills, so Business and Law can take advantage of the range of Marketing courses. 

Usage in Humanities is quite a bit less, but students are using the courses for applications such as G-suite and SPSS. One way to encourage usage would be to tailor playlists around the kind of skills students need for study and employability, link them to course Moodle pages so they’re readily available. This is something the IT Training team can help with.

Total number of courses taken per faculty

BAL

Excel 2016 Essential Training

Advanced Grammar

Creating and Giving Business Presentations

CCI

3DS Max 2018 Essential Training

Cert Prep: Adobe Certified

Associate – Photoshop (2017) Learning Design Research

Hum

Google Drive/Docs/Slides

Word 2016 Essential Training

SPSS for Academic Research

SCI

AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

ArcGIS Pro Essential Training

Programming Foundations:Fundamentals

TEC

Synchro Essential Training

Xcode9 Essential Training

ArchiCAD Essential Training

Mini Case Studies

Nadim Bhakshov, Teaching Fellow, School of Computing

Nadim has, for some time, looked at alternatives to the classic textbook. A well written textbook – as we all know – is a huge benefit to teaching complex material. For a few years now Nadim has been experimenting with Lynda. He has offered students the occasional supplementary video from Lynda to support his teaching. This year, however, he decided to find some learning paths and courses on Lynda and provide parallel material for students.The idea was to use Lynda as a supplement to provide another perspective to what was being taught in lectures and practicals. 

After spending more time looking at Lynda, listening to student feedback and looking to establish better integration, Nadim is now working on the ‘alternative to a textbook’ approach more seriously. Next year, he hopes to replace the classic textbook with learning paths and courses from Lynda and use Lynda in his own teaching. 

Lee Woods, Associate Dean (Students), Faculty of Technology

In the Faculty of Technology, Lynda links have been embedded in Moodle for student induction and the U/F students. In the School of Civil Engineering and Surveying, all courses have AutoCAD and technical drawing Lynda.com resources embedded into the appropriate Moodle Units.

Lee has used Lynda videos directly in the teaching of his units, International Built Environment Fieldwork (IBEF) and Transportation Engineering. There are a series of videos on Lynda around urban planning. Lee has played sections of these in lectures as a teaching aid. Part of the IBEF unit is a field trip to Copenhagen, and there is a video in Lynda, part of the Urbanised course that directly relates to the trip.

Sarah Harris and Emily Parry, Business & Law and Technology Placement Offices

Sarah used Lynda to point students in the right direction for resources to help with skills for placement interviews and assessment centres. Lynda was also used throughout the year to help students build confidence in their abilities. Emily embedded links to Lynda on their Moodle page emphasising employability and soft skills generally. Specific links were added for GDPR, Excel, communication skills and email communication.

The Lynda resources were also used to support and consolidate learning from the Excel trainer led sessions that Sarah and Emily arranged for their students.

Images of a computer screen, a tablet and two different sizes of mobile phones

LinkedIn Learning Upgrade

The upgrade to LinkedIn Learning from Lynda is planned to take place on August 1st. The content is the same as Lynda but it offers a new interface and range of new features, making learning more personalised and relevant to your study or work. There will be an option to connect a personal LinkedIn account with LinkedIn Learning – this means that learning history acquired at the University can be kept on the personal account, even when students or staff leave. Another advantage would be the more personalised recommendations based on the skills from the LinkedIn account. The only information the University will see from a personal LinkedIn account will be the profile picture. The alternative is just to choose not to connect and use LinkedIn Learning in exactly the same way as Lynda has been used up until now.

There will be more communications on LinkedIn Learning and all its features. In the meantime, keep an eye on www.port.ac.uk/linkedinlearning and the Myport article to stay up to date.

Image Credit: supplied by LinkedIn

A person in jacket with lots of different badges pinned on it

Digital Badges

June 3, 2019 / / 0 Comments

This blog post links, indirectly, to my previous post on gamification. While gamification can help promote learning and engagement in a ‘fun’ way, digital badges can be used to reward and encourage learning. So – what are digital badges?

Digital badges are an excellent way to recognise student achievement and engagement. Badges can be awarded via Moodle on completion of an activity, for example, or after the attainment of a specific grade/mark in a quiz. Upon graduation, students can take their badges with them via Open Badges and export them to a ‘backpack’ service such as Badgr. The badges can also be linked to LinkedIn.

In the words of Dr Joanne Brindley (Senior Lecturer in Education): “The Academic Professional Apprenticeship is delivered via blended learning. As such, it was important to me that I was able to effectively monitor the engagement and development of the course members, on an individual basis. Digital badges were an obvious choice, as they would enable the course members to have the flexibility  and autonomy to focus and work on tasks that met their individual learning needs, in a structured way, whilst also providing the course member and myself with an opportunity to gauge their personal progression.

The other benefit, was the ability to identify and set the criteria for each badge. In this instance, the badges were designed to reflect the values, knowledge and areas of activity in the UK Professional Skills Framework (UKPSF). By using this approach I can be assured, that upon completion, the course members have engaged with the dimensions of the framework required for Fellowship.”

For those new to digital badges here’s a quick ‘how to..’

Before issuing a badge you first have to create it. A variety of tools are available to do this such as Adobe Illustrator or sites such as Accredible Badge Creator (https://www.accredible.com/badge-designer/)  and Openbadges.me (https://app.openbadges.me/) both of which are free to use, Openbages.me is the better of the two.

User interface for creating badges in Openbadges.me

Figure 1 – user interface for creating badges in Openbadges.me

Figure 2 - Moodle Badge created using Open Badges

Once a badge has been created, you will need to download it so it can be uploaded to Moodle for issuing to students.

 

Figure 2 – Moodle badge created using Open badges

 

In Moodle badges are added via the ‘Administration’ menu, which is available by clicking on the cog icon on the top-right of your Moodle page, then clicking on More to access the Badges section (see Figure 3 below) which will allow you to manage and add new badges.

Figure 3 - shows what you'll see in the administrative area in Moodle to create new badges and manage the badges

Figure 3 – Moodle badge manager

In the Badges section, choose ‘Add a new badge’. This will allow you to upload the image for the badge and set various basic details such as a description, issuer and badge expiry date. You can manage your badges here as well

Once the badge has been added, you will need to set up the criteria for the awarding of the badge. To do this, click on ‘Manage badges’.

You can award badges according to one of three criteria: manual by role; course completion; activity completion. (Note: for activity completion you will need to make sure this is enabled via Course settings).

Badges are automatically issued once the set criterion (for example, achieving a certain grade in a selected quiz) has been met. Students can view the badges they have been awarded on the Moodle course page. You will just need to add a Latest Badges block from the ‘Add a block’ menu.

The Mozilla Backpack, which allowed badge recipients to ‘store’ their badges online has now been replaced by badgr (https://badgr.io/recipient/badges) Students would need to download their badges from Moodle and then upload them to badgr. The reason for doing this is so any earned badges can be shared with an employer for example. At the moment badgr is not linked to Moodle but hopefully it will be added in the near future.

Students can view their badges via the ‘Latest Badges’ block in Moodle (this can be added by anyone with editing rights on your Moodle Unit/Course page).

Figure 4 badge details accessed via latest badges block. This images shows student details

Clicking on the badge icon in the Latest Badges block opens up full details of the badge such as recipient and Issuer. From here the student can download the badge to add to their online backpack which will be badgr. It is hoped that once badgr is integrated students will be able to add it to the backpack directly from Moodle.

So, are badges worth having?

One concern often raised regarding the use of digital badges is that, well, aren’t they just a bit inappropriate at university level? Will university students take them seriously?

To overcome the possible scepticism of students it is important to be clear what the badges are being used for. If badges form an element of gamification and/or are linked to assessment then the badges are more likely to be seen as something worth acquiring as argued by Samuel Abramovich (Abramovich, S 2016). The badges can be linked to the acquisition of specific skills required as part of an assessment or awarded based on the achievement of a certain grade. Greater value can be placed on the badges if they are relatively difficult to obtain: there needs to be an element of genuine challenge before a badge can be earned. Badges can also be awarded for completion of a task – however, the effectiveness of this approach is something that would seem to need further research. A project carried out by the University of Southampton (Harvey, F.2017), whereby Geography students were awarded badges as they completed course milestones, found that only 25% of students actually claimed badges as they progressed. The reason for this relatively low take up was not clear.

Outside education, digital badges are now being used by companies such as Dell as part of their assessment programme (see https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2016/9/digital-badges-and-academic-transformation). The more digital badges are recognised by major employers, the more likely students are to view badges as worthwhile. Indeed, a recent case study (Anderson, L. et al (2017) Open Badges in the Scottish HE Sector: The use of technology and online resources to support student transitions. Project Report July 2017. Universities of Dundee, Aberdeen and Abertay) found that that 40% of students would value digital badges if employability were to be enhanced by their use. For lots more useful information on digital badges visit

https://elearningindustry.com/guide-to-digital-badges-how-used

References

Abramovich, S Understanding digital badges in higher education through assessment, On the Horizon, Vol. 24 Issue: 1, pp.126-131 2016, https://doi.org/10.1108/OTH-08-2015-0044

Harvey, F Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change, Vol 3, No 1, 2017

https://journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/549

Photo by Melinda Martin-Khan on Unsplash

Melinda Martin-Khan

Moodle Baseline Screenshot

Moodle Baseline Launch

March 8, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Technology Enhanced Learning, Academic Development and DSAA are proud to announce the launch of the Moodle Baseline. The Moodle Baseline is a template and set of best practice advice for Moodle module pages. The release is the culmination of a six month feedback exercise with staff from all faculties along with a pilot with students on Nursing degree programmes.

The Moodle Baseline template features five tabs: welcome, module overview, learning outcomes, reading lists (to launch in the next few weeks) and assessments. Some of these tabs will be automatically populated with data after July 14th in time for the start of the new academic year. The Baseline template will be added automatically when modules are rolled-over or created.

The Moodle Baseline addresses repeated student feedback for more consistency in the layout and content of Moodle modules and makes it easier for students to find key information and assessments.

We hope students and staff find the Moodle Baseline to be a useful tool. Help and guidance information can be found on the following dedicated website. If you have any questions please contact your local Online Course Developers or elearn@port.ac.uk.

Students in a study room, one student looking a laptop laughing

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – Digital Capability Discovery Tool

March 4, 2019 / / 0 Comments

The Digital Capability Discovery Tool is an empowering first step for students and staff to self-assess their digital capabilities and to identify current strengths and areas of development.

What is Digital Capability? 

DIgital capabilities are defined by Jisc as ‘those that fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society’. Digital capabilities are more important than ever: they are essential requirements for employability in a digital economy.

According to Jisc’s Digital experience insights survey 2018, only 41% of UK students felt that their course prepared them for the digital workplace. Everyone should be looking to continuously develop these skills and reflect on their own digital capability.

Using the Digital Capability Discovery Tool

Staff and students are encouraged to use the Discovery Tool to self-assess their digital capabilities. For staff, the tool could potentially be used to inform the PDR process. For students, there would be benefit to discussing the results in personal tutoring sessions.

When you log into the Discovery Tool for the first time you will be asked about your role at the University – there are different question sets for new students, current students, teaching staff, and library and learning support staff. It may be that the options don’t fit your role exactly – just choose the nearest match.

Upon completing the questionnaire you will receive a confidential, personalised report showing your results in each area of digital capability and with links to high-quality, tailored resources.

All responses are confidential, so tutors and managers do not have access to them. The University does, however, have access to aggregated, anonymised data – which will help us identify gaps in our digital learning support and improve our provision for both students and staff. This is yet another reason that everyone – staff and students – are encouraged to complete the survey!

Logging on and further support

IS and DCQE provide sessions for staff to find out about digital capabilities in general, and about the Discovery Tool and how to use it. In these sessions we also discuss how to use the Tool with students and colleagues.

For further information, and to access the Tool, go to digitalcapability.port.ac.uk

Bird in flight creating a shape of an arrow

Remaking Marking Conference

February 6, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Along with colleagues from about 30 different UK universities I attended the Remaking Marking: Electronic Management of Assessment conference held on 4 September 2018 at the University of Reading. I came back feeling confident that, here at Portsmouth, we are developing the electronic management of assessment (EMA) in a reasonable way. Our use of Moodle gives us an element of flexibility that some institutions, using other VLEs, are lacking. Furthermore, the drivers for implementing EMA and people’s hopes for this approach appear to be the same here as everywhere else in the sector. On the other hand, academics have some legitimate concerns – DSE worries; offline marking; having to scroll through documents; the functionality and usability of marking tools; the need to take account of disciplinary differences – and these are shared across the sector, Portsmouth included.

One worrying aspect of the conference was the number of institutions that had tried to implement a marks integration project – and failed. It seems strange that data held in one electronic system (the VLE) cannot readily be transferred to another electronic system (the Student Record System (SRS)), but this seems to be the case. It is particularly strange given that the data we want to transfer – student marks – is so important; surely we shouldn’t have to rely on an intermediate stage in which humans can introduce error? We thought we’d cracked the problem here, several years ago, but the proposed solution was not guaranteed to be sustainable at the SRS end. Perhaps the new SRS will open up new possibilities for us.

Some interesting discussions centred around:

  • the use of rubrics, and whether (and how) they should be used more widely;
  • the use of shared QuickMarks – should a central department or section provide a library of generic QuickMarks, containing links to high-quality support resources, for use across a faculty or institution?
  • the increased use of audio feedback – research suggests that students appreciate audio feedback, but only in certain cases.

One suggestion I found particularly interesting came from Dr Rachel Maxwell, University of Northampton. They thought it important to manage student expectations regarding EMA. In particular, they found that students didn’t have a clear idea of what the assessment process entails at university level. 

A student-generated illustration of the assessment process in place at the University of Northampton. (Credit: Katie May Parsons, all rights reserved)  

Header image taken from the Remaking Marking: Electronic Management of Assessment Conference (2018). Birds Migrating in Formation 
(Assessed: 12th November 2018).  Thank you to The University of Reading for letting us use their poster.

 

ally

Accessibility of digital learning content at UoP

January 17, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On 15 January 2019, following a two-month pilot, the TEL team switched on the Blackboard Ally plug-in across all modules on Moodle. In brief, if a lecturer has uploaded some digital course content to Moodle (typically Word documents, Powerpoint presentations or PDF files) then Ally permits students to download that content in an alternative format (electronic Braille, html, epub, tagged pdf, or mp3). This is great for accessibility, of course, but this is also an inclusive approach: any student, not just one with a particular need, might choose to download a Word document in mp3 format (to listen to on the go) or in epub format (to get the benefit of reflowable text on a e-reader). The TEL team will be providing students with more information about Ally over the coming weeks, but in this post I want to mention a feature of Ally that is of interest to authors of digital course content.

Ally generates an institutional report about the accessibility of course content on the institution’s VLE. So we now know what the most common accessibility issues are for the 38,462 course content files on Moodle. The top five are (drum-roll please):

  1. The document has contrast issues. Just under half of all documents (48%, to be precise) have contrast issues.   
  2. The document contains images without a description. Roughly 43% of all documents commit this accessibility sin.
  3. The document has tables that don’t have any headers. Just over a quarter (26%) of all documents have this issue; I suspect that the documents without this issue are simply those without tables.
  4. The document does not have any headers. This is a problem for 24% of documents.
  5. The document is missing a title. Again, 24% of documents have this problem.

The first four are classed as major accessibility issues; the fifth issue is classed as minor.

At first glance this seems shocking: about half of all documents suffer from a major accessibility issue to do with contrast. When we compare ourselves against other institutions, however, we learn that these issues seem to be common across the HE sector; indeed, we seem to be doing slightly better than many institutions. And the important thing is, now that we know what the issues are, we can start to address them. Over time, we should be able to drastically reduce the number of documents with these common – and easily fixable – problems.

One piece of good news: we have a relatively small number of documents that possess accessibility issues classed as severe. The most common severe issue at Portsmouth – just as it is at other universities – involves scanned PDFs that have not been put through OCR. There might be good, valid reasons why a scanned PDF has been used. But accessibility would certainly improve if authors minimised their use of such files.

Header image taken from Blackboard.com link. Retrieved from  https://www.blackboard.com/accessibility/blackboard-ally.htmlpng
(Assessed: 17th January 2019). Thank you to Ally for giving us permission to use their image.
Open book storyboard

Using motion to improve the user experience

October 31, 2018 / / 0 Comments

The use of animation in user interface (UI) design, and the effect it has on the user experience (UX), is something I’ve become interested in recently — especially now we have started to redesign the Moodle interface.

What started me thinking about this was reading the endlessly fascinating Google Material Design Guidelines. These are extremely easy to read, and provide a comprehensive background to Google’s look and feel across it’s many products and services.

Incidentally, if you’re that way inclined, read it! It’s full of ‘I didn’t realise that, but it makes so much sense’ moments. For example, did you realise that there are rules governing what elements look like as they overlap?

Motion provides meaning

Material Design is a good place to start when trying to work out what effect motion has on the overall UX of a given product. Material Design specifies motion to be able to offer:

  • Guided focus between views
  • Hints at what will happen if a user completes a gesture
  • Hierarchical and spatial relationships between elements
  • Distraction from what’s happening behind the scenes (such as fetching content or loading the next view)
  • Character, polish, and delight

(Material Design, 2018)

Some of these have been used long before this specification was written; loading indicators, for instance, have existed in many forms — almost always as a “distraction from what is happening…”. Often they are simply a single repeating animation to help users pass the time, and to communicate that the waiting time will be finite, i.e. something will eventually happen.

Many of these points have been created as a result of the rise of mobile design and the necessity to tie together the various screens of an app with some sort of visual metaphor so the user is aware that the screen they are currently looking at relates to one they were just using — but can no longer see.

Retaining user engagement across page transitions

Let’s look at that last scenario — moving from one page of a mobile app to the next — in a little more detail. Google aims to maintain user engagement across page loads by maintaining elements on screen between those pages, and animating the change. A user’s eye is intended to follow elements that exist in both pages: the elements don’t disappear and reload in a new position; instead they animate and move to their new position.

The overall aim of this — and I think it works — is to start with the user looking at the new page from a position of engagement. The user already knows what content they expect to see, because they know why the page has appeared (it’s the result of the action they performed earlier, e.g a tap on a button), and what relationship the new information on the page has to the information on the previous page.

(Material Design, 2018)

The image above is from a video illustrating the approach to maintaining shared elements across a screen change (in this case a card expanding to provide more information). Click the link beneath the screenshot to watch the video in full.

Material Design provides this advice for pages with different amounts of shared content:

  • If all content elements are shared
    While a surface is expanding, a significant number of elements should remain visible during the transition.
  • Few content elements are shared
    While expanding a surface, if only a single element will be present after the transition, that element should be the focal point of the transition, controlling all other elements.
  • No content elements are shared
    If there are no shared elements between views, anchor all crossfading elements to the surface’s vertical movement. The surface crops the content within.

These rules ensure that no transition becomes too complex and overwhelming to the user.

I’ve really only touched the surface with this topic. I hope to expand on this further by looking at some other ways that motion is employed in UI design to create a satisfying UX.

Lady looking at a laptop

Digital Skills Certificate

August 22, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Earlier in the year I went to Digifest 2018, the biggest conference for Education Technology in the UK. As well as a chance to meet fellow professionals the conference presents a wide range of inspirational, thought provoking ideas. These can be from large solutions like an Augmented Reality band from Edinburgh playing live on stage with an orchestra in Birmingham, that tests the limits of the Janet Network, to suggestions on simple teaching techniques.

One of the presentations I saw was from the IT Training Team at the University of Lancaster, who set up a ‘Digital Skills Certificate’ for students and staff mapped to the Jisc Digital Capability Framework, it offered online courses in a range of topics under the six elements of digital capability. When participants completed the course it gave them a ‘certificate’ that could be posted on LinkedIn, for students it also went on their Higher Education Achievement Record (HEAR) transcript. It’s a great way for students and staff to develop digital and employability skills and also be able to clearly demonstrate those skills to potential employers for placements and work beyond university.

I like to think I know a good idea when I see one and began thinking how this could be adapted for use at the University of Portsmouth. The Jisc Framework is a great tool to use in order to develop student and staff Digital Capability. In the last year we have also implemented Lynda.com, an online resource of over 10,000 courses. The University of Portsmouth version of the Digital Skills Certificate combines the use of these tools.

Click on this link to see the video.

The University of Portsmouth Digital Skills Certificate is on Moodle and available for both students and staff to self register onto. Participants choose at least one course from each element of the Framework:

  • IT Proficiency – Word, Excel, Google Drive, SPSS
  • Information, Data and Media Literacies – Excel Statistics, Data Driven Presentations with Excel and PowerPoint, SPSS for Academic Research
  • Digital Creation, Innovation and Scholarship – PowerPoint: Designing Better Slides, Introduction to Screencasting, Google Sites
  • Communication, Collaboration and Partnership – GMail, Twitter, Webex
  • Digital Learning and Self Development – complete the Jisc Digital Discovery Tool
  • Digital Identity and Well Being – Computer Security and Internet Safety, LinkedIn for Students, Digital Citizenship

The courses are from Lynda.com and can be completed at participants’ own pace, anytime, anywhere. Once the course is completed, Lynda provides a certificate of completion that can be added to LinkedIn, it also needs to be uploaded as a PDF to the Moodle assignment for that section. The next step is to complete a quiz based on the topic that has just been studied and if passed a certificate for that element of the framework is issued.

Participants can study as many of the courses as they like, but one from each element is required. When all six have been completed an overall ‘Digital Skills Certificate’ is issued, for students this will be shown on their HEAR transcript.

For further information go to: digitalskills.port.ac.uk

adrian.sharkey@port.ac.uk

@adrianjsharkey

 

Nearpod logo

Some thoughts on Nearpod

May 21, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Nearpod is a service that uses audience interaction during presentations to enhance almost any form of teaching.

Before we get into why I like Nearpod, I’d like to point out that I am not employed by Nearpod, I have no affiliation with them, I just really like their product! It’s easy to talk positively about something that you actually believe has benefits.

Nearpod is fantastic at changing the focus of a presentation from a big screen at the front of a room, to that of the person presenting and, of course, the device you have in front of you. The presenter can become a part of the audience, moving around the room and engaging specific members of the audience the room, but at the same time lead and direct the session without being tied to a PC at the front of the class.

Nearpod has 4 licences that start at nothing for a Silver licence right up to a District licence for larger organisations.

pricing structure

 

 

 

 

Taken from nearpod.com/pricing

There is an increase in connections and file storage between each level. I think that the basic interactions on the Silver licence are great for getting information from students and making the class interactive.

The basic features that the Silver licence offers are:

  • Text fill response box
  • Quizzes
  • Poll
  • Draw tool

The Premium features that are available with the Gold licence, and above, allow for:

  • Embedding video and web content
  • Game interactions
  • Allowing note taking on each slide for the student (School licence)

If you can’t see the Nearpod presentation below, please check for any ad or pop up blockers that may stop it displaying.

The Nearpod presentation above started life as a set of standard PowerPoint slides,  which I have then added some interactivity too. In this case, the slide’s interaction adds a collection of images and then I have added a question. Adding questions throughout the presentation allows the presenter to get information about the class; this could be good to gauge how well the audience has understood the lesson so far. It also contains BBC Worldwide content that is accessible directly within Nearpod as well as the ability to embed a live webpage within the presentation and a poll to gain feedback from the audience.

The more expensive licences allow you to set ‘homework’, which provides a version of the presentation to the audience to access outside of the classroom. They can then look through it at their own pace, either before the class, so they are prepared for the lesson ahead, or afterwards.  The presentation that has been embedded in this article has been done using the homework mode feature. It can be added directly within a VLE or a link given to be emailed to the student.

Nearpod also has a marketplace where you can purchase a range of presentations on a variety of topics. Whilst this is a nice addition, many of the materials are aimed at younger children and are therefore not directly appropriate for HE level education. Additionally, much of the content is provided for the North American market so you may not have a huge amount of ready-made content to choose from.

Sometimes, students get embarrassed when they don’t understand a concept or aspect of a lesson and everyone else seems to. It’s happened to me, and it’s probably happened to you. Using Nearpod for audience response could remove some of that worry. Audience responses are anonymous to all but the person presenting – the presenter can focus on improving that person’s knowledge, without bringing it up in front of the whole class.

For all the great features that Nearpod offers, there are a few negatives to the system that some of the academics have reported, for example:

  1. Students can feel “over Nearpoded”
  2. Transferring an existing PowerPoint presentation directly into Nearpod, then adding interactions, can dramatically extend the length of your teaching session

So to the first point. Some academics have said that if you turn every lecture into a Nearpod session, the students start to lose interest in the interactions. This can also be the case when too many are added to one session. The drop off of the initial engagement can be high and you lose their desire to be part of the process.  A few interactions per session inside of a “normal” PowerPoint seems to be the best plan until you find what works for you and your teaching using the software. The other initial workflow might be that not every session needs to be delivered in that manner if you are finding this issue.

The second point relates to the first in as much as it’s not a good idea to take existing PowerPoint presentations, add them into Nearpod and then add further interactions. Academics that have tried this so far have run out of time to deliver the entire lecture. Interactions add time to the normal flow of the lecture and while they are useful tools, it will take a rethink of the content you are trying to deliver in each session. It is a good excuse to look at older PowerPoints and think about how they can be improved either inside or outside of Nearpod. An addition to this is that Nearpod now allows you to continue a previous session using the same code for a period of 14 days after the first presentation. This means if you are tight for time you can carry on where you left off next time around.

The system has maintained a high user base within the University. However, be aware that if the student experience is not monitored it can affect an individuals feelings towards the system and process, which may taint the continued engagement with the product.

If you are curious about Nearpod, I would suggest you sign up for an account and have a go yourself. Give the free version a try and you may even find that it alone will be enough to suit your needs. Within the University we have access to the full licence so please email elearn@port.ac.uk to be added to the account.

A computer screen of a drawing of a children's train on a rail

Case Study – Gill Wray

May 8, 2018 / / 0 Comments

The Shorthand Units

Gill Wray, an academic member of staff in the School of Social Historical and Literary Studies within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences is responsible amongst other things, for the Journalism Shorthand units. I’ve been talking to her about some of the interesting elements of her units that she has implemented for students with the help of the Faculty’s Online Course Developers, Scott, Joe and Daren.

Journalism Shorthand units run in the first and second years as a core requirement aiming to teach shorthand to those taking a Journalism course. As part of her teaching Jill has been involved with the development of some interesting interactive elements on her Moodle site.

I think this sort of work is worth highlighting to others as it shows how Moodle can be much more than just a repository for work, and handouts. Moodle allows an incredible amount of flexibility in terms of what content you can make available for students – it doesn’t just have to be downloadable PDF revision sheets!

The Test Your Shorthand WebApp

The ‘Test Your Shorthand’ app for practicing shorthand knowledge has been around for a while, though due to problems with audio playing on an older version, has recently been rebuilt as a responsive web app to remain functional on various devices across a variety of screen sizes.

The app, which you can see in the screenshots here, gives a student three different difficulty levels to test a student’s shorthand knowledge. Choosing one of these gives a short multiple choice shorthand quiz tuned to the difficulty of the option the student selected. The app also provides a series of shorthand ‘outlines’ (the squiggles that form the core part of journalistic shorthand) as revision aid, as well as 10 different voice recordings to practice note taking on. The audio is offered in 100, 110 and 120 words a minute format, perfect for a student learning to record what they hear.

The app is available as part of the Shorthand Year One Moodle site, and is offered as a supplement to the existing course content, which includes videos that are timed to release to students each week, and also other more traditional worksheet activities.

Digraph Train

Gill’s Shorthand site also includes The Digraph Train. When I asked her why she had added this interactivity to her Moodle site she said:

“One of the main challenges has been the inability of some students to recognise that digraphs ‘sh’, ‘ch’, ‘th’ and ‘wh’ make specific sounds.  We therefore produced a very simple ‘early learning’ style visual in the form of a moving train with carriages adding letters one at a time. There is audio as each carriage joins the train. This helps students understand how two letters come together to make a particular sound.”

The Digraph Train was produced by Gill, with the help of the Online Course Developers in the School, using a software package called Articulate Storyline. When I spoke with Joe Wright, who was responsible for the project, about why he chose Storyline he said:

“I chose to use Storyline because I found it gave me all the tools that would fulfil the task in hand. It is a great e-learning package which you can use to create unique projects using triggers and timing. It’s simple to use as it uses an interface similar to the Microsoft packages which makes it very easy to navigate, to add animations, images and sound to the project. Gill told me that the students found the end result to be very engaging”.

It’s worth mentioning, that both these projects took time, and required skills that are not reflected across every faculty. If you have an idea for something you want to create, but don’t know where to start, visit your Online Course Developers first more often than not they’ll be happy to help. If you think your idea might benefit students (or staff) in a faculty other than your own Technology Enhanced Learning would also be happy to work with you to get your idea off the ground.

Highlighting your own creative and innovative use of Moodle is a difficult thing. There is no University wide platform, no place a member of staff can go and say ‘hey! I helped make this and I think it’s good!’ Case studies like this are our way of putting good work out there for people to see. Currently both of these projects are available only to students studying the Shorthand units on Journalism courses.

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