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Month: March 2020

It’s the End of the World as We Know It

Published 17th March 2020

The World is Temporarily Closed - sign on a cinema called the World
Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

I came home today with an iMac and half of my office in the back of a car. Officially the University is talking about being shut down till after Easter, but I can’t see us being back for a couple of months. COVID-19 has hit home, and not just at work, I now have a friend who’s brother has it and is in a bad way. We live in scary times.

But, this is a work blog, so, work… I’m fortunate to have as secure a job as one can find these days, and educational institutions are arguably one of the best placed sectors of society able to work from a distance. We’ve been preparing for this possibility for the past couple of weeks, running daily workshops on the available tools to teach via online and distance learning, that means mostly Panopto and BigBlueButton in our case. I feel like my job has changed quite considerably. There’s a lot of new work we’re having to do very suddenly to get our systems and staff ready, and a lot of the things I had scheduled have had to be cancelled or indefinitely delayed. I’m also having to prepare for the possibility of finishing out the current round of teaching on the PG Cert online.

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LTA Workshop: Gamification

Published 11th March 2020

Photo of a slide with game design tipsPhoto: 10 things game designers know (and educators should!)

Attended the much delayed LTA workshop on Gamification today, from Kathy Wright of Advance HE. It was a very useful day which combined the pedagogy and theory behind gamification and game-based learning with practical activities that we could adapt to our own teaching. The thought that has stayed with me was the point that education is already a game, just usually a bad one, as students have limited agency, it’s poorly balanced, and often not fun. I discovered a nice new tool, Twine, for non-linear storytelling, and there are a couple of piece of research I’m going to be following up, Reid’s ‘Psychology of the Near Miss’ being one.

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Speedwell OSCE Training

Published 3rd March 2020

Some further on-site training from Speedwell today, this time on how the tool can be used to deliver OSCE and MMI testing – that’s observations of clinical practice and multiple-mini interviews which we use to interview potential medical students. Training covered both configuration and live marking, including how to manage breaks and how to have a spare iPad for a non-configured marker to be able to step in.

We also learned about some new features coming to Speedwell which sound pretty good – the ability for multiple markers to moderate and agree a final mark to record in the system, and ‘killer questions’ which means that students have to pass the specified question as well as the exam / interview as a whole.

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