The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in Learning Technologies

The 18th Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference

As always, this conference is predominantly about learning technologies and how they are used in Blackboard. Hosted annually by the University of Durham there were around 100 attendees from across the sector – academics and learning technologists enhancing learning and teaching with the use of technology.

Staff Development and Digital Competency

The opening keynote by Sharon Flynn from the National University of Ireland (NUI) in Galway focused on staff development and digital competency. The TEL team Interestingly sits in Teaching and Learning and includes learning technologists, academic developers and audio visual developers. She has tailored a National Framework for professional development and was instrumental in helping to form All Aboard Digital Skills in Higher Education, a national project that aims to empower learners, teachers, and anyone who uses technology to support their work/study, or other aspects of living in a digital age.

All Aboard Digital Skills in Higher Education Tube Map

Sharon’s TEL team also have their own helpdesk system supported by a Resources Website where all help material is held. The Helpdesk allows the team to identify and track patterns and common queries. An Overview is produced on a monthly basis.

Typically, attendance at workshops are low but the prep material is useful to add to resources. A popular and well attended Blackboard festival is held at the end of August normally lasting 4 or 5 days. University of Kent also host a Blackboard festival each year where staff showcase best practice. Badges are used to encourage enthusiasm and recognition within digital literacy and managed through the Blackboard’s achievements, a feature we have yet to employ at UCA.

Real-time Video Conferencing with Collaborate Ultra

I attended this session given by the University of Northampton as I was keen to see what the tool could offer – as UCA has no classroom video conferencing or recording tools. Northampton use it mainly for seminars, group and one2one tutorials, research proposal workshops, interviews, guest speakers and PG twilight classes (1 hour session) which include a planned activity. Their PhD project community use collaborate to connect with fellow students globally. The conferencing tool opens directly in the browser, so no need to install any software to join a session. The only downside mentioned was rural areas with a weak internet connection which meant the session would drop out.

Benefits of Collaborate Ultra at University of Northampton

Personally, I am still unconvinced we need such a tool at UCA – UNLESS we expand into more online teaching and international partnerships with other institutions, then it would be a sound investment.

Online IT Induction for Pre-Arrival Students

Lina Petrakieva & David McArthur from Glasgow Caledonian University presented their work stemming from a 3 year research project around student induction. They designed and built a pre-arrival student induction which aims to help students become familiar with their login, university email and virtual learning environment (Blackboard). Working alongside Registry and IT, they used a number of techniques to take students to a bespoke learning object (built in Adobe Captivate) where students were asked to complete a number of tasks in order to obtain their university email.

Timeline mapping the evolution of the IT Induction at GCU

Over 50% of students completed the induction which is significant compared to the 37 views we had with our own UCA IT Induction (hosted on YouTube). Glasgow now plan to make a part 2 induction which covers more aspects of digital literacy. This is definitely a model to learn from, GCU have sent me a copy of this induction, so watch this space.

EMA – Electronic Management of Assessment

A number of presentations covered this topic and it was interesting to see how different institutions approach this feat according to their assessment practice, tools and strategic vision. Both Reading and Aberdeen gave papers on how EMA brought consistency to the process that fostered pedagogical benefits, improved and supported assessment experience for staff and afforded significant reductions in administrative work. The use of Safe Assign was used at Aberdeen whereas Reading used Turnitin with both using the Grade Centre to distribute Marks – something UCA does not currently do. Andrew Yule from Aberdeen gave a compelling argument for Safe Assign in that letter grading could be employed (unlike Turnitin) and assignment Due Dates and Marks where flagged up in Blackboard’s mobile app – whereas Turnitin’s Due Dates are not – a bone of contention indeed!

Blackboard Managed Hosting – One Year On

Chris Boon from City College Norwich shared his experience of managed hosting. The advantages (fast, robust, up-to-date, headache free, responsive, better user experience) far outweigh the disadvantages. These disadvantage being loss of direct database access – which in most cases, forces best practice but can prevent customisations from working.

What UCA can learn from this – as we are due to move to managed hosting this summer – is to avoid the Webservices API used for SIS middleware, and use REST APIs instead.

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Students as Partners

Durham BB 2015 conference

This year’s Durham conference was centred around the theme of Students as Partners with Abbi Flint from the HEA giving one of the keynotes broadly based around the report Engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education that Mick Healey, Abbi Flint and Kathy Harrington have just published via the HEA.

Clearly the conference theme is a very timely topic that challenges our assumptions, practices and beliefs about learning, teaching and assessment. The educational experience a student today gets is very different from the one their tutors and teaching staff received as undergraduates. The conference questioned whether our own experiences are still valid reference points.

From my experience as a learning technologist of five years and MA student in online and distance education 3 years ago, I have witnessed rapid change in pedagogy with the onslaught of technology. This change has indeed reconceptualised education as we know it. The concept of students as partners may seem strange and some students might indeed ask why they should be partners when they pay 9k a year for a course program that is partly conceived by their peers. But unless educators can fully understand today’s digital technology and how new generations are using it, we can never hope to deliver a parallel learning experience that enhances and excites our learners. In fact, without working and learning from students in a form of partnership, we will be out of touch, ineffective and blatantly arrogant with the needs of learners. As Jim Emery from Glasgow Caledonian University stated in his presentation around student engagement “those who graduated even as recently as 4 years ago faced different challenges from the students of right now. The dynamic and relationship between a teacher and a learner is different, or if not it’s ineffective”.

But the notion of student as partner has to be genuine. To be a partner, one has to be fit for purpose, be able to understand the challenges, tensions and opportunities. For students to take partnership seriously, institutions need to man-up and take the responsibility of ensuring technical currency exists within the pedagogic delivery. This again can only be done with the student voice and institutions positively acting on their findings as Duune suggests below:

There is a subtle, but extremely important, difference between an institution that ‘listens’ to students and responds accordingly, and an institution that gives students the opportunity to explore areas that they believe to be significant, to recommend solutions and to bring about the required changes. (Dunne in Foreword to Dunne and Zandstra 2011, p. 4)

Students as Partners – Making it Happen

Measures such as student reps being on all university committees, including the exam reviews and assessment boards have been put into place by Hull York Medical School.

Slide from HYMS presentation

They expelled the ‘token gesture’ principle and forged ahead to work with students as co-producers by involving them with getting a variety of curriculum development activities as paid university employees. Examples include working with the HYMS eLearning Team as Student TEL Ambassadors to ensure that the VLE courses for the new academic year are updated and evolve in appropriate ways both in curriculum design and content and to accommodate the changing profile of students. Often, this would involve the students working alongside clinical and academic staff as co-designers of learning resources and influencing the way they use technology to enhance learning and teaching. Students have also worked on research projects and developing eLearning resources such as virtual patients and e-tutorials.

Another significant and simple participation tool used in the open course GCUGameson was Padlet embedded into their Blackboard Course Site. This simple tool cut through all the red tape and complexity that comes with the Blackboard discussion tools.