MOOC to the Rescue

As Covid-19 spreads round the world, and educational institutions shut their doors, academic and teaching staff are feeling the pressure to put their courses online. We all know this is a big ask -- you can’t magic up a brilliant online course overnight. 

However, you can make quick updates that add dynamism and encourage active learning. And you can set the foundation in designing engaging learning for future courses. Sad to say, the lockdown won't be lifted for a while. 

Get Interactive: Practical Teaching with Technology

3-week online course. Free, or small fee for certificate. 

​Each week focuses on a particular topic:

• Using multimedia for teaching and learning
• Encouraging student collaboration
• Formative assessment and feedback

Next start dates: 30 March, 27 April, 25 May, 22 Jun

Register!

BLE Event: BLESS Meeting

3 December 2019

The BLESS group came together this month to look at current best practice with Xerte and H5P for content creation. Demos of the technologies were presented by Peter Leffek of Birkbeck (XERTE) and Ben Audsley of Queen Mary (HP5).

The group exists to bring about greater collaboration between the Libraries of the Bloomsbury Learning Exchange (BLE) and Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) colleagues by sharing, designing and developing future projects where technology is used to support online pedagogical offerings and associated information systems.

For more information, notes and links generated by the meeting, please visit the BLE website Events page.

Digital Skills for Teaching Staff

The world of digital learning technologies changes so fast, it can be hard for educators to keep up. The BLE's Get Interactive MOOC was one approach to helping teachers around the world use practical and popular technologies to enhance their teaching. Now, we're embarking on another approach to supporting teaching staff within their own university settings.

While we were working on our successful Digital Skills Awareness course for incoming HE students, which has received expressions of interest from 150 UK institutions so far, we started to hear about the need for a similar course for incoming teaching staff, who sometimes enter employment without essential digital skills. This led to a bit of market research and the confirmation that there is indeed a need gap.

This new BLE project will be along the same lines: a "template" Moodle course with basic structure and content, which institutions can adopt, adapt and install locally in order to give their new staff a heads-up about what skills they need for their work and - crucially - steer them to where they can acquire and improve these skills.

The course is being developed initially for and with the guidance of the BLE partners, but the expectation is that, upon successful piloting, it will be available more widely around the UK. Watch this space!

The BLE Highlight Report is now available!

One of Sarah's last big jobs before heading off for maternity leave was to work with me (Nancy) on gathering together all the projects, events, changes, news, awards and accomplishments for the period 2015-19 and present them in a form that wouldn't put the reader to sleep. I think we've managed that by creating a document that balances coverage with brevity.

If you'd like to see what the BLE has been doing for the last four years (or to remind yourself what you've done, if you've been involved in any of our projects or events) you can download a copy from the BLE website ble.ac.uk/about (direct link to report).

Au revoir!

After 12 years working full-time for the fantastic Bloomsbury Learning Exchange, I will now be heading off on maternity leave for one year. I wanted to announce the arrangements for my cover during this time.

My official maternity cover is Julian Bream, who has impressive skills in facilitating meetings, coordinating TEL-related events, and engaging and driving the use of digital education to different stakeholders. Julian will work flexibly for two days per week to maintain the BLE Special Interest Groups and relationships with our providers, ensuring seamless service delivery. I have every confidence and faith in Julian and am delighted that he will be joining the BLE Executive.

Nancy Weitz, the BLE’s Digital Learning Consultant, will increase her days working for the BLE. Her key activities will be supporting the Digital Skills Awareness course (DSAC) and the BLE MOOC; she will be driving the development of a teacher version of the DSAC and progressing the partnership between the BLE and FutureLearn.

Julian and Nancy will now be pleased to respond to your queries. In the first instance, you can contact them via the BLE website.

With very best wishes to all BLE supporters,
Sarah