abstractrabbit (Jim Turner) posterous

Notes on attending of Large-scale curriculum redesign where technology plays a central role

 

Conference site http://www.alt.ac.uk/events/large-scale-curriculum-redesign

 

I was very interested in this subject area, as we have been working over the past 3 years with programme teams to redesign their courses to include technology or just design in programme level pedagogic changes. We are currently using TESTA and carpe dime processes very successfully.

The event focused on stories of how institutions are working with all staff at an institutional level to bring in change. We have had strategic, policy lead projects over the years. These changes where similar, with more staff being made or pushed towards the adoption.

 

Mark Stubbs from MMU told his story of redesigning large scale processes to get the most from systems integration. This would help stream line processes which would lead to an anticipation for curriculum change. We have tried similar things with changes to all programmes in 2010 to larger 24 credit modules, and 3 assessment points per module. I believe, with these types of large changes, a certain rigidity creeps into the system. 30 credit modules, with fixed amounts of assessment points, leave less opportunity for flexibility of delivery in the future. The huge amount of energy involved means that there is little left to address the programmes pedagogic design. However, it was an impressive demonstration of the power of linking live data educational systems. I particularly likes the student feedback collection centrally and then tagged in order to link staff with their student, which creates a tighter connection and turnaround

 

Donald Clark was persuasive as usual, focusing on the seismic shift from scarcity of educational opportunities to scalable open accesses. If someone can mass produce something that was rare, the impact is huge. He sees current University building projects  as a last vain attempt to build scarcity into education. You can only have so many students in those rooms, which leads to in build scarcity. But with the move to massive online education, suddenly something isn't scarce anymore. So we go the way of the book shop. For instance Stanford Uni aren't building any more lecture halls. So the tipping point between physical and virtual has been reached and we are on the wrong side. The shift will be quick and dramatic, leaving old practices in the slow lane. Donald recommends this change management book by kotter to help understand how to find our way out of this mess. Donald touched on Digital literacy, how do we keep up when the skills set develops over every 3 months. He is not sure about this one. I think there probably is some generic skills that could be built into course curriculum design. A programme assessment task that involves a research process by students of the use of technology to support their studies and their careers. The question of why are we not sharing content, remains unanswered. So much reinvention is leaving us far behind, and wasting precious development time.

The big story is the Ufi sell off and the formation of a 54m funding for employability course development.

 

For me though the most inspiring session was from Ciara Duffy. This project saw 800 staff and many thousands of students not turn up to college for a whole day and then a whole week! These were stud-e days, where the whole college delivered online for a day. I like this for its simplicity of message. The college needs to explore new delivery methods because of weather conditions and rural location of students, so, let's all give it ago.

http://www.swc.ac.uk/media/2747/13800%20SWC%20Echo%20Nov%2011.pdf

 

I was surprised that there was no mention of TESTA, Carpe Diem or Napier Unis 3Es process, all of which I see as having possibilities to help in delivering large scale change.

 


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NUS report on 'student experience' for QAA - over simplistic

http://www.qaa.ac.uk/Publications/InformationAndGuidance/Documents/Student-Experience-Research-2012-Part-1.pdf

This report is ment to be ‘evidence based’. Please can NUS tighten up its act when publishing important and influential work like this. Some kind of literature review would be good. And a few more focus groups, it seems very thin to base findings on at this level

 

 


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Million+ project 'teaching that matter'

http://www.millionplus.ac.uk/research/teaching-that-matters

 

this project provides a range of innovative case studies that have tried to support staff and students to review the way they teach and learn. There are a wide range of case studies, familiar ideas I’ve seen before, some technoically (e.g. pebblepad, second life) enabled and many that try to re-connect learning with a specific context.

 

 

 


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Law Society practice statement on the use of social media

Fiona Fargher form law just sent me this. It’s interesting in terms of their approach to the problem and what they see the risks as being

http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/productsandservices/practicenotes/socialmedia/5049.article

 

Jim


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useful video detailing the development of mobuile at MMU

The main thing here for me is students seem to focus on the admin aspect of their learning. Perhaps this is because the staff are not fully engaging with the students on other mobile tools, or these have yet to be developed

 

 


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Microworlds for Science

The idea of microworlds has been around since the 70s. These are typically small java based mathematical simulations of various principles. The main idea is they allow the user to play with the parameters of a simulation in order to understand how a system works. There are many of these that have been developed over the years on the internet, although they are becoming more unfashionable as some have moved onto smart phone development. Below are some links, but as usual before making a copy to distribute on the web or on DVD we ask you to check with the copyright holders. It should also be mentioned that you should check the quality of the particular microworld you want your students to use.

 

http://phet.colorado.edu/

http://mste.illinois.edu/resources/ 

http://shodor.org/interactivate/activities/

http://www.engapplets.vt.edu/

http://onlinelabs.in/biology

 


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feedback 'on demand' process from Leeds Met

Useful idea from staff at leeds. they are asking students to request feedback via a very organized process


Here are the details from the paper


5. Investigation of feedback behaviour and preferences with
efficient solutions for improving student satisfaction

  Authors: 
Ollie Jones and Andrea Gorra
Leeds Business School, Leeds Metropolitan University

  Abstract

  There are many pressures on academics to ‗satisfy‘ students‘ needs for feedback, not least the
inclusion of questions about feedback in the National Student Survey. In this paper we firstly
investigate how a student cohort in a UK Business school perceives and defines feedback by using a
questionnaires and group interviews. The initial research showed that there were significant
differences in views regarding both the preferred method and the relative value of different types of
feedback. In addition, feedback provided before the final summative assessment was perceived as
more preferable, than feedback after the final submission.  

  Many authors have commentated on the lack of student engagement with summative feedback but
others also argue that it is important in terms of improving individual student performance. Hence the
second part of the paper outlines an action research project which involved offering feedback ‗on
demand‘. Several authors have looked at a range of reasons why students do not collect their
feedback but this paper investigated why students Do collect feedback. We used access statistics
data from the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to identify the actual rate of feedback collection.
There appeared to be a discernable preference for seeking feedback where the difference between
the expected grade and the actual grade was greater. Survey evaluation and the VLE access data
both indicated that students were satisfied with an individual criteria approach if the mark was similar
to their expectations. 

  We argue that student cohorts are not homogenous in their feedback preferences and that it is not
resource efficient or effective for academic staff to provide detailed individual feedback to all students.
Students should be offered a hierarchy of feedback on demand and some of the effort could then be
reallocated from summative feedback to formative assessment and feedback. 

  Keywords = feedback, feedback on demand, summative feedback, formative feedback, NSS , VLE 

  http://www.studynet1.herts.ac.uk/intranet/lti.nsf/0/A8BCA73604E06A6D80257920004BB829/$FILE/IBLC%20Proceedings%202011.pdf#page=48