Sarah Horrigan

How do you know if the threshold standard for use of your institutional VLE is working? This presentation showcases an approach to find that out at the University of Derby; discussing the scalable methodology which was used during the academic year 2012/13 and sharing its positive outcomes for practice.

Showcasing Google award-winning AllAboutLinguistics.com - created as an assessment by our first-year undergraduate students - this session will demonstrate how technology can facilitate real-world projects that engage students by providing an authentic learning experiences. The technology facilitates engagement with groupwork, providing tools and support to minimise the problems of working face-to-face that often lead to negative evaluation of collaborative projects.

Building AllAboutLinguistics.com engaged current and prospective students, with first-years supporting A-Level students’ transition into HE by highlighting the diverse range of opportunities offered by degree-level linguistics. Students were challenged by real stakeholders, real deadlines and real-world project management, gaining confidence in their academic knowledge by showcasing it internally and externally. We show how authentic learning experiences lead to an enjoyment of process with an underlying focus on quality output, whilst removing the grade fixation that often accompanies summative assessment. Additionally, students’ engagement with formative feedback was enhanced, because tutors had continuous sight of their online work in development, allowing timely, specific feedback to be provided on an ongoing basis.

Since the technology supported students’ groupwork, increasing their perceived control and competence for the task and so giving rise to high levels of intrinsic motivation (Fazey & Fazey et al, 2001), students themselves noted they put in more work but got out far more than from traditional assessments. Further, we show how authentic assessment enhanced employability; with students recognising and articulating that they gained tangible, transferable skills through the learning process. Additionally, it fed into colleagues’ digital practice, by reducing the need for scaffolding those students’ skills and modelling practices -
an effective means of developing digital practitioners (Bennett, 2012).

This is an interactive, hands-on session which does not assume any prior experience of using Google Sites. It shares the experiences of the lead academic and students’ voices, taking participants through a structured approach to implementing online collaborative activities into practice.

How do you know if the minimum standard for use of your institutional VLE is working? How do you create a digitally literate university - both staff and students? Could the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program rubric help? This presentation showcases an approach to find that out at the University of Derby and the subsequent work to connect the findings to notions of digital literacy, based on the JISC Digital Literacy Framework (2012). It discusses the scalable methodology used during the academic year 2012/13 and shares its potential for
institution-wide change.

Just over two years ago, the University of Derby brought in its Threshold Standards as a standard for every module present within Blackboard. They covered two main areas - content
and communication - with those main strands broken down to include everything from uploading learning outcomes and module specifications to sharing photographs, announcements and reading materials with students. The aim was that this standard would continue to be developed as practice became embedded at the institution.

Fast forward two years and the question arises of how you improve if you don't know where you are at the moment? So, during June to September 2013 auditing of active modules in Blackboard took place as part of an approach to a) benchmark the quality of the use of technology across the institution and b) as a means where the university’s Threshold Standards could be reviewed. 10% of all active modules which had run the previous year were audited using a rubric based on the Threshold Standards, but with descriptors built on this and two other standards - the “Blackboard Exemplary Course Program Rubric” and the “Benchmark for the use of technology in modules” from Edinburgh Napier University. We weren’t just interested in numbers, we were interested to understand quality as well. The results were surprising and thought-provoking, bringing several key issues around staff development, digital literacy and learning design to the fore.

Using our experiences of applying a rubric institution-wide, this presentation will outline both the methodology and process as well as share our planned next steps and lessons learned from using this approach, all with the aim of creating a digitally literate university. From the robustness of the platform, to the staff skills and practices existing above it. From content to communication and identity. If we want to build towards more than the minimum, we have to make sure we have solid foundations

Collaborative approaches to staff development sound great in principle, but practice can be very different.  This presentation reflects on the experience of the cross-institutional collaborative development of TELUS (Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Sheffield).  It shares lessons learned and discusses approaches which will be of concern to conference participants in a tough Higher Education climate.  At the University of Sheffield, the challenge was to find a way to develop skills of academic staff, not demand too much of their time and introduce new technologies, applications and models, allowing them to ‘play’ in a safe environment.  Quality staff development so often happens in a piecemeal fashion across large institutions, with pockets of deep expertise hidden and pressure on central units to provide staff development across huge areas of learning technology.  Additionally, central training and support can seem remote from the day-to-day practices of departmentally-based academic staff.

This paper argues that it is of equal importance to engage with expertise in centralised support structures and academic staff; contextualising the learning to make it meaningful, manageable and enabling it to have direct impact upon the challenges faced by staff. The intention was to show possibilities and to allow time to discover how/what they might implement into their practice whilst aggregating the knowledge and skills already available in the institution, and to fuse them into a coherent programme.

Building around a core set of competencies for TEL practitioners, TELUS was developed holistically, based on a combination of pedagogic need and an exploration of different technologies.  The programme was broken down into two halves:  TELUS 1 focused on blended learning approaches, delivered in this manner, and was organised thematically rather than tool-based.  It actively encouraged the creation of a community of practitioners whilst delivering the modules in a flexible manner to accommodate time-constraints.  TELUS 2 moved towards fully online delivery, giving staff a deeper understanding of the concepts in TELUS 1 whilst giving them the opportunity to experience online studentship and make links with their own practice as teachers.  Using an experiential learning approach, the delivery of both courses was intended to model practice (Bath and Bourke, 2011) in a supported environment.  It was also designed to run alongside the development of new online programmes it meant that staff were given skills - both in learning design and practical techniques for supporting students - on a timely basis.  Training needs analyses were used to further build flexibility into the programme’s delivery, encouraging participants to own their learning experience.

Collaborative in its development and collaborative in its delivery, one of the most successful aspects of this course was the bringing together of skilled professionals from the institution, where no provision previously existed.  Feedback indicated high levels of engagement and demand from staff, and highlighted the need to engage at every organisational level in order to deliver successful and meaningful development.

“TELUS about it” shares the techniques and experiences of the team responsible for its development and delivery.

In the Learning Technologies Team,  at the University of Sheffield, we’ve been taking an integrated approach to using Google to support and disseminate our work.  Though we’ve been using everything from Google Calendars to Docs, Forms, Presentations, Analytics, Readers, Sites and more - this presentation will focus on our use of Google tools to share practice both internally and externally.  Our Learning Technologies blog (http://learningtechnologiesteam.blogspot.com) and Google+ page have played a key role in this and have helped us to explore how best to use them as a means for communication and community engagement.

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In less than 2 months, the blog has gained an audience of over 100 educational institutions worldwide; one simple blog has allowed us to open up our practices as well as make connections across the university and reach a far wider audience.  The presentation also looks at some of the issues encountered, the rationale for the choices made - why we chose to go with a team approach, how we manage multiple authors, what gadgets to use in the sidebar, how we use pages for additional content - as well as offer some advice on how to build a blog from scratch and sustain it using Google Blogger.  It also looks at the developing role of our Google+ page and shows how they can work together to help further create online community.