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!

Formally Launched: the BLE E-Book on Assessment, Feedback and Technology

Our new Open Access e-book provides valuable insight into the way technology can enhance assessment and feedback. It was launched formally on 26th October by Birkbeck’s Secretary Keith Harrison, with talks from the editors Leo Havemann (Birkbeck, University of London) and Sarah Sherman (BLE Consortium), three case study authors, and event sponsor Panopto.

Havemann, Leo; Sherman, Sarah (2017): Assessment, Feedback and Technology: Contexts and Case Studies in Bloomsbury. London: Bloomsbury Learning Environment.
View and download from: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5315224.v1

The Book

Book cover page

The book is a result of a two-year project on e-assessment and feedback run by the Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE), a collaboration between six institutions on issues around digital technology in Higher Education. It contains three research papers which capture snapshots of current practice, and 21 case studies from the BLE partner institutions and a little beyond.

The three papers focus on

• the use of technology across the assessment lifecycle,
• the roles played by administrative staff in assessment processes,
• technology-supported assessment in distance learning.

The case studies are categorised under the headings:

• alternative [assessment] tasks and formats,
• students feeding back,
• assessing at scale,
• multimedia approaches, and
• technical developments.

The 21 case studies report on examples of blogging, group assessment, peer, self and audiovisual feedback, on assessment in distance education, MOOCs and other online contexts, and on developments driven forward by Bloomsbury-based colleagues such as the My Feedback Report plugin for Moodle and the Coursework module.

Why you should read the e-book

BLE E-Book Launch Event

As one of the speakers at the entertaining launch event, I suggested three reasons why everybody involved in Higher Education should read this book, in particular the case studies:

1. Processes in context:
   The case studies succinctly describe assessment and feedback processes in context, so you can quickly decide whether these processes are transferable to your own situation, and you will get a basic prompt on how implement the assessment/feedback process.
    
2. Problems are highlighted:
   Some case studies don’t shy away from raising issues and difficulties, so you can judge for yourself whether these difficulties represent risks in your context, and how these risks can be managed.
    
3. Practical tips:
   All case studies follow the same structure. If you are in a hurry, make sure to read at least the Take Away sections of each case study, which are full of tips and tricks, many of which apply to situations beyond the case study.

Overall, this collection of papers and case studies on assessment and feedback is easily digestible and contributes to an exchange of good practice.

View and Download the Book

The e-book is an Open Access publication freely available below.

For further information, see ble.ac.uk/ebook.html
and view author profiles at ble.ac.uk/ebook_contributors.html

A version of this article appeared on the UCL Digital Education blog.

What have YOU been doing this summer?

Me? Well, with Leo Havemann, I have spent a fair bit of time this summer putting together our long-awaited e-book, Assessment, Feedback and Technology: Contexts and Case Studies in Bloomsbury. The book is an amalgamation of the written outputs from the Bloomsbury Enhancing Assessment & Feedback project, which closed last year. The collection of research papers and case studies included offers a snapshot of the progress our Colleges have made in the processes around the Electronic Management of Assessment. This will (we hope) be of interest and real benefit to the education community at large.

The book will be freely available to download in the next few months - more details can be accessed here, including reserving a copy once it's available!

What Future for Education?

The Institute of Education, University of London, has just started their second free MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on Coursera.

The six-week course explores the question "what future for education?" and is a fantastic opportunity for everybody involved (or not) in education, however margnially, whether student, teacher, learning support or without any official role at all, to take a step back and think about learning, how education is organised, and whether this all makes sense.

Led by Dr Clare Brooks from the Institute of Education with plenty of input from our fully online MA in Education programme, this is unsurprisingly not a lean-back-and-watch online resource, although it can be used as such, but a course that requires participants to engage and be active via forum contributions, shared activities, reflective journals, and online meet-ups - a set of social activities allowing us to learn from each other, with participants from all over the world.

The course has started on 29th September 2014, but it is not too late to join, so stop what you are doing now and sign up at:
www.coursera.org/course/futureeducation

Padlet - Technology in the Classroom

Padlet

http://padlet.com

Padlet is a simple but effective collaborative 'sticky note' web-based application. It's central premise is a 'wall' onto which you can drag and drop almost anything, from pictures, files, links to videos, etc as well as add 'sticky notes', so you end up with a wall of items. An analogue analogy would be a classroom blackboard or a memo board with sticky-notes and/or pictures arranged, as you want, over it.
Padlet also has several very useful levels of privacy.

• Private - available to you only.
• Password Protected - only available to those with a password you select.
• Hidden Link - accessible to those with a link to that board.
• Totally Public - accessible to anybody and searchable by Google.

Padlet can be used both synchronously so that everybody is using it at the same time, or asychronously and there's an option to be emailed when somebody posts something to a wall.
Padlet has two lay outs. Freeform which allows to you place items where you want over the expanse of the wall and Stream where posts are placed one below the other.
The whole application is online, so it's cross-browser compatible, but anybody who you want to view or use it will need to have an internet connection.
The set up is easy, create a free account and then start creating boards.  You can change the background of the boards and even add your own. There's even a nice weekly calendar background that some might find useful.
From a pedagogical/teaching point of view, Padlet provides a nice simple to use way for a class to become involved as additions to the wall can be viewed in real-time and do not require a browser window to be refreshed. So everybody can see what everybody else is adding. Ways this could be used include:

• Allowing class to brainstorm ideas.
• Putting up a list of expectations at the start of a class. Review these just before the session and come back to the wall at the end of the class to discover which expectations have been met.
• Putting up a list of questions at the start of a session. Review these just before the session and come back to the wall at the end of the session to discover which questions have been met.
• Pin up in advance some pictures at the top of the board, then ask the class a question relating to the pictures and ask them to put their answers as sticky-notes below the relevant image.
• Pin up possible answers to a question and ask the class to vote by placing a sticky-note with ther name under the answer they think is correct.

Other features of Padlet that can be taken advantage of are the ability to share on social media and/or export the wall as an image, PDF, Excel or CSV file, including the ability to embed into external blogs, etc.

Technology in the classroom, is a series of posts looking at various technologies
that can be used in the real and/or virtual classroom.

Event overview - Online learning: Developing trends

This lunchtime seminar, presented by Myles Runham, Head of Online at the BBC Academy, demonstrated how and why the BBC utilises social media in its delivery of online education and learning content, in addition to the benefits of doing so.

Some key points I took away from the seminar are as follows.

We continue to be preoccupied with learning taking place in a certain time and place.
Citing Clay Shirky's assertion that "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution", Myles drew attention to education providers' continued delivery of linear courses and 'traditional' learning experiences, such as lectures.

There are other approaches we might employ whilst maintaining our offering as relevant and useful.
People now learn through a variety of different means, including social media and video platforms such as YouTube. It's possible to scaffold learning within these platforms using exactly the same content, people, and approaches as a more traditional approach, but it still isn't accepted as a viable or valid. Social media tools set new expectations for learners, being user-focused, relevant, discoverable, reusable, searchable, social, timely, and most of all: simple. This is why people use them.

Sean MacEntee, via Flickr under Creative Commons Licence.

Web learning tools aren't special.
Myles used the annual C4LPT survey of learning tools to demonstrate that the top ten are just normal tools for productivity. They're non-specialist, i.e. not necessarily built with education in mind, they put user needs first, and can be used in a whole range of different ways.

Digital experiences are a complement to traditional learning methods.
People become anxious when it's suggested that digital activities might replace the course-based experience. They likely won't, but should instead be incorporated into the curriculum to add value and supplement existing practices. Social learning experiences are exceptionally powerful in the real world, so why not also engage in them online with a vast array of learners and experts?

Education providers must play a part in validating content delivered through digital channels.
One criticism of informal online learning is that knowledge can be unverified; it lacks a theoretical or a research-led underpinning. Universities can ensure that quality standards are maintained by being involved in this process: designing, developing, and curating media content that is both relevant and reliable within the context of academic study.

Links:
Myles Runham Twitter
BBC Academy
C4LPT Top 100 Tools for Learning 2013

The Social Scholar is a series of seminars which focus on the use of social media in education. Events are hosted by the School of Advanced Study and are free and open to all. More information about forthcoming seminars can be found in the events calendar.

Originally posted on the LSHTM e-Learning blog. Reproduced by the author, Jo Stroud.

Quality, participation, and the 'openness' of MOOCs

An overview of some recent writing regarding the design and delivery of MOOCs, enrolment on them, and their position within the open education movement.

'MOOCs', or Massive Online Open Courses, have been the educational trend of the past two years. Although media reporting has now died down to some degree, this does mean that we're starting to see some more thoughtful and evidence-based writing on their successes and failures. The following articles pose some interesting questions with regards to how we might develop our approach to and delivery of such courses.

The Quality of Massive Open Online Courses by Stephen Downes
In this excerpt from a longer piece produced for the EFQUEL MOOC Quality Project, Stephen Downes looks at how we might assess the overall quality of a MOOC, given that the term itself and purpose of such courses is still not entirely clear. If we decide to deliver a MOOC the reason for doing so must, however, be clear, and the question of quality and success is heavily linked to use of this model over other, more traditional methods of teaching.

MOOCs: Young students from developing countries are still in the minority by Adam Palin, ft.com
One rationale behind the development of MOOCs is to democratise and extend access to learning materials from elite, global institutions to students across the world. Research to date has indicated that enrolments don't necessarily reflect this, with many participants already holding university degrees or significant work experience in developed countries. This article reports on enrolment trends from developing nations, in addition to potential evidence for these shifts.

MOOCs must move beyond open enrolment and demonstrate a true commitment to reuse and long-term redistribution by Leo Havemann and Javiera Atenas
This post, published in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog, looks at the duality of MOOCs' position as open enrolment programmes whilst at the same time not necessarily facilitating open practices through provision of Open Educational Resources (OER) to be shared and reused elsewhere. The authors raise wholly relevant questions regarding how we might make content used within these courses more available, and whether rules imposed by MOOC platform providers such as Coursera and FutureLearn prevent us from doing so.

Originally posted on the LSHTM e-Learning blog. Reproduced by the author, Jo Stroud.