Tuesday, 3 January 2012

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

Monday, 12 December 2011

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

Monday, 14 November 2011

alternatives to webpa for group peer assessment

Just wantto collect some links. I would love to have webpa. But I’m not sure how they are progressing with the blackboard bridge

Casper http://www.caspar.co.uk/

iPeer http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipeer/

Friday, 11 November 2011

framework for use of video audio in courses (Dial-e)

Deil-e is a useful site for helping staff see the range of uses for found and created video and audio resources. It takes them beyond the obvious.

http://dial-e.net/

Monday, 7 November 2011

ALT-C 2011 videos published

Some interesting stuff here. Looks poorly attended. Good job they recorded these as now I can attended.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ClipsFromALT#g/c/488BC24721DF2544

Friday, 4 November 2011

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

Thursday, 20 October 2011

20% of uk institution use lecture capture software

Research

Method

This research is a very quick scan through Google looking for university ‘ac.uk’ sites that return for the different systems. The hits where then reviewed to make sure the information was claiming that the institution was using the technology, and not just discussing the idea.

Limitation

This research makes no claim that this is a full list or that the extent of which the tools are being use.

36 institutions identified (20%) 29 – Echo 360, 7 – Panopto

Use of lecture capture in external institutions

Contents

Date. 2

Research. 2

Method. 2

Panopto – uk based (7) 2

Bath. 2

Southampton. 3

Anglia Ruskin. 3