Achieving Our Potential #1

This is the first in a series of blog posts on a few topics which are still unravelling in my mind.

During the last couple of weeks I've had various interactions including conversations with academic colleagues, discussions within our Teaching Circle, listening to debate from the JISC Digital Festival (#digifest15) and talking to colleagues about future developments. All of which have me thinking about various aspects of how technology enhanced learning is embedded within our faculty (and or institution) and more importantly what approach do we take in supporting our staff and students.

Last week I attended our faculty Teaching Circle. The theme of which was What is Quality in Learning and Teaching? This led to some interesting discussion around the various fundamentals of quality teaching, areas for focus and problems. My group consisted of three academics, two of which teach on distance learning programmes so naturally conversations led to support for embedding technology into teaching, developing blended learning and some of the barriers in providing quality teaching. It will be of no surprise those barriers include academic digital skills and confidence in using technology to deliver teaching. Other areas that emerged were:

• What are our student's expectations/ perceptions of quality teaching?
• How do we measure quality?
• Variation in teaching experience can impact quality, as can personal traits and motivations
• Organisational factors influence quality i.e. strategy, leadership and support

Personally I took away two questions from the morning,

1. How do we support our academic staff in harnessing the potential of tools and technologies to draw out the student attributes that we would associate with quality learning and teaching? (critical thinking, curiosity, analytical, creativity etc)

2. How do we develop quality blended learning that provides extended learning opportunities for those students that want to engage above the 'baseline'. 

My mind's screaming open web, open education resources, opportunities for learning networks and social learning. But in reality, it's not quite so straightforward.

During this weeks DigiFest, David White and Donna Lanclos took part in a healthy debate on 'are learning technologies fit for purpose?' A really interesting debate and both had valid arguments. Donna's main argument was that learning technologies aren't fit for purpose and tools such as VLEs are too locked down and we are forcing staff to use systems that are content driven and not education driven. And we should be directing students to open resources for their learning.

David's argument was that VLEs provide a structure for students and to throw them out into the open web we wouldn't be providing them with a pedagogical structure.  I'm not going to summarise this to much detail because you can watch the debate online, but if I'm going to chip my two pennies worth in I think we as educators need to be in a position where we prepare and educate our learners in using the open web. However if our educators aren't comfortable in this area then we are going to face a bit of a brick wall. In addition to this I can see Donna's point of view, sometimes we're faced with rather restrictive system that we buy into institutionally and then we find ourselves fudging our way around them and tweaking them to fit with other systems and and teaching. I can see the need from an organisational point of view but VLEs are often used as content repositories which is why we're seeing this move away to other open tools, new platforms and new ways of learning which offer more flexibility and creativity. At the University of Sheffield we use Google and we're seeing an increase in the use of Google apps for education. If i'm honest I don't think institutionally people are ready to do away with the VLE just yet and one of the reasons for that is that there is a varying degree of skills  and knowledge in using other technologies for teaching, using the web for researching, using open apps and social media.  So some structure seems to be needed it's just a case of how flexible you can be within that structure.

To take a step back, we also need to understand our learners. As David White highlighted, just because students are comfortable in using the web socially doesn't mean they have the digital skills or knowledge to use it appropriately for learning. I think without understanding this we're really not in a position to make assumptions about our learners or to design learning. This is an area we'll be exploring more this year within my faculty. So, thinking about questions 1 & 2 this brings me to a third question:

3. Are we doing enough? 

I'll leave you on that note because this area is huge. But I am going to come back to these questions and pick at them a little further in my next post.

Using technology to support achieve more

This last few months many of us have been beavering away working on the Faculty Health Challenge. The Health Challenge is part of the university initiative Achieve More.


I have been working with the academic lead and the rest of the team in the curriculum design process, designing and creating the website 'online workbook' and managing the blog. We've had quite a challenge logistically, as a faculty we simply haven't had the time in the curriculum to allow students to undertake this in a one week period like other faculties have. So we have taken a long and thin approach in delivering weekly content and resources over a 12 week period using Google Sites.

The Approach

Our student groups are working in a multi-disciplinary team to consider the impact cultural and area differences have on the perception of health and delivery of health care, and in doing so developing their own identity as a Global Citizen. They will be working in teams looking at:

1. What affects people’s health in this area? 
2. What can be done about it? 
3. Why hasn’t this been done before?

Why Google Sites?

It's easy to use, it's flexible, we can enrol all our students, facilitators and supervisors easily enough, we can share and restrict our videos via google circles, visually it looks a lot nicer than your typical VLE (well we think so) and it allows an opportunity for all our first year students to interact with Google Sites and Google Docs (should they choose to use docs). Also, our first years will already be using a mix of Blackboard and Minerva so we wanted something easy to navigate around as we don't need the full functionality of a VLE.

We have 40 groups of students, each group has a dedicated facilitator. We created the master site and copied it 40 times and then released it to each student group and their facilitator.

What tools and technology have been used?

The module content delivery comprises of a mixture of content specific weekly online resources such as links to external resources as well as resources created in house by academics, librarians and learning techs. These are in the form of videos, screencasts and presentations.

We're expecting our students to upload items to their own site as well as use the threaded comment feature on Google Sites if they want to have a discussion online around a particular week.

What about communication? Social Media? Twitter? Facebook?

What about it? We have no hashtag or Facebook group, I'll say no more on this. What I will say is that we have a fantastic resource created by our SALTS (Student Ambassadors for Learning and Teaching) which is called 'Hashtags & Healthcare'. If you'd like anymore info then let me know i'll share it with you. But essentially it's an online guide for students created by students looking at the potential of social media as well as the pitfalls for those in a healthcare profession.

We're leaving it up to our students to decide how they want to communicate with each other and work as a team, we've given them the opportunity to be able to have online discussion but if they'd rather meet or email or use another online space then they are welcome to do so.

We are using a private Google+ community for our facilitators to touch base with one another as the weeks continue. They can use this private space to share issues and ideas or just keep each other up to date on week to week progress.

We do however have a Health Challenge blog, this is a Wordpress site that run alongside the week by week delivery of the programme. The purpose of this is to feed in useful tips, blog posts from subject specialists, footage of the opening event and all the 'fun' stuff along side their week to week learning. This blog also feeds into each groups site but can also be viewed as a stand alone blog.



We're only into week 3 of the module and our students are getting ready to head out to their allocated neighbourhood next week. The next few weeks will start to get really interesting as the students start exploring their neighbourhoods (observation only) and hearing from our patients as educators!

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?!!)


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