The first six months of 2009

Over the course of the last months, I have been fortunate enough to be have been given the opportunity to travel around the UK, attending various meetings and conferences. Given that we are soon to embark on the summer vacation period, I thought that this might be a good opportunity to summarise where I have been and pick out one highlight from each trip.

January
Learning Futures Festival 2009, Walkers Stadium, Leicester [blog post] –  The opening keynote was delivered by Professor Sugata Mitra from Newcastle University, who spoke on the title An Alternative Schooling: Self Organising Systems in Education. He spoke about self-organising systems, in particular, describing and reflecting on his involvement with the Hole in the Wall (HIWEL) research work.

February
EVAF4All: Electronic Voting Analysis and Feedback for All project, University of Edinburgh [blog post] – First meeting of those institutions involved in the project. Development of an innovative system which allows students to view their results after taking part in EVS related activities. Students will be directed back to relevant content through the system and presented statistics regarding whole class performance.

March
Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology: EVS and beyond SIG, City University, London – first meeting of the steering groups. The first event will be in November 2009 at Leicester University. For those interested in finding out more, visit the relevant Ning community at: http://estict.ning.com

April
MoodleMoot UK 2009, Imago Centre, Loughborough [blog post] – Martin Dougiamas, Founder and Lead Moodler, gave an exceptionally enjoyable and interesting presentation about the Moodle development process, and an insight into the features that await in Moodle 2.0. The new Repository API can connect to Alfresco, YouTube, Flickr, Google Docs, Mahara (e-Portfolio), other repositories (OPuS?!). Martin’s demonstration used this (slick) functionality to search and copy in an image from Flickr… and embed a video from YouTube. [very cool!]

Plymouth e-Learning Conference 2009, The Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth [blog post] – Delivered my first conference presentation with Alan Hayes (Department of Computer Science). A fuller description of the study, including the presentation of research data, conclusions and scope for future work, can be found in the paper. This can be downloaded from OPuS.

May
An Introduction to Google Apps, University of Bath – Sam Peters, Business Development Manager (Education) at Google came to the university to give a useful introduction to cloud computing in the form of Google Apps. This presentation gave an insight into how these applications are being used at other universities in the UK and US. My former colleague, Roger Gardner at the University of Bristol, has reflected on a similar session on his blog. Since the presentation, I have started to use Google Sites to power my website at nitinparmar.co.uk.

June
The 3rd Technology Supported Learning Conference, Technology Supported Learning in the 21st Century: Issues and Paradigms in Transformative Tertiary Education 2009, Staffordshire University [blog post] – I presented my first conference poster, Developing and Facilitating a creative teaching culture using an Electronic Voting Systems,  that I had co-produced with Andy Ramsden, Head of e-Learning at the University of Bath. It can be downloaded via OPuS.

Roll on ALT-C 2009 at the University of Manchester in September!

Introducing Audio Feedback

Yesterday, I attended a presentation by Dr. Jo Phoenix, from the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University. Coming back to the University of Bath for a number of  other meetings, Jo spoke enthusiastically to former colleagues about developing a mechanism at her new institution when providing feedback to students for formative assignments.

Using a digital dictaphone (with a USB cable attachment), Jo recorded audio feedback for formative student assignments and made the files available via duo,  Durham University’s Blackboard-based VLE. Feedback took the form of c. 8 minutes recordings, where Jo would pause/record feedback as she worked her way through the essay.

The majority of students were pleased with the results, particularly as the marker was able to convey tone in her voice, indicating a variety of emotions. One student did comment that she was downbeat about the feedback form as she could “sense the disappointment in [Jo's] voice”.

The current format allows for all students to hear each others feedback, though as Jo quite rightly pointed out, the feedback would only make sense if the listener had the essay in front of them. A follow-up podcast could then be made avaiable for generalised feedback (for example, covering essay structure, grammar etc.), though this could just as easily be done at some point during a face-to-face lecture.

This approach does raise questions about accessibility of the feedback mechanism to students, and whilst no problems were encountered during Jo’s work, she did mention that feedback could be recorded through Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which would allow feedback to be given in text format with no additional overhead to the marker.

As the feedback for this assessment mentioned above audio-based, no extended feedback is available in written form. This does raise a variety of questions on the Quality Assurance (QA) side, particularly if this approach is extended to include summative assessment.  I would need to defer to my colleague Ellie Clewlow, Head of Enhancement and Development in the LTEO, who might be able to shed more light on the issues to do with the use of audio feedback for summative assignments/assessment. Is it even allowed?

We use Moodle as our VLE at the University of Bath, so a colleagues will have a couple of different options available to them if they wish to setup their own mechanisms for replicating this approach:

1. If you wish to allow students to hear each others feedback, create a new folder within the Files section of your Moodle course. Upload the files and then link to the relevant folder from your Moodle course home page. An alternative is to make the files available through the Learning Materials Filestore.
2. If you do not wish to allow students to hear each others feedback,
   • Create a Moodle assignment activity (choose the Advanced uploading of files option) and ask students to submit their assignments online.
   • Send the audio file as a response file, leaving a short amount of written feedback (and grade, if applicable) using the relevant dialog boxes.

Of course, the relevant dictaphones would be available from the Audio Visual unit at the University of Bath.

This inevitably raises questions about the effectiveness of audio feedback to students about work, over other methods. My next task would be to find out if any other institutions, UK and/or abroad, have used this approach and, if applicable, the degree tio which the approach has been successful. Moreover, it would be useful to know if any good practice advice exists.

Creating a regional collaborative e-Learning hub

I spoke at the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office team meeting a bit earlier on about the Western e-Learning regional hub that has recently been started up – presentation below.

For more information on the work that is currently being undertaken by the group, please visit the website at http://weethe.wordpress.com/

Supporting collaborative activities using Wikis

Yesterday, I delivered a seminar titled Supporting collaborative activities using Wikis, which formed the part of the Enhancing Teaching Through Technology Summer Seminar Series at the University of Bath. The session, was attended by both colleagues from around the University campus, including some from the e-Learning team.

We’re currently evaluating our approach to training sessions, workshops and the like, so I’ve also taken the opportunity to also examine my own style of presenting, starting with my PowerPoint slides. I must say a huge thank you to Alison Wildish, Head of Web Services, who gave me some useful tips on how to make my slides more visual. The slides, which are available available as well as on SlideShare, took about a month to come together and went through numerous drafts [including some last minute tweaking whilst watching The Apprentice the night before!].

© 2008 Andy Ramsden

© 2008 Andy Ramsden

The session was recorded using Camtasia, which whilst being an excellent piece of software, was let down by a rather poor audio recording. Therefore, I’m unable to make the recording available at this stage. I’m working on it!

During question time towards the end of the session, some issues came to the fore, which I thought might be useful mentioning here.

• Is it possible to say that Moodle and Confluence are “rivals/competitors”? Um, I’d say no. Moodle is a Virtual Learning Environment which offers a multitude of activities to support collaborative activities online, such as discussion forums, facilities for online discussion, a quiz activity for e-assessment as well as a very basic, but functional, wiki. Confluence is a “best of breed” wiki application which offers both basic and advanced wiki functionality. Both services can be used side by side, and do complement each other. Do remember that it is possible to link to a Confluence wiki from within a Moodle course.
• Can colleagues external to the University of Bath get access to protected Confluence wikis? Yes that can, though a University of Bath staff member will need to apply for a BUCS Lite-type account on their behalf.
• Is it possible to import SAMIS groups into Confluence? Not currently, however this work is plans for sometime in the next few months.
• Which team in the University is responsible for Confluence? The Web Service teams currently look after Confluence. For more information, send an email to support-wiki@bath.ac.uk

Overall, I was pleased with how the session went. I was apprehensive about delivering it, though I really shouldn’t have been. The e-Learning team, as well as the wider Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office, is an exceptionally supportive environment, which made for a less fraught experience. I was also apprehensive about how my stammer would be on the day, but all in all, it/I was fine. Some further reflections follow:

• When explaining the concept of restricting access to a wiki space in Confluence, I should have made mentioned that the permissions in the applications are restrictive enough to limit viewing and editing rights at page level tool.
• I would have liked to have a couple more discussion points in the session, with the intention of both engaging with the audience a bit more, as well as giving myself a break from talking. I expect this area to develop as I become more confidence with the content and style of delivery.
• The previous point, of course, needs to be balanced with the amount of content. There was a lot to say and get out there, and I think I did ok.
• The model titled Developing the use of Wikis only really came together a couple of days before the session itself. I would have liked to have had more time to develop my thoughts on this before the session. [see next steps]

Something that I am attempting to introduce into my blog writing is the concept of “next steps”. As such, some appear below:

• Re-evaluate content of the sessions and think about whether or not anything needs to be added or removed. For example, I could introduce some about barriers to engagement. If I was being critical about the presentation, I would say that it was a little too much on the evangelical side.
• Test the technology before going live with it. I was really disappointed that the audio didn’t come out as expected. We’ve got a good quality USB microphone that my colleague Roger Gardner might trial during his session on Exploring Social Bookmarking next Tuesday lunchtime.
• Finally, drive my research towards discovering what the intervention points actually are in the model mentioned above. This would form part of a wider literature review.