Tag Archives: lecture capture

Learning at City Conference

At this time of year, many universities run teaching and learning conferences.

I have spoken at a few of these myself. In July 2020 I presented (online) at the University of Hertfordshire Teaching and Learning Conference. In July 2021 I did a keynote at the University of Cumbria Annual Learning & Teaching Fest. The week before that I had spoken at the LJMU Active Blended Learning Conference.

What I do find though, if I am not speaking, is I usually find out about these kinds of conferences, while they are happening on Twitter.

This year we are seeing a lot more conferences happening in-person. So when I saw that City, University of London, were running their Learning at City teaching conference in-person and were welcoming external delegates, and it hadn’t happened yet, I signed up.

One of my reasons for attending was to find out more about their approach to hybrid teaching, which I had read about online.

After coffee and pastries, we had the welcome and opening keynote.

Friend or Foe? Configuring the Role of Assessment as an Opportunity to Transform the Quality of Higher Education was presented by Professor Susan Deeley, who is Professor of Learning and Teaching(Urban Studies) at the University of Glasgow.

Taking a holistic view of its functions, assessment can be utilised in versatile ways to be effective and efficient. Playing a vital role at the heart of learning and teaching, authentic and sustainable assessment is key to facilitating students’ development of skills, competencies, and graduate attributes. This is in addition to enabling students to demonstrate their academic knowledge, understanding, and critical thinking. Stepping beyond traditional assessment boundaries, a less conventional path is explored where students are actively engaged through assessment and feedback literacies within a staff-student partnership approach to learning and teaching. It is asserted that this leads to students’ deeper learning and a more democratic classroom. Configuring such a positive role for assessment transmutes it into an intrinsically motivating force that can transform the quality of higher education.

The talk covered a range of issues relating to assessment, and I did a sketch note of the talk.

One of the questions at the end of the conference was how challenging it would be to change the assessments within a module due to the validation process that was quite rigid and lacked flexibility for change at pace, or would require re-validation. This is indicative of processes that were designed for in-person courses that would change rarely, lacked flexibility and agility. Sometimes there are good reasons for that, but it does mean that sometimes though you can’t be responsive.

Having booked into parallel sessions, I did the usual thing and go to the “wrong” session.

I had intended to go to the Discover Learning Design with LEaD session, but in the end, went to a session with two papers.

Understanding student digital experiences at City, University of London and  From face-to-face to remote learning: what can we learn from student experiences of pre-recorded lectures in the pandemic?

The first presentation was about the results of the Jisc Student Experience Insights survey at City.

Whilst teaching has moved back to campus, for many students there are still online or blended elements to their learning. It is therefore important to continue to evaluate student experiences of technology for learning. This paper will present the results from the 2021/22 iteration of the survey carried out at City during Spring 2022. The session will compare the results with the national benchmark from Jisc and previous iterations of the survey to see how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted on student digital learning experiences.

It was interesting to see how a university was actually using the survey to inform decision making.

The second paper was focused on a cohort of students.

We explore students’ experience of asynchronous learning activities, with a specific focus on pre-recorded lectures and consider their role in promoting deep learning in an online education context. 

In this subject lecturers pre-recorded their lectures to help provide a more engaging learning experience. It was also designed to be more inclusive for those attending online.

In the presentation, we heard that student feedback was in the main positive, it was seen as more flexible, more accessible, students were able to interact with the recordings when they wanted to, and could rewind, review and drop into the recordings. It was also interesting to hear about the importance of captions (or transcripts) of the recordings.

After lunch there were two more sessions, I attended The Pedagogy of Hybrid Space and Transforming your presentation slides for online learning.

These were interesting sessions and demonstrated by their delivery the challenges of delivering hybrid (as in dual mode simultaneous) sessions. I will focus on these two sessions in a later blog post.

The final session of the day was a summary of the day and a celebration of staff achievements.

Overall I had a really good day and enjoyed all the sessions I attended.

Netflixisation, is that even a word? – Weeknote #40 – 6th December 2019

Gringotts Dragon
Gringotts Dragon at Harry Potter Studio Tour

At the weekend we went to the Harry Potter Studio Tour. The first time I went to the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour was in 2015, just after they had added the Hogwarts Express and Kings Cross set to the tour. We made a return visit, mainly to see how different it was dressed for Christmas and with snow. Last time we were in the foyer waiting to go in, suspended from the ceiling was the magical flying Ford Anglia. This time there was a dragon!

Fetter Lane
Fetter Lane

The week started off in London for my Jisc Senior TEL Group meeting. This is an invited meeting in which we discuss various issues and technologies relating to teaching and learning. We had an informative discussion in the morning on curriculum analytics, what it is, what it isn’t, what it could be used for and some of the serious and challenges in analysing the curriculum. In the afternoon we were discussing some of the challenges relating to Education 4.0 and what the potential issues are in relation to preparing for the future that may be Education 4.0. Continue reading Netflixisation, is that even a word? – Weeknote #40 – 6th December 2019

Top Ten Blog Posts 2018

This year I have written only 17 blog posts, in 2017 it was 21 blog posts, in 2016 it was 43 blog posts, in 2015 I wrote 24 blog posts. In 2014 I wrote 11 and in 2013 I wrote 64 blog posts and over a hundred in 2012. In 2011 I thought 150 was a quiet year!

Do signs work?

The tenth most popular blog post in 2018 was asking So do signs work? This article from 2013 described some of the challenges and issues with using signage to change behaviours. So do signs work? Well yes they do, but often they don’t.

The post at number nine was my podcast workflow, published in 2011, this article outlines how and what equipment I use to record the e-Learning Stuff Podcast. This is only one way in which to record a remote panel based podcast, and I am sure there are numerous other ways in which to do this. I have also changed how I have recorded over the two years I have been publishing the podcast due to changes in equipment and software. It’s probably time to update it, though I am not doing as much podcasting as I use to.

Dropping three places to eighth was 100 ways to use a VLE – #89 Embedding a Comic Strip. This was a post from July 2011, that looked at the different comic tools out there on the web, which can be used to create comic strips that can then be embedded into the VLE. It included information on the many free online services such as Strip Creator and Toonlet out there. It is quite a long post and goes into some detail about the tools you can use and how comics can be used within the VLE.

The post at number seven, climbing one place, was Comic Life – iPad App of the Week. Though I have been using Comic Life on the Mac for a few years now I realised I hadn’t written much about the iPad app that I had bought back when the iPad was released. It’s a great app for creating comics and works really well with the touch interface and iPad camera.

Sixth most popular was a post from 2018, called “I don’t know how to use the VLE!” This blog post described a model of VLE embedding and development. This post was an update to the model I had published in 2010.

In at number five, is also a post from 2018, Why does no one care about my digital strategy? This post described some of the background to the leadership briefing I wrote with Lawrie Phipps on the digital lens.

digital lens

Holding at fourth, is Can I legally download a movie trailer? One of the many copyright articles that I posted some years back, this one was in 2008, I am still a little behind in much of what is happening within copyright and education, one of things I do need to update myself on, as things have changed.

Dropping one place back to third, was Frame Magic – iPhone App of the Week, still don’t know why this one is so popular!

FrameMagic - iPhone App of the Week

Back in 2015 I asked I can do that… What does “embrace technology” mean? in relation to the Area Review process and this post was the second most popular post in 2018, last year it was in sixth place, so it’s getting more popular.

Once again, for the sixth year running, the number one post for 2018 was the The iPad Pedagogy Wheel.

The Padagogy Wheel

I re-posted the iPad Pedagogy Wheel as I was getting asked a fair bit, “how can I use this nice shiny iPad that you have given me to support teaching and learning?”. It’s a really simple nice graphic that explores the different apps available and where they fit within Bloom’s Taxonomy. What I like about it is that you can start where you like, if you have an iPad app you like you can see how it fits into the pedagogy. Or you can work out which iPads apps fit into a pedagogical problem.

So there we have it, the top ten posts 2018.

“I don’t know how to use the VLE!”

A model of VLE embedding and development

Despite many people talking about the death of the VLE over the years, the institutional VLE is still an important component of most colleges and universities offer in the online space. Whether this be supporting existing programmes of study, those offering a blended approach, or even for fully online programmes.

For most universities and colleges, growth in the use of the VLE is relatively organic, with little planning on either side. Training is often focused on the mechanistic and technical aspects of the VLE. Some training looks at the learning first, but without understanding the potential of the functionality or the affordances of the VLE, it can be challenging for practitioners to work out how to use the VLE to meet the needs of that learning activity.

The end result is an inconsistent approach to how practitioners use the VLE which can be confusing for learners who have multiple modules or courses delivered by different people. The other end result is that sometimes an inappropriate function of the VLE is used resulting in a challenging experience in learning something, with the challenge being using the technology, not understanding the learning.

One of the attractive aspects of any VLE is the range of functionality that it offers allowing practitioners (academics, teachers, lecturers) many different ways to engage with learners and create learning activities.

Continue reading “I don’t know how to use the VLE!”