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Tag: Engagement

UoS Learning and Teaching Conference 2022

Published 7th December 2022

Photo of Andy Aldrin with a map showing space fairing nations - it's a lot!
Slide showing every nation with a space programme of some kind – it’s a lot!

“Why I got out of bed for class today?” Because if I hadn’t, my boss and my boss’s boss would have taken turns to kill me if I had missed our first annual learning and teaching conference.

Back in those heady days of 2019, when we were all young, innocent and care-free, a couple of good friends of mine bought me a ticket to see Nightwish at the Wembley Arena in December 2020 as a Christmas present. Well, there was some sort of global event or emergency or something which means it didn’t happen. It was rescheduled for the following year, and that didn’t happen either. We never did find out why it was cancelled with less than a week’s notice the second time, but our suspicion is that someone in the band got Covid. So it was rescheduled again, for November 2022, and this time it went ahead, and it was wonderful!

Such was this case with our conference too – planned since 2019, and finally taking place two years later. It was every bit as good as Nightwish I swear. We had some 220 people sign-up from all across the University, and my team were out in force, running sessions on CleverTouch boards and working as marshals, making sure everything went without a hitch, and I did my Studiosity impact presentation in one of the breakout sessions.

The conference began with a student panel discussion, talking about their experience of online study over the pandemic, and later as hybrid learners. The OfS could learn a thing of two from them – students want both. The benefits and social connections of in-person teaching, and the convenience of being able to catch-up with recorded and online sessions in their own time. One astute comment was that “engagement is not the same thing as attendance”, and disengaged students can be every bit as much of a problem in-person as online. Their thoughts on solutions were to mix up teaching methods, and to have interactive and group activities that make students want to be there.

Sessions I attended were from Dr Nicola Roberts on ‘Failing to Progress on a Programme of Study: A Statistical Analysis of Factors Related to Criminology Students’, Dr Helen Williams on ‘The awkwardness of transitioning to Higher Education and the implications for student retention’, and Dr Elizabeth Hidson on ‘SunRAE – the Sunderland Reflective Action in Education Conference, Podcast and e-journal contribution to enhancing international initial teacher training student engagement’.

The day wrapped with a keynote by – somewhat unbelievably – Dr Andrew Aldrin, son of Buzz. I was one, single degree of separation from a man who walked on the moon. Andy, as he insisted on being introduced, is the President of the Aldrin Family Foundation which has a mission to educate people, mainly K12 school aged kids in the US, about space, the moon, Mars, and to inspire people into pursuing space-related careers. As the man said, “Kids love space, and dinosaurs, but they get over dinosaurs.” (It was a good job we didn’t have any palaeontologists in the room.)

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Jisc Digital Culture Forum

Published 16th March 2022

Headpats
Good Sonya ^_^

I wrote a thing, and someone else published it. Get me.

This specific thing was in response to a Jisc call for contributions to a collection of case studies on how teaching and working online has changed as a result of the pandemic, and I wrote up our experience at Sunderland of the rapid adoption of reVIEW (Panopto) and Microsoft Teams.

The full collection is available now at Jisc Digital Culture, and my contribution (including squished profile pic, grr): How a Pandemic Enabled a Culture Shift Towards Lecture Capture.

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LTA Workshop: Running up That Hill

Published 5th June 2019


Listening to this while reading this post will have no therapeutic value

This was the second Learning and Teaching Academy workshop I attended this semester, to give it it’s subtitle: Engaging Students to Learning Through Teaching and Assessment. (The big boss, who put the programme together, has a penchant for naming events with a musical theme.)

The workshop was given by Prof. Terry Young, Emeritus Professor of Healthcare Systems at Brunel University, who talked about his experience in academia over the past 15 or so years, having come from industry where he spent a similar length of time, giving him an interesting take on the academic world and conventional practice. On assessment, he asked us to consider what are the actual tangible benefits of, for example, spending time on decided on whether or not a given piece of work is worth 82% or 85%, and could this be time better spent elsewhere? Terry argues that there is little value in time spent this way, instead advocating for threshold based marking, first deciding whether a piece of work is a pass or a fail, and then asking either if it’s a fail, is it a good fail and can the student therefore be guided to a pass in future assignments, or if it’s a pass, is it just a pass or a good pass?

Terry also reflected on the nature of work academics are going to need to do over the next 20-30 years in the face of changes driven by automation and artificial intelligence. He concluded that there are three key tasks which will continue to be necessary: writing and specifying the requirements for programmes and assessments, curating and filtering content, and working closely with students to ensure their development and wellbeing.

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WaLTS on Twitter

Published 28th August 2014

One pithy definition of madness is that it is the act of repeating the same action over and over and expecting different results. So it was that back in April I was asked to create a Twitter account for the team which, having done so, was promptly ignored and left to languish. To this day all six glorious tweets from that account were made by your humble author. Today, or rather spread over the past couple of days as a ‘bitty’ job, I have resurrected the old ‘LDS’* Twitter account and renamed, revamped and brought it back into use.

So, am I mad? My intention behind this is to have a more informal avenue of communication between the team and our customers, but to be a success it will require active engagement and relevant content. UoS_WaLTS has one thing going for it that NorthumbriaTEL didn’t: me, enthusiastic and not going anywhere anytime soon this time.

Another little job I’ve been doing for similar reasons of engagement is improving the announcements page on SunSpace, which was just dull black on white text, trying to make it look nice and keeping the content current so that it isn’t reduced to just annoying wallpaper which people scroll over to get to their courses, to which end I have also embedded a widget for our Twitter feed into the announcements for all users section.

* Learning Development Services, the old name for my team before merging with Web Services.

https://twitter.com/UoS_WaLTS

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