E@T Newsletter February 2010 10th Annual

Learning & Teaching

Teesside University celebrated the 10th Anniversary of its annual Learning and Teaching Conference this year. The conference theme was Building on Success and with over 150 participants it was as always a great opportunity to see what other staff and colleagues are doing across campus. It was also a great opportunity for us to share our own thoughts, ideas and successes about how we are all building on success and modelling good practice within our own learning and teaching.

This year’s mix of sessions covered many different aspects of good practice within learning and teaching, covering a wide range of subjects from inclusivity to simulation.

Throughout the day I managed to attend several sessions including a roundtable by Andy Price where a small group of academic staff from various schools discussed and debated the issues and barriers to cross-disciplinary programmes. In particular, how the cultures and working practices of the different schools and departments (whilst very much wanting to foster innovation) can also at times create logistical difficulties. Andy and his colleagues identified this as one of the barriers to working in this innovative way to try and deliver their ‘shared vision and values’ in educational provision.

Working in innovative ways was also covered in the second keynote of the day delivered by Dr Simon Ball from TechDis. He talked about how we can use free and Open Source technologies to support and enhance good inclusive practice within learning and teaching. He demonstrated an easy-to-use feature within Word that can be used to give audio feedback and highlighted several other examples of resources from the JISC TechDis HEAT project and elsewhere that tutors can use to support more inclusive module delivery. Creating learning resources and activities that are inclusive are not just supportive of students with disabilities but can also be very useful to all students. If you are interested in using Word to give audio feedback check out our brand-new recipe sheet on Blackboard’s staff lounge tab for a quick and easy step-by-step guide that will have you up and running in no time. If you would like to know more about the other technologies featured in the session e-mail the e-learning team on who have been using many of these supportive technologies for years and are always happy to help.

The show and tell sessions this year also had a brand-new format, which enabled up to three different presentations to be showcased in one session. I think this worked particularly well as it enabled the conference participants to see lots of different material within a small time frame.

The staff presented a short five-minute/2 PowerPoint slide introduction to their work and then the participants got the opportunity to walk around the room and talk to them about it.

Amongst the show and tells that particularly interested me were how the SCM are getting students to record movies on one of their masters modules to demonstrate their software running as part of their ICA. Historically the module only had about 10 participants so doing individual vivas allowing the students to demonstrate their work had not been a problem. However when the cohort size increased to 47 it was impossible to use the same criteria for such large numbers. Therefore getting the students to record their own software/ICA running and submitting this for the assessment allowed the tutors to still see the software in action as they would have previously done in the vivas. I think this nicely demonstrates that technology can support not only teaching practice but also the assessment strategies as well. This is a technique easily sharable and scalable using Screenr.com or Screentoaster. com.

As with Simon’s keynote TBS are also using some of Microsoft Word’s own built-in features called Quick Parts, to help them give feedback to students. Quick Parts let you save blocks of text into a gallery that you can then reuse many times as you like. This easy to use tool can help staff to create and build up a word bank of their own texts. It is quite a powerful tool when you consider how often you write the same thing when giving feedback to students. This was something that several of the conference participants were very interested in. We have done a recipe sheet about this too, the basics steps to get you up and running in no time. As with all the other recipe sheets you can find these on the staff lounge tab in Blackboard. If you need any further help just drop us an email.

Debra Tinney | E-learning Development Officer |

For the first time the Conference featured ‘Show and Tell’ sessions where a number of presenters were given the opportunity to give a five-minute presentation before each moving off to a corner of the room to answer the questions of delegates as they circulated between the presenters.

Of particular interest to me at the first of these was the ‘Boot Camp Project’ presented by Paul Baldwin of SAM. On the Media Production course Paul and colleagues have taken an intensive, hands-on approach to helping students learn the essential editing skills needed for their degree. The approach has already proved very popular with students who spoke positively about the experience in the short video he had produced documenting the project. The particular benefits seemed to centre on the students learning higher level editing skills, previously taught at later stages throughout the degree, within the opening weeks of the course. Once these skills have been acquired students seem better equipped to realise their potential throughout the course. This caused an interesting discussion about current practice ‘working up to’ these skills over the progression of a degree versus ‘in at the deep-end’ approach.

The second keynote, Dr Simon Ball, was also particularly of interest to me. Simon is a Senior Advisor (Higher Education) for JISC TechDis, the UK advisory service for inclusive use of technology and his talk seemed to inspire a number of delegates. Simon’s examples of how simple e-learning tools can be used to streamline teaching processes such as giving student feedback were a good showcase for how E-learning, used in the right way, can really enhance the student experience, while also saving time and effort for the instructor. Simon’s examples included the use of Word to record audio feedback – a very quick and simple process – which with the help of our recipe sheet, we hope people will be inspired to do!

Simon encouraged delegates to download JISC’s freely available toolkit of ‘Access Apps’, an invaluable repository of free E-learning tools that fits on a 2gb memory stick. ‘Access Apps’ includes a raft of simple to use programmes such as Audacity (for recording Audio), Screentoaster.com (online screen-capture tool, similar to Camstudio, Screenr etc) and Dspeech (automated conversion of text files to audio files)

You can download it here: www.techdis.ac.uk/getaccessapps Recipe sheets on using Audacity to record podcasts can also be found on the Staff Lounge tab in blackboard.

Paul Pinkney | E-learning Development Officer |

In another show and tell Mike Teague showed SSSL’s Smart Search website, a resource to point students in the right direction for help with their academic writing skills. It was realised that many new students only used the Internet when carrying out research and a large number only cited non peer-reviewed sources such as Wikipedia.

The Smart Search e-resource was made available through Blackboard to all SSSL students and provides interactive tools to students on how to critically evaluate different sources of information available to them including electronic journals and databases. It lists various different types of resources, peer reviewed and not, available to the students via the systems in the library or publically accessible on the Internet.

Feedback from the students appeared to support the Smart Search website with students saying that they found the information available on the site relevant and useful. Key to its success is discipline specific content but it would be relatively easy for other schools to create a similar resource.

Richard Glover | E-learning Support Officer |

Bethany Usher introduced delegates to this website, which has been set up by D-Lab, and gives students studying Journalism the opportunity to write and publish their own articles. In addition to News, Sport, Lifestyle, Issues and Entertainment sections there is a personal blog area where students can write their own reflections.

All articles are moderated by Bethany before being published, giving students the experience of what a real newspaper might be like. This could be considered similar to formal feedback. As the article is developed, Bethany gives constructive feedback as to how the article could be improved, possible areas to avoid due to legal restrictions, and positive feedback on completed (and subsequently published) articles.

Multimedia elements come from a service called Apture (www. apture.com).

So far the project has been very successful. Students are engaging with the website and writing their own articles. They have responded very positively to the experience. Outside interest has also been positive. The Evening Gazette has already used some of the articles published, giving students the chance to build up their resumé. Another advantage of the website is that it allows students to develop an online portfolio of their work. This could be very useful as a reflective tool (to look back to previous articles and hopefully see an improvement with the later articles). The website also acts as a form of advertisement for the students, showing their work to the public.

This is a good example of students engaging in personal reflection in a blog and so if you would like to know more about offering blog, website or portfolio tools to your students, contact the E-learning team.

Russell Smeaton | E-learning Support Officer |

Nicola Poppitt and Vicki Hill

Feedback for learning: Staff and students’ perspectives on the role of informal feedback

This was a very interesting presentation focussing on the role of informal feedback in teaching and learning. The presentation drew upon findings from a research project conducted in 2007/8 at Teesside where students completed a survey (n=263) on their experiences with assessment. Staff (n=21) and student (n=70) views were also collected via focus groups.

A familiar theme was apparent – that feedback = assessment = grade, i.e. informal feedback is not recognised by students and therefore a valuable learning opportunity is lost. This has almost certainly had an effect on our NSS scores. Many students aren’t recognising feedback as feedback so as a consequence they are scoring this element of the NSS lower than they may well otherwise do. This could be an easy win for Teesside: if students can be educated to recognise different types of feedback then Teesside’s NSS scores may improve.

The presentation advised more focus given to helping students recognise informal types of feedback. Nicola suggested discussion of feedback during induction perhaps. There is also a model for embedding the giving and receiving of feedback available from E-learning on blogs, wikis and discussion boards. In conclusion the paper emphasised the value of informal feedback and how crucial it is in the learning experience.

Maggie Hadland

Experiential learning: an approach to teaching management skills in the classroom

This presentation focussed on one particular module Maggie teaches – Management Skills. Maggie teaches this to third year mental health students in order to prepare them for their role as qualified nurses. This experiential learning approach involves the cohort (generally 30-45 students on average) being split into teams of 8-10. Each team chooses a leader, a team name, a logo, and creates a team philosophy. An observer for each team is appointed. The observer’s role is to document the weekly discussions that take place and report on the dynamics of the decision making. The observer is not allowed to contribute to the team discussion/task. Each week the groups are given a new scenario to deal with. These include managing a range of clients (using reality-based scenarios); dealing with critical incidents, and creating a new product or service. Team leaders are purposely given different management styles to adopt and feedback is provided by peers and the observers.

After 2-3 months the teams are amalgamated to produce 2 new bigger teams. New leaders are chosen from the leaders of the old groups. It is then interesting to watch the students explore the new groups and the effects of the new, larger group on the individuals. How will those who had held key roles in the old teams adapt to a larger team?

The approach allows students to relate theory to practice. The teams experience real-world scenarios, deal with them, and learn from them.

A question from the audience asked if the students who asked to be Observers are missing out on the experience. Whilst this is a valid question it’s not really a concern, the summary sessions allow for discussion and peer review.

Overall this was a good session and an interesting approach to teaching the topic of management skills. There are huge possibilities in using technology in all these cases.

Richard Sober and Mike McLean

The secret of their success: From first year fears to final year achievements

In July 2009 recent graduates from a number of UK institutions were interviewed and filmed at the New Designers exhibition in London, a show for the highest achieving design students, to find out to what they attributed their success. Further surveys were carried out at Teesside University with first year design students during welcome week to assess their perceptions in relation to the fears, challenges and expectations of the student experience ahead of them. The presentation looked at whether the first year and final year students’ views correlated.