CLIPP Board

Taking Leadership in Mystery of MOOCs and the Mass Movement toward Open Education

CLIPP is happy to invite you to a seminar on  Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The presenter, Professor Curtis Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology in the School of Education at Indiana University.  Professor Bonk firmly believes in distance and blened learning since he is a product of it. Curt is a popular conference speaker with several books in the area of emerging technologies for learning. The seminar will be taking place at Aston University, Birmingham in G11 the Byng Kendrick Theatre on Monday 28^th January 2013 from 10:30-12:30. Please book your place by contacting Zara Kendrick.

Open education was often laughed at or ignored until the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with their tens–or even hundreds–of thousands of learners in a single course. Given the mass success of Stanford courses topping 100,000 each and startups like Udacity and Coursera as well as the announcement of edX (from Harvard and MIT), we can no longer look the other way. Still, many questions about MOOCs and other forms of open education remain, such as those related to infrastructure, marketing, pedagogy, and assessment, to name a few. Just how does an instructor or trainer keep thousands of students motivated and involved in such a course? And what are the more promising business models? In this talk, Bonk will detail his experiences in teaching a MOOC and offer guidelines for others hoping to create a highly engaging MOOC-based learning environment. A set of 10 key leadership steps and another set of 10 pedagogical principles will be outlined with examples. He will also map out a set of business plans and more than a dozen types of MOOCs. In the end, MOOCs and mass movement to open education will no longer be such mystery.

Three Overview Points:
1. Much experimentation with MOOCs and open education today; dozens of possible business models (advertisements, fees for completion certificates, pay as you go, company sponsored courses, assessment fees, etc.).
2. Will the certificates that students earn while taking MOOCs make traditional college degrees obsolete?
3. What steps might a company, government agency, or university take to be a leader in this movement toward MOOCs and open education?

Lecture capture – doing it well and at scale

Queen Mary, University of London.
June 16^th 2011

Earlier in the month I attended the ALT event Lecture capture – doing it well and at scale at Queen Mary, University of London. Lecture Capture is something that CLIPP has been involved in for three years now; having piloted Mediasite and Echo360, we now run Panopto, branded as Aston Replay for our students, and have it installed in all of our centrally booked lecture theatres.

After brief introductions from the exhibitors, Eoin McDonnell from QMU kicked off proceedings talking about their experiences of rolling out lecture capture, focusing on staff attitudes and anxieties to lecture capture. 13% of lecturers responding to a survey said they were ‘violently opposed’ to lecture capture and of those, 100% had accessed lecture recordings from other universities. Students at QMU viewed the recorded sessions as a backup to the real thing – they still want lectures.

Lecture Capture at Aston, 1980s style

Kris Roger from London School of Economics spoke about how lecture capture at LSE started out with a single VCR as a  response to a request from a lecturer to needing to implement a scaleable solution across the institution. Aston has a long history of using video, meaning we started out with more than one VCR (see right for a shot from the archives).

The next two sessions were people who’ve built their own solutions. Dr. Marco Zennaro and Dr. Enrique Canessa, from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, demonstrated a system that was developed in house at ICTP called openEyA – a  low cost solution running from an Ubuntu based netbook. At the time of writing, they have 7565 recorded hours of physics and mathmatics lectures available to view online. Dr. Neil Berry, University of Liverpool, demonstrated the use of capturing audio and computer screen during a lecture to provide recordings of Chemistry teaching.

Juliet Hinrichsen and Amanda Hardy from Coventry University discussed issues around staff development, and have a wealth of OER available on their website. While we have a lot of support materials available for staff, we don’t have many for students to get the most out of Replay which is something we will address over the summer.

Graham McElearney closed the day by talking about copyright. In a nutshell, if we didn’t make it, didn’t buy it, and it hasn’t been given to us then it isn’t ours to use. There are also limits on what can be recorded, while a lecturer is entitled to show a clip from a TV programme in a lecture room, they can’t record it.

The key thing that I took away from the event is that lecture capture will highlight any weaknesses already present in processes, a common example given was a lack of communication (a decision was took centrally to record lectures, but the first time the lecturers knew was when they received an automatic email telling them their recording was ready). Here at Aston, we don’t centrally control the recordings, we give the freedom to the lecturer to choose what and when to record. The main complaint we get is users have to log in twice to make a recording – once to the PC, and once to the recording software. This is down to the way PCs in our lecture theatres are configured and is something we’re keen to fix.

The Twitter backchannel at events is invaluable, providing extra content and encouraging discussion. I’ve collated some (ok, a lot) of the tweets about the event on Storify, and next time I’m at a similar event I’ll make sure I’ve got a laptop, rather than rely on my mobile phone.

Hello BoB

Box of Broadcasts (BoB) is an online service providing staff and students access to recordings of TV and Radio, which allows you to

• Record programmes from over 50 TV and radio channels from Freeview
• Book recordings seven days in advance
• Choose from tens of thousands of programmes in the archive
• Create playlists and clips
• Share programmes, clips and playlists with your colleagues and students

BoB replaces and improves upon the previous off air recording service as you will get quicker access to your programmes (usually within 24 hours), and now they are available to view across the UK, not just on the Aston network.

Access BoB at www.bobnational.net. To login, select UK Federation Login, type in Aston and select Aston University from the drop down, then log in with your Aston username and password.

Please Note: Aston staff are currently unable to access BoB. As an interim measure, the BUFVC have set up a temporary account which we can use while the problem is fixed.

There is comprehensive user guide available on the BoB site. If you have any questions about BoB, or sourcing TV/radio programmes for use in your modules,  contact us.

Aggregate, Filter and Connect

A CLIPP Seminar by
Prof Phillip D. Long, Ph.D.
Tuesday 11th May 1300-1400 SW309 followed by questions and discussion

The pace of change in higher education, especially when confronting the surge of digital tools, feels overwhelming. Many retreat from taking steps toward embracing any digital tools for fear of making bad choices, wasting limited time, and detracting from the transmission of content from teacher to student amidst the turmoil.  The growth of digital networks, social networks and ways to create, manipulate and share knowledge has paralysed many academics. How does one even start to thoughtfully identify, evaluate and choose among the deluge of learning tools? How and in what ways does one integrate technologies into learning spaces? We’ll discuss ways to save time, increase efficiency, and improve the quality of decision-making in assembling your personal digital learning environment. We’ll consider the implications of technologies for learning in built vs. virtual spaces.  The goal is to ‘aggregate, filter and connect’ people and ideas through smart decisions and carefully constructed social networks to augment learning.

Phillip Long is Professor of Innovation and Educational Technology Inaugural Director of CEIT at the University of Queensland which is dedicated to research on learning environments that have the potential to innovate teaching, learning and creativity. Prof. Long’s current research interests focus on designing built pedagogies, physical & virtual to support active learning and collaboration. He retains a role as Visiting Researcher in the Centre for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT where he was also the Senior Strategist for Academic Technologies. Long’s professional activities include: the New Media Consortium Board (2006-09 & past chair), NMC Project Horizon (2005 to present) and chair of the Horizon Australia/New Zealand Edition (2008-9).

To reserve a place please e-mail Lyn Cottrell

Best Practice CLIPPs

We’ve released several videos featuring staff from across the University sharing best practice in teaching and learning, talking about contemporary issues, how they worked to solve these problems and improve the student experience. Here’s a playlist on Youtube or you can look at individual clips below.

• Helping students with revision by using Podcasts as a revision aid tool – Pavel Albores
• Encouraging International students to take up placements through presentations – Dashi Alpion
• Enhancing students reflective practice and personal development using Pebble Pad, a pilot study. – Nicola Bullivant
• Understanding student expectations using SERVQUAL, a series of online surveys – Nicola Bullivant
• Providing informative feedback for students by using the Grade Centre within Blackboard VLE – Professor Helen Higson
• Raising Intercultural awareness for international and home students through creative workshops – Professor Helen Higson
• Improving communication to students using SMS within the Business School Placement office – Carolyn Keenan
• Working with large groups and setting students minimally supervised group work tasks – Pete Reddy
• Professional and social networking tools to improve student networking skills – Carolina Salinas
• Working with a very large group of students and how to provide feedback and support – Dr Patrick Tissington

In addition, Aston staff can find the videos and contact details in the CLIPP module on the VLE under ‘Video CLIPPs’.

httpvp://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=37B97B85632243B6

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.

Equella Upgrade

ISA will be upgrading Equella, which powers Blackboard’s Resource Centre, on Monday 5th October.

What does this mean for users?

• Users will not be able to upload any items to the resource centre while this is taking place.
• The viewing of resource centre items already added to modules in Blackboard should see little to no disruption.

Why are we doing this?

The new version of Equella brings a number of improvements with regards to adding your content into the resource centre and into your Blackboard modules. Details of which we’ll give when the upgrade is complete.

Update 05/10/2009. Equella has been successfully upgraded to the new version and contribution rights are restored.

More good practice

Another quick heads up – the final day of university good practice presentations took place last week. As with the previous two days, the presentations are available for Aston staff to view.

Good Practice Presentations

Tomorrow is the second day of University Good Practice presentations. Head over to the website to see the schedule (there’s been a last minute change) and get more information on the individual projects.

Update (04th Sept)
The presentations are now online for Aston staff to view.