The Future of Mobile and Technology Enhanced Learning in Higher and Further Education Conference

Yesterday I popped along to Salford University for a conference called 'The Future of Mobile and Technology Enhanced Learning'. There is a full list of speakers here if you're interested in who presented but I thought I'd share a summary of the highlights of the day for me and my thoughts on some of the presentations given.

So to start we were introduced to an app called MeeToo by a company called Lumiinisight which we used throughout the day to post questions about the presentations and to carry out voting/ polling. You can ask questions via the instant messaging feature which is pretty neat.  I quite liked this app although there are similar alternatives out on the market which I suspect are free although not sure about the pricing for it. Never the less I thought it was a neat little app and if you'd like to find out more about it then check out the website.

I'm going to focus my attentions on two presenters. Firstly Jonny Driscoll who is the CEO of Unipin. A new 'social learning environment' on the market. The focus for the platform is around student engagement and social learning built upon real time social media interactions. The concept hangs of the idea of drawing in 3 aspects of university life into one well presented interface. These 3 (if memory serves) are academic, personal and extra curricular activities. It looked like a mix of Pinterest, Google + and Facebook smashed together with a sprinkle Evernote. Jonny graduated only a couple of years ago so he's managed to bring his own experiences of a recent graduate into this platform and into the vision of Unipin. Questions raised about the product were around privacy and encroaching into the social space of a student. There are options to adjust privacy settings so you're not divulging too much of your personal profile. As an academic you can timetable in lectures and allow note taking. The algorithms mean that students are seeing the most important and relevant information to them  each day, be that a social event or a seminar.

Personally, I liked the concept and the way it looked but I think there would still be a need for managing some teaching and learning process such as assignment submission and feedback elsewhere depending on what the platforms being used for. Rolled out on a wider scale I think the product has potential for some FE and HE environments and it'd be interesting to see what feedback they get from students in terms of it pulling in the 3 aspects of university life.


Secondly and finally, Prof Neil Morris Director of Digital Learning at the University of Leeds delivered a presentation on digital technology and higher education - delivering benefits for a student education. Neil talked about their approach and strategy to address some of the issues surrounding student learning, online environments, the digital age and learning technologies. What sprung out to me was the similarity between what they had already done and what we as an institution are also starting. Some key areas such as MOOCs, OERs, lecture recording and blended learning were under their digital strategy for student education. Here at the University of Sheffield we are also looking to take a similar approach and look at these themes institutionally through an digital engagement group. It would appear that taking this holistic view of a 'digital offering' and looking at each aspect of it with a clear strategy for support and implementation is a worthwhile approach. That cohesion amongst 'all things digital' across an institution is often overlooked when introducing just the tech and process as opposed to firstly thinking about the digital pedagogies that command the tools in the first place.

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.

The Art of Communication - CMALT

OK, I'm not actually going to write a guide on the art of communication, but I did want to talk about the importance of 'effective' communication within our roles. Last week I was asked to join the Faculty of Social Sciences at one of their regular CMALT sessions to discuss my 'journey' as a learning technologists and the factors that led me complete my CMALT. The Faculty of Social Sciences have around 12 members of staff that are currently in the midst of compiling their CMALT portfolio. Organised by their faculty learning technologist, Ros Walker they have been coming together regularly looking at each aspect of the CMALT portfolio with an invited speaker for each session. An approach that I think has worked very well!

The last session looked at 'communication'. I shared my own experiences interfacing between many different colleagues as this hybrid technological and pedagogical communicator. This got me thinking about the various teams I've been alined to as a learning technologist. In my time as an LT I've sat within:

• a multimedia team within technical services (Business School at Sheffield Hallam)
• a Unit for Enhancement in Learning and Teaching as part of curriculum development team (UeLT at University of Kent)
• a Centre for Learning and Teaching (CeLT at Manchester Metropolitan University)
• a strand of Learning and Research Technologies (LRT) called Learning Innovation (Manchester Metropolitan University)
• and now a Faculty role withing The University of Sheffield's Faculty of Medicine Dentistry and Health

During my time I've worked on a varying scale of projects including small scale innovations through to large institutional change through out all of which I've been required to adapt my communication skills to the appropriate audience. It really is incredible when you think about the different kinds of roles that a learning technologist has to communicate with, last week alone I met with/or had contact with fellow learning technologists, central IT, faculty IT, administrators, academics, students, members of senior exec and learning and teaching services. Some of those interactions involved an informal coffee, attending and feeding back at an event, a presentation and using social media!

Working in such a dynamic field requires the skill to adapt communications methods and techniques to the right setting and colleague. As communicators of sometimes seemingly complex technological ideas to teaching problems it's really important that we can do so in a way that is clear to our audience. It's also really important that we listen, sounds obvious right? I'll draw upon an example from a couple of weeks ago when I was asked to attend a programme committee to talk about e-learning. Now, I can chew the e-learning fat till the cows come home but what we see time and time again are colleagues jumping on top of learning technology as an answer to their prayers. After some questioning and listening it became obvious there was no issue for me to address as such so a different approach on my part was needed in this case but it's sometimes this kind of dialogue and the approach that is important with colleagues when being asked to address certain problems.

We are exposed to many different situations which require a variety of communicative skills, this can range from written reports, presentations, staff development sessions, presenting at conferences, reporting to strategic groups, communicating institutionally, dealing with students and primarily being the connection between technology and pedagogy.

Quite often we can find ourselves in the firing line as the 'bringers of change' when it comes to implementation of new new learning technologies and approaches. This can always be tricky and the wrong approach here can lead to upset and frustrated staff and really set things back. In this case I always flip things the other way and start with the pedagogy, the students and the approach and leave the technology to one side. But it's very hard sometimes to control the way in which colleagues perceive our roles which of course will impact on the way in which they choose to communicate back.... or not communicate back! This means we have to be adaptable, confident and above all think on our feet.

What I've also found in my time is that in many situations we seem to be the missing connection between many streams of broken communication between various pockets of the institution. I think this comes down to the wide spanning nature of our roles and quite often I find myself informing colleagues such as academics, IT and professional services of the latest goings on. I guess this comes down to the nature of our role being plugged into so many areas of the systems, the student cycle and teaching and learning.

Although Ros had asked me to share my own journey at this particular session, I have been attending some of them already as an exisiting CMALT holder, a great opportunity to hear from other LT professionals and share experiences. Looking forward to the next!

The role of a Learning Technologist

I've been chatting about the The Really Useful Ed Tech Book with some learning technologists today. This is a great all round read for those working in TEL, those who want to understand what impacts on TEL and those who want to understand the role of a learning technologist and it's available to download for free! I thought I'd post my thoughts on the parts of the book that stuck out to me. I really liked Wayne Barry’s chapter "…And What Do You Do?" Can We Explain The Unexplainable? 

The prologue made me chuckle, we’ve all had those awkward moments when we get asked what we do haven’t we? My personal response tends to vary depending on the role of the person who has asked me the dreaded question 'soooooo, what is a Learning Technologist?'. My personal best (or worst) would have to be my graduation day. It was 2013 when I graduated with my MSc in Technology Enhanced Learning, Innovation & Change. I watched hundreds of students walk on stage to be greeted and presented with their award by Lord Robert Winston. I was up next! Now we all wonder if we’re going to be that student that gets asked a question mid hand shake, well that day I was that lucky student. And what should Lord Robert Winston ask me? That dreaded question…. “so what do you do?” Panic! Now anyone who knows me knows that I am not one of these learning technologists that shy away when posed with this question, never shall I brush my job role under the IT carpet or place it under the ‘e-learning’ catch all.

I had found myself up on stage at Sheffield City Hall with hundreds of people starring at me whilst I desperately tried to think of the quickest and clearest response to get me off that stage. I couldn’t do it, “I’m a Learning Technologist” I said proudly to Lord Bob, “Oh, what’s that?” he replied. I used my standard opening response in this situation as a first attempt “I work with academic staff to embed learning technology into the curriculum to enhance learning and teaching". Lord Bob gave me the nod and probed a little further. Luckily I managed to wrap the conversation up in what felt like hours but was actually minutes and merrily trotted off the stage without falling over. Phew!

So I wonder how other people view our roles? I think most of us learning technologists can certainly answer that question in our own contexts but why is it so difficult for others to understand? Is it because we all do so many different things?  Peter Reed refers to this variety of roles in his chapter The Structure And Roles Of Learning Technologists Within Higher Education Institutions. He talks about the variation of job role on a spectrum, spanning from IT Systems Architect right through to Educational Developer. He also looks at the factors that can influence the diversity of the role including the impact of organisational structure. I myself form part of a team of learning technologists within a faculty, but I'm the only faculty post whilst the others focus on departmental demands. In my previous post I highlighted some of the work I do as part of that role. Our faculty has a number of departmental learning technologists and technology professionals that sit at various stages of the spectrum Pete’s referring to. I'd place myself closer to the end of educational developer but in my time working in the field have moved along at different points starting from more of a content development role and quite often I find myself sliding up and down this spectrum depending on the project I'm working on. What I like about Pete's chapter is that it sets out the variety of aspects to the role and the influences and business demands that might go towards shaping the kind of learning technologist that you are.

In their chapter, Learning Technologist as a Digital Pedagogue Dr David Walker & Shelia MacNeill highlight that we might be in danger of compartmentalizing ourselves if we do tightly define our roles. I would tend to agree with this and there have been many times where I've seen quite specific job remits and responsibilities even right down to the specific software and technology that's required to be supported. This always baffles me (although I do understand the need for this in the case of certain posts) as we're dealing with technology that's constantly changing and a big part of what we do is to look beyond what we already have in place and look ahead to what's on the horizon, but more importantly we look to the teaching approach and learner needs that guide the technological solution. Equally, compartmentalising our roles too much could be detrimental to the professional development of the learning technologist as well as detrimental to the support, knowledge and guidance that can be gained from the learning technologist.

What defines each individual learning technologist seems to be their own personal interest and background. We all bring something different to the table and we all have our strengths and weaknesses.

I think the authors of this chapter sum things up quite nicely with this closing paragraph:

"...the ‘new professionals’ of 2015 are an emerging tribe of digital pedagogues with focus on learning enhancement and advocacy of innovative practices underpinned by research and scholarly activities. Among this overlapping community of professionals, we would argue that Learning Technologists - operating across academic disciplines, support services and more senior management positions - with their ability to engage in discussions with colleagues from multiple disciplines beyond simply the use of technology identifies them as our most rounded pedagogues..." (Walker & MacNeill pg 103)

So back to my question, how do others view our roles? Well when I first started here at the university I was keen to find out how academic colleagues in my faculty perceived our roles. So at different stages last year I took the opportunity to gather some comments from the academic staff for my own interest.  

I asked 14 members of staff to summarise in just a couple of sentences ‘What do you think is involved in the role of a learning technologist?  I've loosely themed the comments and here's what emerged.

With only 14 comments it's clearly not representative of the faculty in anyway but it's interesting to gather the thoughts of colleagues that attend the TEL sessions that I run. As you can see that staff development and support were regarded as the largest part of a learning technologists role. And interestingly, the application of teaching theory or pedagogy was not mentioned as much in comparison.  

This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, typically many people view the role of a learning technologist as quite techie and aren't necessarily aware that in order for us to be the bridge between teaching and technology we do need to have a sound pedagogic understanding and grounding. 


Staff development and support are at the top of the list and rightly so. We all tend to undertake an element of support or staff development be it in the form of formal workshops around TEL or one- to- one support.

Here’s a pick of a few comments: 

"Translating academic intentions into a technology context. Helping to uncover the possibilities of technology and then supporting the implementation. Not content writing."

"To advise and support on the delivery of teaching and learning via technology - any aspects of it i guess!"
 
"Establishing appropriate software for delivery of online distance learning mechanisms for support and feedback. Initiating and maintaining online community feel. Enabling both academic and personal support for students."


I have to say it was quite nice to hear these comments as many of them were pretty spot on which was a great relief! Nobody said fixing the printers... Yay! There were no great misunderstandings of our roles and I guess that's down to the variety of roles we have in the faculty. We have a number of roles within the faculty that support TEL from various angles including filming, content development, VLE management, writing systems right through to staff development, advice and guidance on TEL, project work, curriculum design to educational development. If you ever find yourself new to a faculty I'd recommended taking the opportunity to ask academic colleagues how they view your role as a learning technologist as it makes for an interesting discussion point around the how you can support developments in TEL, allows you to establish your role and other roles working in TEL and also gives you a better understanding of what potential challenges you might face in the future.

References

Barry, W. (2015). "…and what do you do?" Can we explain the unexplainable?. In: Hopkins, D., ed., The Really Useful #EdTechBook, 1st ed. David Hopkins, pp.23-34.

Reed, P. (2015). The structure and roles of Learning Technologists within Higher Education Institutions. In: Hopkins, D., ed., The Really Useful #EdTechBook, 1st ed. David Hopkins, pp.41-51.

Walker, D. and MacNeill, S (2015). Learning Technologist as Digital Pedagogue. In: Hopkins, D., ed., The Really Useful #EdTechBook, 1st ed. David Hopkins, pp.91-105.

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!

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!)






This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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?!!)


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