BLE at ALT-C 2016 - follow-up

The themes at last week's ALT-C were Connect, Collaborate, Create. Over 460 delegates attended the three days of rich, illuminating and inspiring presentations about how technology is ever-evolving to support learning and teaching across the education sectors.

The three papers that the BLE was involved in were well-received, contributing to the collaborative and sharing ethos of the conference, and fitting in tightly with the conference themes.

On Day 1, A collaborative approach to improving online assessment and feedback opportunities, presented by Leo Havemann and co-written with Sarah Sherman, described the BLE's eAssessment and Feedback project. You can see the slides here: 

On Day 2, Manoj Singh from QMUL led the workshop, Risky business: A workshop to examine what happens when learning technologies vanish and how we can work together to mitigate disasters. The workshop was co-authored with Sarah Sherman and supported on the day by Sultan Wadud from SOAS. Attendees were first shown the following presentation:

Following that, they were asked to work in groups to consider the impact if specific learning technologies were suddenly pulled. They completed a shared spreadsheet to capture the risk analysis of such occurrences. You can access the spreadsheet here

Manoj Singh, QMUL

 

Finally, on Day 3, Manoj, with Sultan, gave the paper Pulling the plug(in): Dealing with a technical crisis by sharing knowledge, resources and experience: a companion presentation about the experiences of QMUL and the BLE members when the MediaCore service was given a year to be decommissioned. Manoj described how this required an intensive needs analysis exercise to be conducted to identify feasible replacements, then a migration project. This unexpected yet massive piece of work had to be undertaken at the detriment of other projects at all the affected institutions.


Presentation slides:


And the video of the presentation:

Leo and Wadud holding up their certificates to the camera

At the annual ALT awards ceremony, which celebrated 10 years at the conference, the BLE TEL Support Team's 2010 accolade of a highly commended Learning Technology Team was remembered as representatives were given a special certificate.






Photos via Flickr:
Chris Bull CC-BY-NC ALT

The BLE at ALT-C 2016

The Association for Learning Technology (ALT)'s annual conference, ALT-C, kicks-off on Tuesday 6th September at the University of Warwick. This is the biggest and most important conference of the year for staff working across the education sector with an interest in technology enhanced learning. This year, the theme of the conference is Connect, Collaborate, Create - topics very close to the heart of the BLE - and I am very proud that we will be presenting three papers.

The first is all about our BEAF project - a collaborative approach to improving online assessment and feedback opportunities. In the paper, we will describe what prompted the focus for our work, what we achieved and what it all means to the consortium members. You can read the abstract here and view the presentation here.

The second paper is a workshop, co-presented with colleagues from Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) and is based on our shared experiences of losing MediaCore: Risky business: A workshop to examine what happens when learning technologies vanish and how we can work together to mitigate disasters. The workshop is a hands-on session where delegates will have the opportunity to share and discuss similar stories of losing relied-upon tech due to providers being taken over or deciding to ditch the technology they supported. Moreover, delegates will be able to consider risk management plans. Read the workshop outline here and view the presentation here.

Finally, to complement the workshop, a standard paper co-presented again with QMUL will describe in more detail what happened to us when we were given just short of a year to decommission, replace and migrate to a new media repository - Pulling the plug(in): dealing with a technical crisis by sharing knowledge, resources and experience. You can see the abstract here and view the presentation here. This presentation was also filmed; the video can be viewed here:

Much of ALT-C will be live-streamed, so if you're not attending in person, you can tune in remotely. More information is available on the excellent conference website, https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2016/