ble-learning

Lecture Capture: More Info Needed?

2011-04-28T15:39:00.003+01:00

Lecture capture is quite a hot topic in HE these days and we recently had a showcase event in Bloomsbury to look at how some of the BLE member colleges are making use of it as well as hear from other universities.

In Bloomsbury the technology which has been adopted for this (especially at the RVC and LSHTM) is Echo360 (formerly known as Apreso). Echo can record a video stream of the lecturer, another video stream of whatever is shown on the big screen (this is usually used to record the steady advance of PowerPoint slides on the teaching PC, but can also capture a feed from a visualiser or DVD player), plus the audio of the lecturer (provided they speak into the mic).

The event included an especially useful presentation from Graham McElearney of Sheffield University, who discussed the intimidating copyright and IPR issues and implications of lecture capture but also offered frameworks from which to develop sound institutional policies. For more info from the event click here (BLE login required).

Another event was recently held by JISC Legal and recordings can be accessed here: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/RecordingLectures.

Upcoming events

Echo360 are holding a conference at the LSE on the 25th of May - for more information see http://echo360.com/community/community-conference-europe/.

A platform-agnostic ALT event entitled "Lecture Capture - doing it well and at scale" is coming up at QMUL on 16 June, and will be covering:

Case studies of successful implementation including from the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy
Lecture recording in the sciences
AV issues when working at scale and solutions
Encouraging adoption
Pedagogic and learning design issues
Supporting teachers and students in their use of lecture capture
Institutional policies and obstacles
Lecture capture myths and misconceptions and how to tackle these
IPR/Copyright issues

Click here to sign up for further information about the event.

Turnitin Wednesdays

2011-03-08T17:00:00.002Z

You have probably heard of 'Orange Wednesdays'. Now, I'll admit that a lot of people might be more easily enticed to a free trip to the cinema than a free webinar, but iParadigms UK, apparently undaunted, have taken a leaf out of Orange's book and have introduced a series of webinars on Wednesdays. (Before Orange take legal advice, I should point out that they haven't actually called them 'Turnitin Wednesdays'!)

Every Wednesday at 2 pm (UK time) they are running Introduction to Turnitin webinars - sign-up is via this link.

Then following these at 3 pm, there is a series of webinars looking at various aspects of plagiarism prevention, with a pedagogical rather than technical emphasis. Upcoming sessions include:

(Please note these sessions are for teaching and support staff only.)

To give an idea of what these sessions involve, here are my recollections following a previous 'institutional policies and procedures' session a few weeks ago.

One of the interesting aspects was the diversity of current practice amongst institutions represented. The widespread and growing adoption of Turnitin as the coursework submission tool used within VLEs seems to be a big driver for HEIs to reconsider their approaches. It seems clear that simply 'switching on Turnitin to catch the offenders' isn't best practice - consideration of how to make use of Turnitin with students in a formative way is urgently needed.

Elluminate in Bloomsbury - not just for ash clouds and snow days

2011-02-16T16:49:00.001Z

In a previous post ('Don't let an ash cloud ruin your meeting') I suggested that virtual classrooms could be the way to go when faced with a natural disaster (or natural irritant) that prevents a class from meeting face to face as planned. And I have noticed during this winter's snowier periods that more staff members have taken this option up.

But of course, online meetings don't only have to be seen as a replacement for a face to face meeting that has been cancelled. At the recent Bloomsbury Elluminate Showcase, speakers from around Bloomsbury talked about how they are making use of Elluminate with different groups of learners.

You can watch the recorded event via the magic of Elluminate (BLE members can also join a group in the BLE and/or sign up for some training on 14 March or 9 May).

It's also worth checking out these free ebooks from the Onlignment Blog, especially Live Online Learning – A facilitator’s guide.

Beyond Teaching at the London Blackboard User Group, December 2010

2010-12-15T17:28:00.001Z

The London Blackboard User Group met in the pleasant surroundings of Regent’s College last week. The presentations were on the theme of “Beyond Learning and Teaching”.

The presenters and case studies were:

Supporting Accessibility (Jennifer Fraser & Michael Wheare, Birkbeck) - the presenters discussed the process of making digitised readings accessible to the visually impaired.

Prompting Health & Safety Awareness (John Conway & Stefan Hoyle, Imperial College) - for this online training course, extensive use has been made of the selective/adaptive release functionality to ensure students complete the test and can’t make more than two attempts.

Information Literacy (Sarah Spells & Jo Tate, SOAS) - all students in the School now have access to an organisation in the BLE which provides subject-specific information literacy/research support and advice.

It might be more accurate to say the theme of the meeting was “Beyond Teaching” because there was definitely a still a student learning focus in the activities discussed. Seeing as Blackboard is a ‘virtual learning environment’ that does seem to make perfect sense, but participants questioned whether the VLE is always an appropriate space for the activities it is used for. During the questions and the closing discussion some people felt that institutional websites and intranets should host materials which are not actually part of a student’s course, or at least that the pros and cons of using the VLE should be looked at closely.

Perhaps in the early days of VLEs, learning technologists were pleased to see the system being used widely, but now, with some reporting the VLE has become a portal to access all kinds of material and services, there is also an issue of the demand on system and human resources, and the impact this demand may have on the elearning service these resources are supposed to be supporting.

On the other hand, the VLE offers benefits. It may be desirable that students should be authenticated and personally granted access to materials via membership of specific areas; they may also need to complete assessments. VLEs are also easy for staff to add simple content to without needing specialised web authoring skills or assistance, or to create more sophisticated content for using ‘rapid’ authoring tools.

The fact that we were debating whether people are now using the VLE ‘too much’ certainly indicates that the often reported ‘death of the VLE’ may be a way off yet.

Review of Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference 2010

2010-05-12T11:00:00.002+01:00

Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference 2010, Swansea, reviewed by Leo Havemann and Mimi Weiss Johnson, in the ALT newsletter, Issue 19 (12 May, 2010).

Don't let an ash cloud ruin your meeting (or tutorial)

2010-05-10T09:30:00.001+01:00

In the wake of the recent/recurring volcanic ash travel crisis and ensuing estimates of enormous costs to the UK economy, Lucy Kellaway (writing for the FT) seems like a lone voice in the wilderness when she says the ash cloud helped productivity:

For offices all over the western world, last week was one of the sanest and most productive for a very long time. On Monday, people got to work to find half the appointments logged into their BlackBerrys suddenly cancelled. [...] A cancelled meeting is a net productivity gain: it tends to go away altogether.

Meeting minimisation seems to be one of the great 21st century aspirations, but when so much of work is collaborative, we also can't afford to miss crucial information and discussions, or we are liable to be allocated tasks we don't fully understand.

Another ash-related article that caught my eye claimed that serviced office firm Regus experienced a 108% increase in demand for videoconferencing during the UK flight ban, suggesting that many people decided to meet virtually rather than not at all.

The Onlignment blog is featuring this issue in a series of posts entitled 'We can't go on meeting like this'. In the introductory post they state:

...let us bring together four ideas:
1) Companies are not going to stop holding meetings
2) The risk of disruption to travel is ever-present
3) Every business has to have a contingency plan to allow meetings to happen when it is not possible to bring people together
4) If companies are to use online conferencing, then they need to plan it, and do it properly

Having recently attended a couple of sessions about Elluminate (which is integrated with the BLE via a building block - more information here) at the Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference, the idea that we should be doing more meetings (and more teaching?) online was already kicking around in my head; another presentation at the conference discussed the massive surge in Blackboard use that occurred during January's snow disruption.

Certainly putting more notes up on Blackboard is helpful, and good use can also be made of asynchronous tools such as discussion forums and blogs, but these approaches may not adequately replace planned face to face interaction. Although it may be possible for a cancelled lecture or tutorial to simply be rescheduled, perhaps a better option would be to do it virtually.

Free online Turnitin training

2010-04-28T12:24:00.003+01:00

nlearning, the Northumbria University spin-out company who support Turnitin in the UK, are now offering weekly training webinars for TurnitinUK users (for instructors, rather than admins).

They sent an email advising:

Sessions are every Wednesday at 1400 (GMT) via WebEx and dial in details will be sent to you after you sign up. There is no limit to the number of sessions you attend or the number of people who can attend. Please feel free to forward this mail on to any colleagues who you feel may be interested in this training.

Please sign up using this form: http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?formkey=dDdDTkstUDBrZUswYU5kUzV0cE95MGc6MA

I attended the first session in order to get an idea of how useful it might be for our user base in Bloomsbury (bearing in mind we are using Turnitin via the Blackboard integration).

Although they were using webex, it was possible to get audible/understandable sound via the headset and not be dialled in on the phone, so that was definitely a point in its favour.

It would be quite a useful session for someone using the standalone (submit.ac.uk) version of Turnitin rather than through the Blackboard integration as we use it. The part that could cause some confusion for our instructors was the explanation of creating a class, getting students to sign up or uploading your student list, all of which in our case is handled by the building block.

Then there was quite a good discussion of the originality reporting aspect.

There was plenty of time for Q & A built in at the end.

Overall as I suspected, I think we would be better off getting people to attend an integration-specific session, but I don't know yet if nlearning are definitely going to provide this, and how regularly.

This Educational Resource Could Not Be Opened

2010-03-29T14:19:00.002+01:00

Notes from the Turnitin User Group (Birkbeck, 3rd February 2010)

2010-02-19T17:50:00.006Z

Welcome & Introduction

New appointments at iParadigms:

CEO - Chris Caren
VP Engineering - John Hartman

JH has implemented recent server-side changes which have significantly improved the speed of the Turnitin site/service.

One outstanding issue since the last UG - problems with generating Grademark images, is ongoing. 4 other issues have been fixed.

User voice - log in to the institutional administrator account and at top right of screen click on Feedback Forum. You are allocated 10 votes. Most-voted requests will go into the development/release schedule. (In Bloomsbury we only have one admin account - can we have more, in order to vote more?)

nlearning are now on Twitter but they have protected their updates - you can request to follow them at http://twitter.com/nlearninggold.

They have produced some free anti-plagiarism and referencing guides for Ofqual, designed for sixth formers (but may well be relevant to first years).

New Peermark functionality added (seems like Grademark for peer review).

The developers are moving toward a unified interface where you can see the assignment with the originality reports, Grademark etc as an overlay and more rapidly switch between them.

Also the integration for Blackboard will become a 'deep integration', meaning we will gain the same functionality with our integrated assignments that standalone Turnitin website users have with theirs. (Possibly this has been done for the Moodle integration already?)

View requests straw poll - when a request is sent to view a paper in the database due to a match being flagged up in an originality report, the email currently goes to the instructor. The group generally felt this should go to the institutional system administrator, or else to both.

Grademark

Speaker: Stephen Bostock (Keele Uni)
Discussed Grademark in terms of student benefits and staff barriers to its use.

General discussion:

Most institutions had seen some use of Grademark, and people who have used it are generally positve about it - but many academics remain unwilling to mark online.
The much-voted for ability to bulk-download Grademarked papers is now scheduled for April release.
Importing rubrics can be done at an individual account, or else system-wide level - the group requested this feature could be rolled out at a 'department' level.

Formative Use of Turnitin

Many institutions are seeing benefits from incorporating formative use of Turnitin into student training on academic honesty / information skills / anti-plagiarism and referencing. In some cases training is delivered by academics, sometimes by the library, and sometimes with input from various sources. The group generally felt there was value in formative use as the students would be able to learn about plagiarism without fear of getting in trouble.

Institutional policies governing use of Turnitin were discussed. Policies included:
1) for each assingment, either all submissions or none must be checked.
2) each student must have one formative experience of Turnitin before submitting real coursework.

Formative use cases discussed:
1) Students submit a report to Turnitin (not assessed), then based on the results write a piece of reflective writing which is assessed.
2) Students submit a draft of a piece of coursework, and later the finished version. (In the case of the draft, the submissions should not be added to the student assignment database, in order to avoid causing a high level of matching when they submit the finished piece.)

It was suggested that formative use works best when tied in with assessment and not done as an isolated exercise.

University of Leicester subject-specific plagiarism tutorials were recommended.

Durham reflections (post-Blackboard conference)

2010-02-15T13:57:00.005Z

I attended the Durham Blackboard Users Conference back in early January, along with some other members of the BLE technical group, and having also attended last year, I once again found it well organised and well attended, so it was a great opportunity to hear and meet speakers from all over the UK and beyond. Highlights for me included hearing about how e-learning is being embedded into key skills training for bioscience students at Leciester (see Jo Badge's blog for more info), thus-far somewhat disappointing results from a promising Twitter project at Kingston (see Tony McNeill's blog) and a presentation from US academics about Blackboard's Exemplary Course Program, explaining why they believe student engagement is at the heart of exemplary courses.

Overall, I thought it was interesting (ironic perhaps at a Blackboard conference - though to be fair there was a social media theme) that the most interesting work being done by presenters is generally happening outside the VLE itself. It must be said though that most continue to regard their VLE as an important tool in the e-learning kit.

There was a lot of reflection on barriers to e-learning development, with major ones cited being:

many staff lack the time, and sometimes skills or willingness, to engage beyond creating course document repositories;
students often demonstrate an unwillingness to participate in tasks that are not assessed; and indeed sometimes also to participate in collaborative tasks which appear to hand advantage to 'competitors';
students are not necessarily the ‘digital natives’ they are often assumed to be;
some students, while confident in their use of technology, don’t see the relevance of it for learning.

This makes me wonder if too much of our focus as learning technologists tends to be on staff development, when we should perhaps be engaging with students more directly, and also engaging with the tools they know and like more.

Images courtesy of ewjz31 via Flickr.

Recently bookmarked ...

2009-11-17T17:08:00.011Z

There's been no time to blog over the last few months but I have bookmarked some interesting sites, which I thought I might share, in lieu of actually saying something.

Blogging (macro & micro):

Related tags: blogging, twitter

Get Googling:

Related tags: google, googlechrome, googledocs, googlereader, googlewave

e-Learning 'tips and tricks':

Related tags: e-learning, onlineteaching, tools

General interest:

Social networks and social class (CNN story) - http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/10/13/social.networking.class/index.html

The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd http://tinyurl.com/ll6q8t

...What are these tags I speak of?

'Tagging' is web 2-speak for adding metadata so that bookmarks added are searchable and findable again. I tag and then share my bookmarks via delicious (and then 'tweet' them via twitterfeed) - here are some examples of tags I use often...

blackboard, podcasting ,presentations, web2.0 , socialnetworking.

How I learned to stop worrying and love Twitter

2009-05-27T14:30:00.006+01:00

If you have even a passing interest in social media, and haven't been under a rock for the last six months, then you will have noticed a lot of media hype and web buzz about the 'microblogging' service Twitter.

Twitter is the latest and greatest cause celebre of the social web and, like MySpace and Facebook before it, has its share of detractors in the 'real' media - in fact, for a relatively simple and useful service it has generated a surprising number of them. For example, ABC News issued a sort of 'call for complainers' who are "sick of social networking" (is it better to do it, teeth gritted, than just not bother?), and apparently super-sleb Simon Cowell has decreed that tedious tweeting celebrities should desist.

Not to be outdone in these matters, the Daily Mail even warned Twitter may be making us immoral. This satirical video, a bit more humorously than most of the detractors, sums up the Twitter backlash fairly well.

All the commotion is doing no harm to Twitter's exponential growth, but the commentary can tend to be quite misinformed, painting Twitter usage as timewasting and/or voyeuristic, only of interest to the bored and/or boring, constantly lifestreaming the mundane/pointless. Now, admittedly, any of these sometimes apply, but that sort of baby=bathwater logic would see us ditching telephone conversations, emails, blogs, and why not the published and broadcast media.

Instead, suspending judgment for a moment, and thinking of Twitter as simply an alternative communication medium,

is it different from other media?
what are people getting out of it that they didn't get before?

Followers, but not twits

Twitter combines elements of other communication channels in quite an innovative way. The Twitter service essentially allows a user to post a short message (up to 140 characters long) which is then distributed to everyone who "follows" that person. The stream of outgoing posts is also aggregated on the user's profile page.

Although the shortness of tweets immediately calls to mind comparisons with texting and instant messaging services, Twitter's role in online life probably falls closer to blogging (hence the term "microblogging"). This is because messages are not typically distributed one-to-one (although you can also do this) but one-to-many.

The asymmetric "following" model means that, unlike classic social networking by "friending" (i.e. I ask you to be my friend, you accept), you can choose to follow someone interesting to you, who may or may not have an interest in following you back. This has allowed the entry of high-profile users who mainly use the service to 'broadcast'. A year or so ago the most followed Twitterati generally came from the tech world, but around the time Barack Obama's campaign team began tweeting his daily whereabouts, celebrities (e.g. Jonathan Ross), organisations and companies have cottoned on to the utility of Twitter as an alternative channel to reach their publics. Many now argue however that the nature of Twitter has been transformative, and these traditional content-originators are now engaging in more of a conversation with their followers.

The rush to tweet has fuelled the surge in mainstream media coverage, and social media-related blogs and news sites are awash with articles on how to leverage Twitter for your brand and how to rapidly gain more followers, all of which is valuable to people who are operating in that kind of space, but may seem less relevant in the educational context. But I would say the value of Twitter is that it can be used in various ways. It is probably one of the most useful tools to come along for educators and researchers in a long time.

Getting started with Twitter

Despite all the advice out there, I wouldn't say there is a right or wrong way to use Twitter. My tweets are probably 90% e-learning or related, but as with 'small talk' in face-to-face interaction, sometimes I send someone a quick hello or respond to what they have said, or post a news link.

Perhaps the dubious advice on Twitter's home page which suggests you should use it to answer the question 'what are you doing' is partly responsible for the notion that it is mainly used for 'status updates' (a la Facebook), sometimes known as 'lifestreaming'. As with any piece of writing, you need to consider the audience of followers who will read your updates, and decide what's appropriate and useful.

At this point I should backtrack a bit: all this discussion of how one should tweet actually puts the cart before the horse - I wouldn't even worry about that until you have found some people to follow and take some time to immerse yourself in the conversation. Generally speaking, those of us working in education have the most use for Twitter as a way of building a network (sometimes referred to as a personal learning network or PLN).

A PLN, simply defined, is a community which shares interests and information. In her recent PLN survey, Sue Waters found a 'microblogging tool e.g. Twitter' was cited by her respondents as their most useful PLN tool. A PLN acts as a filter, selecting what they regard as useful and interesting information. Of course at times there can be too much information - as with feed readers and mailing lists, as the flow of information increases, there is no room for reader's guilt. There are already enough things in life that have to be read - emails and assignments, for example. The joy of your PLN stream is that you can dip your toes in as and when.

I follow a combination of people, who fall into the following groups, although there is overlap:

people who work in a similar area to me (learning technology) and tweet (and often blog) interesting thoughts, questions and links - it's good when you achieve a critical mass of people who follow a similar group as you get more of a sense of the conversations that go on, and can jump in.
people who work in adjacent areas to me, such as teaching, technology and media.
people I don't need to follow but do because I find them interesting or funny.
people I know in real life.

This may seem like an obvious sort of remark but it's hard to realise the benefit of your network until you have one. So quite often to start putting a Twitter network together, it's best to check any blogs you read for evidence of the blogger's twittername, ask colleagues you work with or know through other networks if anyone tweets, or check out some twitter directories (e.g. wefollow). Once you are following a few interesting people, take a sneaky look at who they follow and regularly converse with, and follow them too.

Further reading

In Some tips for Twitter Danny Nicholson provides helpful advice on getting started with Twitter. It's also worth checking out Twitter Handbook for Teachers from educators in Western Australia and this Twitter Workshop Guide from Mira Vogel at Goldsmiths.

Finally, 'personal brand' talk aside, this guide from Mashable will help you design and distribute your new online self to your satisfaction.

If you already use Twitter, I have a very quick survey that I would love some more feedback on.

Developing Online Learning Communities with Wikis

2009-03-31T19:08:00.002+01:00

Earlier this month Birkbeck received a visit from Dr Lucy Mathers, Senior Lecturer in Media Technology at De Montfort University. Lucy presented some outcomes of an e-learning project in which student assignments were developed and submitted via wikis (this was done using the Learning Objects wiki tool within a Blackboard VLE). The goals of this project were to encourage deep learning and enrich the student learning experience.

Lucy's session was entitled Facilitators and Barriers to Developing Online Learning Communities, and highlighted both staff and student perspectives. Please have a look at Lucy's slides (or this much more detailed conference paper) for more information than I provide here - I just wanted to summarise what I found to be some of the interesting points to come out of this project.

Previous studies have examined the use of discussion boards to foster online learning communities. While building on that work, in this case the use of wikis allowed students to produce their own individual pieces of work while sharing and collaborating with peers.

Barriers to this type of teaching, according to staff, included a perceived lack of technical skills, concern about time needed to set it up and train the students, as well as some concern around pedagogy/assessment. Issues with student participation included the fact that students are primarily motivated by marks. They also tend to perceive themselves to have good peer evaluation skills, but don't always.

Facilitators included students agreeing ground rules for collaboration at the beginning, and therefore having a sense of ownership. Showing examples of good practice in class was useful. Students who are very engaged with their learning tended to participate more enthusiastically.

Welcome to the BLE-Learning Blog!

2009-03-23T13:42:00.008Z

Why BLE-Learning?

The Bloomsbury Learning Environment or BLE is a Blackboard VLE shared by a consortium of Bloomsbury Colleges of the University of London, including Birkbeck, where I am based.

This blog has been created to support e-learning at Birkbeck and in the Bloomsbury community. As such I will be covering a mix of Blackboard-specific and general e-learning topics. I am hoping to provide articles which will help teaching staff to develop their own e-learning (as well as e-teaching) skills.

Please make comments and suggestions regarding what you would like to see covered in this blog. Thanks for reading!