Elisabetta Lando, Educational Technologist at City St George's, University of London, introduces her team's new guidance on using the visualiser for active teaching and learning in this post originally published here.
“You see, Baldrick, this pencil is not just for writing. It’s for pointing out stupidity, stirring tea, and, if the situation calls for it, making tiny holes in annoying people’s portraits.” Blackadder BBC.
To paraphrase Blackadder: a visualiser is not just for projecting bits of paper. It’s for scaffolding learning, thinking aloud, and, if the situation calls for it, collaborating on some mind maps with students (and so much more).
With many thanks to the academics who responded to our call in the learning and teaching community on Teams, and told us how they use visualisers in their teaching. We have now put together some guidance on different ways of using this learning spaces technology for active learning and teaching.
These ideas also support inclusive and adaptive approaches in the classroom, which is now an even bigger focus in the new Professional Standards Framework (PSF) for teaching and supporting learning.
Scaffolding Learning: Use the visualiser to break down complex problems into manageable steps. This helps all students, especially those who may struggle with abstract concepts, to follow along more easily.
Think Aloud: Use the visualiser to model thinking processes. This technique helps students understand the reasoning behind each step and can be particularly beneficial for students who need explicit instruction on cognitive strategies.
Collaborative Mind Mapping: Engage students in collaborative mind mapping activities using the visualiser. This fosters a sense of community and encourages participation from all students.
Student Work Showcase: Display student work under the visualiser to highlight diverse approaches and solutions. This not only celebrates different ways of thinking but also allows students to learn from each other. It can be particularly empowering for students with different learning strengths.
Interactive Annotations: Encourage students to annotate texts, diagrams, or images projected by the visualiser. This interactive approach supports adaptive learning.
Real-Time Feedback: Use the visualiser to provide real-time feedback on student work. For example, during a writing exercise, you can project a student’s paragraph and discuss its strengths and areas for improvement. This immediate feedback helps all students understand the criteria for success and how to improve their work.
To find out more about the new Professional Standards Framework, see Dr Clare Tyrer’s Learning at City blog
Anna Armstrong, Senior Learning Designer at the University of London, takes a critical look at why an online learner described discussion forums as a 'dead space' in their learning. In this post originally published here, Anna discusses what can be done to prevent this sort of response.
Our online learners told us that their discussion forms were “dead spaces” and had “no value”. In this post I will explore how this may have happened and ask if there is anything we can do about it.
What do we mean by a discussion forum activity?
asynchronous: takes places over a set period of time with students contributing at the best time for them
purposeful: clearly structured and related to the learning outcomes
student led: students contribute, reading and replying to each other’s posts
tutor facilitated: online tutor monitors forum and comments minimally, correcting if misunderstandings arise, summarising occasionally
Students created their own thriving digital community
Let’s start with a success story: Our BSc Computer Science students created their own thriving digital community using the online communication platform, Slack. Our student rep showed us how they had created their own space where hundreds of participants from all over the world engaged in an informal social community organised by the learners themselves with no reliance on the tutor. They set up dozens of threads on various topics like job opportunities, memes, first cohort, official. It became an essential and core aspect of their study: a space to ask questions, share resources, and have fun. They established strong bonds and felt able to express vulnerability in this environment. Students clearly demonstrated an appetite for connecting with peers on a digital asynchronous platform.
Image of the rich Slack interface
Academic discussion forums were “dead spaces”
This success story shows what students can do online when they have motivation and purpose, so why did this not transfer into the online forums that we provided for learning within our programmes? One of our strongest students described their academic forums as “dead spaces”, which were devoid of interest and value with few learner contributions. Here’s an example:
Image of a forum showing students have viewed but not contributed to the forum
What went wrong?
These students have disengaged with learning through discussions and are therefore missing the opportunity to engage critically with their course material and to become experts in their field. Do students even realise? Were we as educators responsible?
A discussion with our students revealed why the academic forums failed.
Students expected to be ‘taught’: There’s a mismatch between student expectations and reality. Our online programmes include didactic teaching elements but have an emphasis on practising and applying new concepts, combined with developing understanding through written discussions. This is an unfamiliar approach for most learners and our time-poor students prioritised and gave value to familiar content-led tasks such as reading and watching lectures.
Students expected a one-to-one with the tutor in the forums: Believing that they would receive a personal reply to their posts from the tutor, students tended not to reply to each other. They didn’t see the value in peer-to-peer communication for learning.
Students lacked the skills or confidence to contribute: It’s a daunting prospect to post your response to an academic question in writing with all eyes on your post. Early activities were challenging and discouraged students from continuing.
Students were not interested in the activities: On reflection, some forums were lacking purpose and often there were too many.
Students were not heard: Some brave students did dip their toe in the waters of the earlier forums. Their posts were met with silence and unsurprisingly they quickly disengaged from all future discussion tasks.
Forum tasks require effort and can feel difficult: Composing a coherent well-informed response to an academic question takes time and is difficult. We know that when students are challenged, they perceive that they are not learning (Carpenter et al., 2020), and it’s easier to watch a video or read a book and underline some words – the sense of learning is greater.
The discussion interface is problematic: In Coursera, students cannot see what others have posted before they post their contribution. This is a huge hurdle. It’s like speaking in a room full of people where you can see and hear no one. A discussion is about reading and responding to each other. I don’t blame students at all for not wanting to speak up.
So, should we just ditch discussion forums?
As we can see, online discussion-based activities are challenging. It takes a deliberate and well-informed effort to scaffold and structure activities, and students need a lot of support to do well in them. So why bother? Is it worth the effort?
Many voices celebrate the value of discussion-based learning in online programmes when included as part of a range of learning activities, for example,
It’s not only academics and teachers who think discussion forums are a rich learning opportunity. My own experience as a postgraduate online learner confirms to me that it really is worth the effort. I studied online for three years. It was lonely and isolating. The forums were the only way to explore the academic material with other people; through discussions I could express my emerging understanding and adjust it by reading my peers’ perspectives. Forums gave me a way to develop critical thinking and establish my academic voice.
I found it liberating and egalitarian: everyone had the same opportunity to be heard. It was also difficult and frustrating at times, as is any good learning. But the act of thinking and writing regularly in small chunks, and getting regular feedback was rewarding and motivating.
So, if there is value in learning through discussing ideas, we owe it to our learners to help them to make it work. We need to understand what made the student communities successful, and what made the academic forums fail.
What do students need to learn through forums?
Our students engaged with their social forum with energy and enthusiasm. By examining what made that space work, can we harness and direct that energy into academic study?
Why did Slack work well?
How can we apply that to educational forums?
It was a safe space where students felt confident to contribute
Help learners develop academic writing skills and confidence to express ideas in writing by scaffolding through simple low-key activities with plenty of early encouragement and feedback.
Ensure the interface allows students to read previous contributions before they post.
It was useful for learning Students could find the information they need, and got help promptly when they asked
Provide rationale: Explain the benefits of learning through forums in an online programme
Set expectations: Acknowledge that these tasks are challenging and can feel difficult. Invite students to respond to each other using a specified structure. Tutor can model the type of response required.
Invite students to take part: Give a clear purpose with instructions on how and why to take part. Gilly Salmon’s approach The e-tivity invitation is good.
Students connected with their peers and supported one another They did this naturally – they wanted to form a community.
Set expectations: Outline student and tutor role (Kwon, 2021) – forums are a space for student-to-student dialogue where the tutor is a coach and facilitator, weaving, summarising and guiding. Tutor can teach this through early forum feedback.
Provide task instructions which include how to respond to peers. Make the tasks manageable in the study time available and give enough time for the discussion to develop as learners join asynchronously throughout the week.
Students developed and expressed an onlineidentity Some were able to be more themselves online than they could be in their own real-life communities.
Outline roles: tutor starts, students respond and interact with each other.
Design a series of ice breaker activities focussed on allowing the cohort to get to know each other, including webinars to build a successful community of inquiry.
Students had agency They ran their own space and could adapt its use and structure to their own needs.
Give students permission to lead their own spaces – these are student led forums where there is no need to wait for a tutor to contribute.
Ensure the tutor is present and students feel supported by but not reliant on their presence.
It was fun! Students could easily share memes, emojis, videos, URLs. They set up silly spaces as well as serious ones.
Probably the most important point!
Challenge students to complete interesting relevant tasks and change the format of the discussion activities, for example:
– free students form their academic inhibitions by assigning them a specific stance in an argument – respond to a controversial stance in a debate – research and report back on findings from their own country or town – provide a choice of questions to respond to – ask them to post more than just words – voice, image and video are all possible
Conclusion
We have seen that, given the right conditions, students throw themselves into online communication activities and enjoy them. But they need to be guided and they need to understand how to learn in this new and unfamiliar environment. Discussion forums don’t just happen by themselves, they need to be well designed and well scaffolded, purposeful and appropriate. As educators this is our responsibility – this is a valuable reminder that we are teaching real people who need real support to learn and do well.
What do you think? What’s your experience of learning online and developing a strong peer community of inquiry?
Kathryn Drumm, Educational Technologist at City, University of London, shares her experiences of visiting Google's Accessibility Discover Centre.
Just beforeGlobal Accessibility Awareness Day 2024, I was part of a group from City who visited Google’s Accessibility Discovery Centre in the heart of London’s Kings Cross. The group was made up of colleagues from across City, all of whom have an interest in digital accessibility. There were staff from the Library, the EDI team, academic staff from the HCID (Human-Computer Interaction Department), Marketing, the ERES from IT and, of course, the Digital Education Team. If nothing else, it was great to see how many people are committed to expanding awareness of digital accessibility across the university.
We were greeted by Hans (to the far right in the group photograph) and taken up to the ADC to meet with Praneeth, our other host for the day. Praneeth explained that Google has three ADCs across the world, and their aim is to collaborate with people outside of Google, especially members of the disability community, to make Google’s services accessible for all.
The ADC sign, behind Praneeth in the group photo, was an interesting lesson in accessibility. It was created as decoration for the room, but was also meant to be accessible via touch to those with vision loss. However, the feedback from users was that the sign was too large for anyone to interact with, so a smaller, more user-friendly version was created and installed next to it. It’s a reminder that while you can have good intentions, you always need to test your proposed solution with the intended users.
Speaking of testing, to further develop their products and services, Google invite testers to come to the ADC where take part in talk-aloud, task-based tests and use tools such as eye tracking software to get feedback. At the moment, they have to carry out this testing at Google’s London HQ, but they intend to create a virtual lab for those who can’t travel.
We then saw their accessible gaming arcade, the result of their work with the Manchester charity Everyone Can. Here games could be controlled through pressure switches, wobble switches or via eye-tracking. Hans impressed us all by only crashing his virtual car a few times when he raced it around the track using only his eyes.
We then looked in more detail at some of the accessibility tools aimed at those with sight or hearing loss.
The huge leaps in creating live captions was of particular interest to me, as I was a subtitler in a previous life, and remember how it used to take 10 hours to create 20 minutes of subtitles. Now, we are used to captions being generated automatically as a conversation takes place or a video plays. We also saw how Google Nests could be programmed to trigger different coloured lights to alert d/Deaf users to specific sounds, such as a red light for the doorbell or a blue light for a baby crying.
For those with sight loss, we saw specialised Braille displays. But Praneeth also demonstrated how improvements to Pixel phones can guide users via vibrations to frame objects in the camera. Not only does this allow people to take their best selfie, it also means they can centre the camera on labels or documents. The phone then recognises the text and can read it out. So it would be possible to scan a tin in your cupboard and work out if it contains tomato soup or pineapple.
Praneeth also showed us accessibility features into Android phones such action blocks which allow you to condense common multi-stage tasks into one action represented by an icon on the phone’s home screen. For example, calling a loved one can be represented by their photo, meaning that those who struggle with complicated processes for whatever reason can now complete them with one tap.
I was saying to a colleague later that while the visit was interesting, I had felt that I’d seen a lot of the technologies or similar versions before. But thinking about this further, I realised that rather than feeling disappointed that my mind wasn’t blown by some new technology, I should see it as a testament to how pervasive many accessibility tools are now. We are no longer astounded by automatically generated subtitles, but only notice where they go wrong. We expect the miniature computers in our pockets to read labels or translate conversations. And a centralised home hub, controlled through our voices, turning our lights on, playing us music or ordering our groceries online is no longer the wild imaginings of sci-fi but the everyday. It reinforces the idea that we should always be aiming towards the point where we just assume that technology will be accessible to everyone, where we’re not having to raise awareness through special weeks and that it stops being extraordinary and is instead the ordinary.
Today, we're diving into an
insightful presentation by Sultan Wadud, the Learning Technology Manager at
SOAS, who shared at the Spring 2024 Moodle User Group Greater London (MUGGL) event hosted at King's College how the team has worked to introduce Digital Accessibility.
In his presentation, Wadud
sheds light on the importance of digital accessibility, emphasising its role in
ensuring that content, websites, and applications are usable by everyone,
including individuals with disabilities. He also touches upon how digital
accessibility contributes to compliance and standards, making online content
more inclusive. One of the highlights of
Wadud's presentation is the introduction of Ally, a powerful tool aimed at
enhancing accessibility in digital course content. He elaborates on how Ally
scans content within the LMS, generates alternative formats, provides insightful
analytics, and offers feedback to improve accessibility - truly a game-changer
in the realm of digital accessibility. However, Wadud doesn't shy
away from discussing the challenges the team encountered along the way,
including delays in contract negotiation, technical hurdles, and limited
academic engagement. Despite these obstacles, he also shares some notable
achievements, such as creating online guidance, conducting workshops,
establishing a working group, and notably improving the institution's overall
accessibility score. Looking ahead, Wadud outlines
the team’s plans, which include renewing the contract for Ally, ramping up
training and awareness initiatives, collaborating with specific departments,
producing more concise educational videos, and striving to reach and exceed the
Ally sector average of a 78% accessibility score. Link to recording: https://soas.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=217a7127-6e73-45cb-88b7-b16b00cbe837
The Bloomsbury Learning Exchange (BLE)joined forces again with the Centre for Online and Distance Education (CODE) and the London International Development Centre (LIDC) to extend
the conversation around the decolonisation of digital education, which started
last year with our first joint webinar. On 17th April, our follow-up webinar, Decolonising Digital Education – Lessons from Distance Learners, focused on distance
and online education, and specifically on the experiences of remote learners.
We were delighted to convene a panel comprising three students who had recently
completed or were currently pursuing online courses offered by the University
of London. What followed was a lively and engaging panel discussion, chaired by
CODE Fellow and vice-principal for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at
the Royal Veterinary College, Dr Christine Thuranira-McKeever, with
thought-provoking questions posed by the audience.
Our student panelists each introduced
themselves and presented the ways in which they have experienced decolonisation
in respect to technologies used to deliver online courses. Conrad Francis is an
Australian Sri-Lankan dual Olympian (Sydney 2000, Athens 2004) who has coached across
the world, working in schools and universities in countries including China,
Indonesia, Japan and South Korea. Conrad completed a PGCE in International
Sports Management at the University of London in 2022 and provided a truly
international perspective. Conrad stated that student empowerment lies at the heart
of decolonising education. He encouraged students to question what they already
know and what they are learning.
Dr Swati Aggarwal holds a doctorate in
AI and has extensive experience in research and teaching in India. Moving to a
teaching position in Norway in 2023, she completed the online Postgraduate
Certificate Learning and Teaching in Higher Education provided by the
University of London. As an educator herself, Swati drew on her experiences of decolonisation
both in delivering and being a recipient of learning. She exposed the need to diversify the voices that shape
education itself to reflect the multi-cultural world.
Finally, Sanjeeva Singh, an Olympian
Archer, shared his experiences of working towards a Post Graduate Certificate
in International Sports Management at the University of London whilst studying
at a distance in India. Shaped by his distance learning
experience, Sanjeeva argued that decolonisation in education comes down to
three key components: inclusivity, diversity and innovativeness. He believes
that learning material should be as diverse as the students accessing them.
The audience posed many interesting
questions regarding access to digital technology, differences in cultures, and how
institutions can ensure inclusivity and promote diversity to prevent prejudice
and bias towards Western approaches to learning and teaching.
Dr Linda
Amrane-Cooper (Director of the University’s Postgraduate Certificate Learning
and Teaching in Higher Education) responded to the need to acknowledge sensitivities
and apply feedback from learners in order to ‘decolonise’ the professional
framework in which educational providers must work. Taking on board these lived
experiences can only improve the quality of the courses that are delivered. As Elizabeth Charles (Assistant
Director of Library Services at Birkbeck) reported, the panelists’ “differentperspectives
were a wonderful cross-section of learning from theory and applying to their
individual loci and how enriched they felt as a result of this. Linda’s
contribution was also very welcome; that level of engagement of acknowledging
where the programme or institution is located and starting from, given the
validation requirements, yet not shying away from the need to turn that
critical lens on the epistemological pillars that support the programme”.
