Category Archives: e-Learning Forum

Flipping the Classroom

A special e-Learning Forum is planned for later this month on Thursday 29th October, 11.00 – 15.40. The subject is Flipping the Classroom and we have arranged a number of speakers. The event will be held in the Enterprise Zone on level 3 of the library.

Programme
11.00 – 11.10 Welcome: Tim Whalley
11.10 – 11.40 Alan Masson
11.40 – 12.00 Rhian Williams
12.00 – 12.20 Kevin Tipton

12.20 – 13.30 Lunch

13.30 – 14.00 Sheila McNeill
14.00 – 14.20 Tim Whalley
14.20 – 14.40 Hollie Cameron
14.40 – 15.00 Eddy Moran

15.00 – 15.20 Discussion: What Next
15.20 – 15.30 Closing remarks: Mary McCulloch/Simon Booth

Dr Alan Masson – Senior Manager, International Customer Success, Blackboard.
Reimagining the flipped classroom?
This hands on interactive session will use recognised principles of assessment and feedback and educational interactions to articulate an aspirational vision for the educational design of blended learning / flipped classroom. This vision will then be used to inform the development of a learning design framework and patterns of Blackboard tools and resources to best address these educational requirements.

Dr Alan Masson is the Head of Blackboard International Customer Success. Previous to this role he was the Head of Technology Facilitated Learning at the University of Ulster where he led a number of national projects in the areas of Assessment and Feedback, Learning Design and Curriculum Enhancement. He has extensive experience of delivering assessment and feedback enhancement workshops to a range of UK Universities and has acted as a critical friend to the QAA to support the development of curriculum innovation toolkits. This workshop is part of an academic success initiative which is seeking to support Blackboard customers to get the best educational value and impact from their Blackboard investments.

Ms Sheila McNeill – UK Learning Technologist of the Year, 2013, Glasgow Caledonian University.
What the Flip?
Flipped teaching approaches are becoming increasingly popular and are even being hailed as the future for all learning and teaching.  More and more educators are flipping their classrooms, but there are many who are still unsure about what flipping actually means, how and what to flip in their contexts. As well as exploring the concepts of flipped teaching, this presentation will share an example of how a course team at GCU restructured their modules using a flipped approach. The team abolished lectures and moved to a more self directed and discursive workshop approach. This has led to increased engagement (and enjoyment) for both students and staff.

Sheila MacNeill is a Senior Lecturer in Blended Learning at Glasgow Caledonian University, where she works as part of a team who provide strategic direction, pedagogic guidance and practical support to staff embedding digital, blended online learning across the curriculum. Open-ness is at the heart of Sheila’s professional practice and she regularly blogs about her adventures and musing in and around the use of technology in education at www.howsheilaseesit.wordpress.com and can be found on twitter @sheilmcn.  Before working at GCU, Sheila was one of the Assistant Director’s at Jisc Cetis, a national innovation support centre for the UK HE Sector. She was the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year 2013.

Dr Rhian Williams – English Literature, University of Glasgow.
Poetry Podcasts
I will be talking about the ‘Poetry Podcasts’ project that she developed with then-colleague, Professor Kirstie Blair in 2011. The podcasts appear on iTunes and online and have received a significant number of ‘hits’. The project was aimed at school leavers and first year University students, but has scope for wider application.

Dr Rhian Williams is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, specialising in teaching poetry. She is the author of The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2nd Ed. 2013), which appears on many reading lists in the UK and USA

Professor Kevin Tipton – School of Sport, University of Stirling.
Experiences with flipping large sports science classrooms
I will discuss some methods that I’ve used in sports science classes to enhance learning despite increasing number of students. These methods are designed to provide an interactive learning environment for students in large classrooms. The basis for these sessions are video lectures that are uploaded onto Succeed. In class, I have used Peer Instruction and Think-Pair-Share and other methods. Finally, I have used Twitter to stimulate critical evaluation of research papers.

Kevin Tipton is a Professor of Sport, Health and Exercise Sciences at the University of Stirling in Scotland. His research is focused on exercise, nutrition and muscle metabolism. He is an author of over 80 papers, book chapters and review articles. His interest in exercise nutrition extends to application of the science to athletic populations. He served on the USA Committee for Military Nutrition Research and helped develop sports nutrition consensus statements for the IOC, FIFA, FINA and IAAF and has served on the UK Sport Nutritional Supplements Advisory Board. When not working he enjoys walking the hills and muirs with his dog, Reiver.

Dr Tim Whalley – Dean of Students, University of Stirling.

Ms Hollie Cameron – VP Education, Students’ Union

Dr Eddy Moran – School of Education, University of Stirling.
Is It Real Teaching? Post-Graduate Students’ Perceptions and Use of Online Video Tutorials
This presentation reports a small scale study funded by SELF of post-graduate students’ perceptions of online video tutorials compared to face to face lectures, their use of the videos and the learning strategies they employed while watching them. Data was collected from online tracking of user-interaction, usage statistics collected by Succeed, and semi-structured interviews. Findings suggest that while learners recognise and value the strengths of online delivery of teaching input and interact with the material in purposeful ways, they also recognise and value the social interaction of face to face teaching and learning

Eddy Moran is a teaching fellow specializing in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) in the TESOL unit of the School of Education. He also contributes to courses on TESOL theory and methodology and language assessment. His research interests are language learners’ epistemologies of learning, learner interaction with CALL software, and the application of blended learning for taught postgraduates, particularly the use of online video.

This workshop takes ‘Flipping’ to mean any activity that replaces a traditional lecture with an activity designed to improve student learning. We don’t simply mean replacing a lecture with a Listen Again recording but any prior activity undertaken with the purpose of making the lecture time more valuable for student learning. Come along and listen to a range of perspectives on flipping and ways to flip from staff at Stirling and elsewhere.

To book, Succeed -> Learning and Development – My Learning -> Teaching Bites -> e-Learning Forum: Flipping the Classroom.

MyProgress

A demonstration of  MyProgress has been arranged for Tuesday 17th March at 13.00 in the Enterprise Zone.

What is Myprogress?
Myprogress is a mobile assessment product for recording skills and managing structured examinations. It enables authoring and delivery of rich observational competency assessments on iOS and Android devices, online and offline. Its offline app means that students and assessors can capture evidence, even in challenging environments with no connectivity.

Myprogress gives you all of the tools you need to manage skills assessment effectively

  • Enables students to respond to assessments at any time through a customisable free App, even offline
  • Enables tutors and mentors to manage assessments and engage with students through personal feedback at the moment of need without having to leave the campus and visit widely dispersed students on placement
  • External assessors can complete observations in real time using the student’s device or their own (we include a reviewer role for remedial escalation)
  • A progress file enables students to collect a record of achievement
  • Assessments can be mapped to professional competency frameworks, including learning outcomes
  • Advanced reporting tools for reviewing individual and group activity and scoring

For further information go to https://www.myknowledgemap.com/products/myprogress/features.aspx

So if your division has students on placements come along as this software could be very useful.

eLearning Forum

The second meeting of 2014 will be from 12.30 – 14.00 on Wednesday, 11th June in the Enterprise Zone (in the Library). There are two presentations:

We know lectures don’t work but anyway, here’s a lecture: reflections on opportunities in the 21st Century – Iain Atherton, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health

Video – Annotations/Crowd Sourcing – Kevin Brosnan & Edward Moran, School of Education, & Derek Robertson, e-Learning Liaison and Development Team

Iain’s talk discusses an innovate use of Blackboard Collaborate to deliver statistics teaching to post graduates taking the Masters in Research in the School. Come and find out where learning really takes place! The second session covers  a system that tracks how students interact with ‘Listen Again’ recordings and a prototype system that allows students and lecturers to make textual annotations on video recordings of teaching practice.

We’ll be starting at 12.30 with lunch. The presentations will start around 13.00. We’re aiming to finish by 14.00.

To register for the event please contact Kirsteen Young  (ext 6876).

eLearning Forum – Listen Again

Some presentations from the eLearning Forum on 23rd January 2014 are now available on the following Listen Again page:

http://listenagain.stir.ac.uk/media/2013/elearningforum/listenagain.php

This link and all the PDF versions of the presentations from the day are now also available in the ‘Learning and Development – My Learning’ course area in Succeed. You can find them all in the following folder:

> Course Content > IT & Information Skills > eLearning Forum > eLearning Forum Event – 23rd January 2014

eLearning Forum Presentations, Plagiarism Quiz and Turnitin Question

This blog posting follows up from the eLearning Forum on Thursday, 23rd January 2014.

Presentations

These are now available to view in PDF format:

Plagiarism Quiz

The Plagiarism Quiz which Sarah Grayston has created is now available to view in the ‘My Learning’ course space in Succeed, to which all staff have access. You will find it in the ‘Assessments’ area of this course. If anyone would like a copy of this assessment added to their own module in Succeed then please contact Sarah sarah.grayston@stir.ac.uk to arrange this.

Turnitin Question

To clarify after the discussion relating to Turnitin: if the settings of a Turnitin Assignment are such that a student paper is not submitted to the repository, then Turnitin will still compare the submitted paper against student papers, web and electronic journal items in its database and generate an Originality Report. The only difference will be that Turnitin will not compare papers submitted under this assignment with other papers submitted to this same assignment. Therefore, plagiarism taking place within the module (one student copying off another) would not be spotted as the papers would not be in the repository.

Listen Again

Where staff have agreed to share their talks, we are working on making the presentations from the session available on the Listen Again service. We hope to have these ready for early next week and will do a further blog posting when they are available.

eLearning Forum: Join in via Collaborate

Tomorrow’s eLearning Forum session on Electronic Marking will be available for users from Highland and Western Isles campuses to view through the Blackboard Collaborate conferencing tool. Here is the link that will take you into the session:

https://ca-sas.bbcollab.com/m.jnlp?sid=2010246&password=M.A25297F42CE808A39D68A18F5F11A8

The session starts at 1pm, but we will try to be live in the Collaborate room about 20-30 minutes or so before that. We have tested the sound today and it may be lower than would be ideal, so you will have to boost up your incoming sound as high as possible in Collaborate, but it is usable. Users will be able to post questions to the presenter using the Chat function in Collaborate only. Steve Boulton will pass these questions on to the presenter(s) at the end of their presentations. See you there.

eLearning Forum: Electronic Marking

The eLearning Forum is back! The first meeting of 2014 will be from 13.00-14.30 on Thursday, 23rd January in the Enterprise Zone (in the Library). The theme of the first meeting is Electronic Marking and will have presentations from users of all three available solutions:

Word (Succeed) – Kevin Brosnan, School of Education
Succeed (Assignments) – Sarah Grayston, e-Learning Liaison and Development Team, Information Services
GradeMark (Turnitin) – Ruth Watkins, Student Learning Services, and Tim Whalley, School of Natural Sciences

There will also be a short presentation by Christine Taylor, School of Management, on the new plagiarism quiz developed by eLD and available for all staff to use within Succeed.

We’ll be starting at 12.30 with lunch. The presentations will start around 13.00. We’ll be aiming to finish by 14.00.

To register for the event please contact Kirsteen Young  (ext 6876).

eLearning Forum

The next meeting of the eLearning Forum will be on 23rd January in the Enterprise Zone from 12.30 – 14.00. Lunch will be provided. The topic for the forum is electronic marking and will discuss the three ways this can be done at Stirling:

(i) A method that allows the downloading of the submissions in Succeed, marking usning Word (comment/track-changes) and finally a mechanism to return the marked work to the students.

(ii) Turnitin’s GradeMark tool (available when using Turnitin)

(iii) Succeed’s Crocodoc tool (part of the Succeed Assignment Tool)

Note that method (i) allows for offline marking whereas (ii) and (iii) require an internet connection.

As lunch is being provided we need to know who is planning on coming along. Please let Kirsteen Young (via email) if you wish to attend: kirsteen.young@stir.ac.uk