CLIPP Board

Optivote, my first go.

Last week I used Optivote for the first time and very successfully, so I thought I would share my thoughts and experiences on its use. This is not a word for word guide about how to use it, but where possible I have linked relevant training videos.

First thing I need to say is that if you wish to use Optivote, you need to contact Dean in AV support as it was his involvement in the first instance that made everything so easy down the line.

The Goal

To gather student feed back about how they use and how useful they find the Media Site recordings of one module on their course. We also wanted to asses what type of learner the individual was to see if this effected their use of the Media Site recordings.

The Set Up

Getting started was very quick and easy. It consisted of a simple install of the Optivote software on my desktop computer and making a profile. You then create a local database which stores the lessons you have created, which in turn contains the questions you have written. This may be slightly more complicated if you don’t have admin rights on your computer to install software, just get hold of who ever normally does it for you.

There are two ways that you can build your questions.

• Use Optivote’s built in question feature.
• Use a traditional Power Point that contains questions linked to Optivote.

Due to the nature of what I was attempting, a straight questionnaire, not questions within an already prepared lecture, I decided to just use Optivote’s own built in system.

The first questionnaire, the shortened version of “Experiences of Teaching” is 17 questions all with multiple choice, but no correct answer. At first I thought it would be quite annoying to have to type the set of “Agree, Agree Some What, Disagree, Disagree Somewhat, Unsure” 17 times but thankfully they have included a duplicate question option which saved me at least some sanity if not a lot of time. My second set of 12 questions were of the same type and also had 5 options so it was no hassle putting that one together.

Generally setting up the questions is very easy with you making some choices over the type of question and how many answers you want to give your audience the choice of. The questions and answers can be formatted to use text and pictures, but I only used the text option. I think as long as you have your questionnaire thoroughly designed before you start trying to use the software this process is no more difficult that creating a power point slide.

On The Day

Come the day of reckoning, I simply copied my Optivote database to my “H drive” from “My Documents” and turned up at the lecture room. Dean from AV was there to meet me and together we handed out the hand sets to the intrigued group of about 40 students. It was nice to see their reaction to something new, and pretty much instantly they all seemed on board with whatever was about to happen.

I fired up Optivote on the teaching room PC, and it went straight to my “H drive” and loaded my database of lessons and questions. I cannot stress how seamless an experience it was, creating the lessons at my own computer and then being able to open them where I needed to.

We moved through the questions very quickly. All 25 questions were answered in less than 15mins, and I’m reasonably confident that these answers are useful and “correct”. The students seemed engaged and as the hand sets are so simple no one seemed to get be confused over there use. In general the students were very happy with the pace and what the questions were asking. There was only one incident of myself clarifying a question and students changing their minds as to which answer they gave, so it’s quite useful that this is a feature of the system.

Interpreting Results & Reporting

It seems to me that Optivote has been made to collect information and report it back on discreet questionnaires. I would guess however that in the most part this is exactly what users want to do. In my case however, I want to do some comparisons between the 2 sets of results. There is only limited cross referencing I want to do though and I think its also very important to remember that if I had conducted this research in the traditional way I would not only have to manually cross reference the data but also manually collate it in the first place.

Its very easy to produce reports from your data. Below is a screen shot of the available reports. I won’t pretend to know what all of these do yet, I’m not even sure at this stage which I’m going to using for my research, although I’m sure this will become apparent once I get into it.

On top of these types of reports you can save any report data to an Excel Spread Sheet, Word Doc or HTML page.

If you are interested in Optivote you can check out some more information in our Learning Technologies Module in Blackboard. Link requires you to have an Aston log in suitable for Blackboard.

‘iTunes university’ better than the real thing

The research paper; “iTunes University and the classroom: Can pod casts replace Professors?” that I talk about here can be found on Science Direct (easier to read) or can be downloaded from the UNY Fredonia web site (easier to print).

Some research conducted by Dr. Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, suggests that:

“…students in the pod cast condition who took notes while listening to the pod cast scored significantly higher than the lecture condition.“

That is a fairly bold statement but one I think that is affected more by the note taking aspact than the pod cast aspect of the study. I don’t think that this research is however being presented as the be all and end all of pod casting related research, if indeed if it “really” about pod casting and not review mechanisms. Dr McKinney even notes herself that there is limited scope within the study and that more work really needs to be done.

Personally I think that this is more down to note taking and review than it is the medium in which the information is presented.

“Students who downloaded the pod cast averaged a C (71 out of 100) on the test – substantially better than those who attended the lecture, who on average mustered only a D (62).

But that difference vanished among students who watched the pod cast but did not take notes. Students who listened to the pod cast one or more times and took notes had an average score of 77,” McKinney says.

Giving students the chance to hear/see/experience the lecture several times, as well as being able to pause and rewind gives students much more opportunity to make good notes compared with the traditional method of experiencing a live lecture once. I don’t think we can draw the conclusion though that students only need a review system and so the live lecture is now redundant. I think that a blended approach where experiencing the lecture first time round where you can interact with the lecturer as well as your peers is very important but, then being able to review that lecture allows you to get the very most from the experience in the first place.

Conveniently this fits in with the preliminary results from some of my own research about how students use Media Site lecture captures within Aston. Here’s a few quick anecdotal points that I think support my view:

• In general students liked to fact that they could concentrate on exactly what was being done in the lecture, safe in the knowledge they can make notes later when they have more time to do so.
• In general students did not think that replacing the live lecture with a recording was a good idea but some thought that if a lecture could be replaced with a tutorial that could be useful.
• No one repeatedly and deliberately missed lectures because “they knew they were being recorded anyway”.

As an aside this paper by Dr Kinney has been discussed on every blog in existence many websites such as Read Write Web and more notably New Scientist.

The importance of data

As CP Scott – founderof the Manchester Guardian – said: “Comment is free but facts are sacred.”

In an act of selfless public service, The Guardian Online has opened up access to many of its databases and stats banks in a one-stop shop called Data Store, meaning that these valuable sets of information generated and/or collated by the venerable newspaper about such areas as population, military, financial, social welfare, the environment, politics and so on, will be searchable and usable at the click of a mouse without subscription.

You can export the information into Google Docs, or crunch the numbers there and then. All this information is in an easy-to-use web site and you can even follow its progress through a blog, on Twitter or get involved as part of the data group, if you like that sort of thing.

This should prove to be a reliable and informative source for staff and students alike and will bring together many different sources and resources into one helpful service.

You can find this link and many others in Media & Learning Technology’s new links page

Using Popular Culture in Teaching

This video from the University of Minnesota, stars Jim Kakalios talking about how he uses comics and comic book characters to help teach physics. His explanation of why Gwen Stacy died in the Amazing Adventures of Spiderman is a small except from his book “The Physics of Superheroes” where he illustrates many different practical aspects of physics.

I find this really interesting for the same reason that I wrote about Carl Seniors “Dance of the Proton”. That reason is engagement. Jim Kakalios has been able got over the fact that his subject can be considered boring and instead of ignoring it with a “well that’s the subject” he has chosen to do something about it. You can clearly hear how passionate he is about his subject and his want to transfer that passion to his students has led him to use a very simple idea to very good effect.

JISC Next Generation Technologies in Practice

I’ll be attending JISC‘s Next Generation Technologies in Practice event tomorrow, but the event is already well underway. Discussion on the first day is aimed at projects already involved with the Users and Innovation programme and its Emerge community. The second day will act as a showcase.

Organisers are encouraging delegates to follow and join in the discussion during the event. Follow the conversations about the conference on Twitter. They’ve even managed to get themselves as one of the most discussed topics on Twitter.

Learner Response Systems: Effective Use in Higher Education

Learner Response Systems: effective use in HE
Thursday 19th March 2009 – SW309/308

Learner Response Systems (LRS) are now commonly used in school classrooms throughout the country and are therefore already familiar to many of our student intake. The Learning Technologies team within The Midlands Leadership Centre provides a blend of bespoke practical training, CPD courses in ICT, as well as strategic advice for schools, local authorities and other educational groups. This team led the REVEAL Project, a national project looking at the effective use and implementation of LRS in schools and FE, which they have recently expanded to include HE and will be sharing the results of their research at the next CLIPP seminar to be held on Thursday 19th March.

The seminar will be followed by a workshop offering some hands on training and an opportunity to look at the practical application of LRS. Participants can then make use of the Opivote system, catering for up to 220 students, which is now available as a bookable resource through Media and Learning Technologies (further details plus video tutorials are available in the Learning Technologies module on Blackboard).

Both sessions are open to all staff – please email l.cottrell@aston.ac.uk if you are planning to attend.

• Seminar 1:00pm – 1:45pm in SW309
• Workshop 2:00pm – 3:30pm in SW308

Up and coming CLIPP seminars

In addition to the recently announced CDIO seminar, CLIPP are hosting other seminars over the coming weeks. The programme is as follows

Thursday 19th March @ 1300

Midlands Leadership – Learner response systems and their effective use in HE.
(Seminar and workshop) More Information

Monday 11th May @ 1300

Effective use of e-portfolios
Julie Hughes/Emma Purnell
(seminar and workshop)

Tuesday 2nd June @ 1300

Reflective practice workshop
Jennie Moon

Friday 12th June – all day

L&T seminar day
(presentations on the CLIPP funded projects)

Making Engineering Education More Active; The CDIO Approach and its implementation at Liverpool

Monday 9th March 2009
1300-1400 in SW309

The University of Liverpool‘s Peter Goodhew will be talking about his experiences adopting the CDIO as the framework of their curricular planning and outcome-based assessment.

The CDIO Initiative is an innovative educational framework for producing the next generation of engineers. It provides students with an education, stressing engineering fundamentals set in the context of Conceiving — Designing — Implementing — Operating real-world systems and products.

The CDIO Initiative was developed with input from academics, industry, engineers and students. It is universally adaptable for all engineering schools. CDIO Initiative collaborators throughout the world have adopted CDIO as the framework of their curricular planning and outcome–based assessment.

The approach, although being discussed in the engineering context, may well be of interest to colleagues from other disciplines if considering or interested in new approaches to learning and teaching practice.