CLIPP Board

Optimizing Classroom Audio for Streaming Online

There is another free webinare this week from Mediasite about ways to record better sound in classroom situations. As we are going through lecture capture pilots at the moment and there are a number of lecturers out there that record the audio of their lectures I thought this may be quite a helpful one. Details below:

“Can you repeat the question?”: Optimizing Classroom Audio for Streaming On-line Instruction.

Tuesday, December 8th | 11:00 – 11:45 a.m. CST.

***Please note that this event takes place 7:00 – 7:45pm UK time.***

For more information and to register head over to the seminar page at Sonicfoundry.com

Food for thought from 100 science videos

Here is a link for “The 100 Coolest Science videos on Youtube“, collected and recommended by the American website Onlineschool.net. It’s a site that specialises in recommending learning establishments to online learners.

The 100 videos feature everything from making soap bubbles containing dry ice and songs about the periodic table to a 75 minute lecture on Electron Spectroscopy from UC Berkeley, taking in such presentation as “a 3 minute skip through 100,ooo years of volcanic eruptions” and “an introduction to heredity“. Oh, and who wouldn’t want to learn chemical reactivity from this video?

What’s impressive about this list is both the variety of different teaching and presenting styles (animations, straight to camera, wacky experiments, songs, etc) and the many ways that complex information can be condensed into digestible videos. We at Media & Learning Technologies are always keen on making multimedia content that grabs the viewer and which are clear anc concise; these videos are a good cross-section through the world of online video learning and hopefully will provide plenty of inspiration to us and ayone who wants to make videos for learning.

Food for thought, indeed.

Equella update

Apologies for the short notice, but there will be a period of down time for Equella this afternoon from 1500. ISA expects the work will take 30 minutes. This is to increase the storage space available for items in the repository.

International Symposium on Total Engineering Education

Professor Alison Halstead was invited to an International Symposium on Total Engineering Education in Shanghai from 23 – 26 October. She presented a keynote address on the Challenges for Engineering Education in the UK. Dr Robin Clark, Head of Learning and Teaching Research, also gave a paper at the conference, as well as chairing a session and being part of a panel addressing the question of global models and standards for engineering education. Robin received a Bayer Teaching Excellence award at the conference presented by the Head of Bayer Technology Services Asia and the President of East China University of Science and Technology.

Robin and Alison had a successful event and some excellent contacts were made. In particular a  successful relationship has started to form with  East China University  of Science and Technology. The university is very similar to Aston and is interested in developing its engineering education capability and research. This is being supported by the university setting up the first Department of Engineering Education in any Chinese university.

Stock photos and how to edit them

I really love my RSS feeds as they send me web stuff that I would never have found otherwise in my travels around the interweb. I’m always on the lookout for stock photo libraries, from where I can get generic images to use as illustrations in our work. Copyright control is a perennial problem that can make people wary of using other people’s materials; these stock archives are a helpful solution to that problem.
So here are two links that will help you to source and edit stock photos, for us to use in our Learning & Teaching work.
The first link is for 250 Free Stock Photography sites and it’s a very comprehensive aggregation of some of the wonderful online services out there. You should check the terms and conditions attached to each photo or each library first, but generally the copyright owners really do want you to use their photos, so get downloading.

Courtesy of www.stockvault.net

Once you’ve downloaded your stock photo, you can then edit and transform it using one of these 11 Free Photo Editing Programmes and Top 5 Free Online Editors (as long as the photo’s terms of use allow such modifications, which most of them do). From free software like Gimp, Paint.Net or Lightbox Image Editor to online, upload-download services like Adobe Photoshop Express or Picnik, these are a great starting point for those wanting to make changes to their images.

Give them a try; the future is free.

e-Assessment – making IT work

By attending en masse, Steve Ellis (CLIPP), Dennis Mottram and Jeremy Batt (ISA) managed to cover all five parallel sessions at today’s UCISA event in Bradford. It was both reassuring and alarming to discover that only a handful of the 75 delegates attending had any kind of formal e-assessment policies in place but David Walker, in the opening keynote, gave a very useful insight into how the University of Dundee had implemented theirs which he is only too happy for other institutions to adapt (subject to appropriate accreditation, of course). In the second keynote, John Dermo took us through the implementation of thin client technology in a custom-built e-assessment suite at Bradford University. Dennis drew the long straw to take the tour of this facility later in the afternoon so can provide further information on both the space and the technology.

Audio recordings and slides of the keynotes together with outlines and outputs from the afternoon sessions are available from e-assessment.wetpaint.com where, hopefully, the useful discussions started today will continue on-line.

EU Curriculum Development Grant

Aston University has been successful in a joint bid to the EU Tempus Programme to develop a professional standards framework for HE courses in Environmental Management in the Russian Federation. The EU grant for €1,024,137 over 3 years has been awarded and will faciliate Dr Anne Wheeler and other Aston staff to participate in the curriculum development project with a number of other partner institutions. The other partner institutions involved in the project are the Universities of Tyumen, Freiburg, Strasbourg and Koblenz-Landau and 4 other Russian Universities. The project will be coordinated by Freiburg and Tyumen and, subject to the completion of the relevant paperwork and contracts, will begin on 15th January 2010.

PebblePad Retreat

PebblePad team at Rowton Castle

Anne Wheeler has attended a two day PebblePad retreat at Rowton Castle in Shropshire (3 & 4 November 2009). Representatives form Queen Margaret’s University and the Universities of Northumbria, Derby, Greenwich, Bedfordshire and Birmingham, plus some PebblePad staff, have been discussing some of the finer, or indeed more challenging issues surrounding the implementation and use of PebblePad. This was not a technical event, nor was it a blue skies event (though there were occasions when discussions entered this arena). This was intended to be a meeting of people interested in, and knowledgeable about, issues directly relating to learning, teaching and assessment (subsuming PDP and CPD) – specifically how PebblePad can be used to support these purposes.

At the end of the first day there had been a full and open discussion of how PebblePad has been implemented and used at the respective institutions. Ideas and perspectives were shared and it was decided that some developments at our universities, such as handbooks, guides, papers, presentations, etc., could be put on the Pebble site under a collective commons agreement. It was also agreed that PebblePad is NOT an eportfolio system but more a personal learning system within which eportfolios can be developed if a user wishes, or as a requirement of their course. It is more a personal e-space where users can discover and understand more about their own learning, and also a space where they take charge and manage that learning.

PebblePad has also been very responsive to suggestions, such as providing an alternative interface for institutions that woud like a more ‘professional’ first view on entering PebblePad, but still allowing individual personalisation thereafter. The format for the first PebblePad conference in June 2010 was also discussed over dinner, with useful suggestions regarding the types of papers that would be encouraged, and the development of a conference book.

On the second day the group considered how to make the embedding of PebblePad fail in an institution. This allowed to us to consider challenges and barriers to successful use, and how we at the universities and PebblePad might overcome them. We also thought about ‘touch points’ for students using PebblePad on entering our institutions and in what ways that might enhance their individual learning experiences – this also raised awareness of pre-entry and post graduation learning experiences and the possible access to the system outside their formal time at university.

Overall the retreat was a very worthwhile, informative and enjoyable experience in an excellent setting.