e-Assessment

I attended and presented at this years e-Assessment Scotland conference. I came back with lots of inspiration and ideas ready for the start of term so i thought I'd blog about what I took away from the day and how I'll be putting my thoughts into action. So here goes...

The keynote was my an old colleague and friend of mine Mr Peter Reed. You can view his slides and thoughts of the day on his blog. Pete delivered a really interesting keynote focusing around Brookfield's reflective lenses which encourages reflection through 4 lenses. These are self-reflection, students, literature and peers. In particular looking at assessment through the lenses of others and giving consideration to a host of factors when planning assessment. I found this really interesting and thought provoking when thinking about my own working context. So what am i going next? Well during the course of the next year I'm already planning a few events around e-Assessment and e-Feedback BUT I'm going to pop that on the back burner just for a very short while whilst I take on board Reedy's fantastic keynote. I'm going to re think my original sessions and target audience and I've been in touch with a few different members of staff within the faculty including programme administrators and unfair means officers. What I now want to do is involve some of our key stakeholders to ensure I'm understanding their perspectives when it comes to e-Assessment and involving them in informing some of these events and vice versa. I've also been thinking a lot more about the assessment lifecycle, assessment loading, high and low stakes assessment and how the planning of assessment in general can impact on the success of the assessment as a whole which again is something to consider when working with the various staff roles when planning new assessments.


I presented on emerging e-assessment practices, trends, techniques and tensions. I took a thematic approach as opposed to the usual case study approach and focused on three key areas in A-assessment. These were Collaborative e-Assessment, Portfolio based e-Assessment and e-Submission, e-Marking and e-Feedback. The presentation highlighted some of the emerging e-assessment practices being adopted within the faculty to address some of the challenges, this included the use of PebblePad for e-portfolio assessment, online submission and marking through Turnitin and Grademark and the use of Google apps for collaborative assessment and group work.


The other presentations on the day were varied and interesting and I met some new folk! Networking at a conference is always a big reason for me attending but it was nice to meet colleagues that were local to Scotland that I have never had the opportunity to meet before and have kept in touch about a few things since the conference! Also, although quite often we don't take advantage of a lot of the sponsor's stalls at these things, I really did and got some useful information from some of them in relation to developments within my faculty.

And finally, I got to visit Dundee! I stayed next to this lovely boat (pay no attention to the danger sign, i didn't!)






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Based on a work at navdeepinthought.blogspot.com.

MELSIG MMU "Smart Devices for Learning'

Last week I attended MELSIG which was held at Manchester Metropolitan University. I just wanted to highlight some of the key things I took away from the day. The event focus was around 'smart devices for learning', topic that's been growing in interest and use for some time now. What I quite like about MELSIG is that you tend to get a good mix of speakers that are currently undertaking projects directly with students and also you tend to pick up some useful app ideas.

So... My fave presentation was by Simon Thomson Head of eLearning at Leeds Met. I picked up a handy little 'smart device' that they've been using called a 'chatterbox', a fairly old school device used in my youth to direct truth or dare questions. Anyway, Simon has been using them with staff and has stripped them of all truth or dare questions, lucky for them! Instead the chatterbox has been replaced with tools to enhance teaching and learning and ways in which they can be used within teaching. As luck would have it I am in the midst of organising a session for staff around designing online learning activities. I'm definitely going to be using this chatterbox with staff as a conversation starter.

Something else i picked up was a company called Spritz who focus on developing text streaming technology and it's integration into modern technology. So the ability to be able to read moving/ streaming text as opposed to fixed text that you need to scroll through on an app would be quicker, more comfortable and easier. One to look out for i think! (Get it?.... 'Look' out for?!!)


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Based on a work at navdeepinthought.blogspot.com.

FOTE13

This year i managed to get to the Future of Technology in Education conference held at ULCC, London. The event covered a range of discussions and presentation ranging from BT's Futurologist Nicola Millard talking about Crowds, Clouds and Customers, highlighting the importance of connectivity and how the ability to connect  anywhere is changing our working and learning behaviour, societies evolving behaviours in terms of the way in which we interact and use technology to communicate and collaborate with one another as well as the changes to the physical spaces in which we work.

I guess something that stuck out from the day was the underlying message about the value of social interaction and face to face. Nicola Ward (BT) mentioned the importance of having connectivity to be able to carry out tasks in social spaces, Gwen Noteborn of Maastricht University highlighted the importance of face to face lectures in relation to her research in webcasting. She mentioned how webcasting added value to students learning but couldn't replace the social aspect of coming together in one room for a lecture. Lindsay Jordan Educational Developer at the University of the Arts London also talked about that feeling and sense of remembrance you have when experiencing something in a physical space with a social aspect as opposed to an online space, to demonstrate this she presented wearing a blue spandex 'onsie' and a blue wig. Lindsay has a point,  I don't think some of us will forget that in a hurry! So what does this mean for us as educational developers? How do we create that social experience for our students when it comes to online courses and in particular as Lindsay discussed in relation to the high drop out rates that we find with MOOCs.

The University of Sheffield has just signed up to FutureLearn and the first course to be launched from the university will be Discover Dentistry (shameless plug, go check it out). We'll be looking at using the tools within the FutureLearn platform to add elements of interaction and discussion whilst keeping motivation up. The platform is relatively new so it'll be an interesting experience for all so watch this space!






This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at navdeepinthought.blogspot.com.