CLIPP Board

New year – new tools

MB512

Welcome to the new academic year at Aston. We’ve been busy upgrading some of the core learning tools during the summer. Before I talk about new tools, I thought it’s worth shouting about a new collaborative learning space (MB512) – see image above. This space has been designed and installed to showcase the ideas and feedback from recent consultations coordinated by Steve Ellis. It looks and feels great, and has been designed to ensure the space is flexible and can cater for collaborative (small group) working.  The design, colours, and embedded technology all make for an innovative space.

For those just getting back into the swing of things here’s a few pointers to keep you updated;

Blackboard VLE has been migrated to a managed hosted service, and is now updated to service pack 8. The transition has been slick and painless, and thus ensures a robust service for all our users. Two new tools of note in this release are:
• New grading rubrics
• New reports (tracking) types

As you may be aware, Blackboard purchased Elluminate and Horizon Wimba last year. The resultant development was Collaborate, which we upgraded to this summer. Apart from the improved interface , upgrades include:
• Echo cancellation, which eliminate feedback noise, meaning you no longer need to use headphones with PC speakers.
• Improved scheduling via the Blackboard integration.
• (vastly) Improved application sharing. Meaning you can share your desktop/live applications with session attendees, to illustrate an idea, walk through a solution, or collaborate in real time.

Collaborate is fully integrated into your Blackboard Courses.  Access it via the Tools menu.

We have also upgraded Turnitin’s integration with Blackboard. This new integration should eliminate some operational issues reported last year. The new (direct) integration fundamentally alters the way BB VLE links to Turnitin. This has resulted in a change to the submissions inbox, removing the ability to sort by student name, and no paper ID column! Students still get a full time and date stamped receipt. The main difference in the assignment set up, is the new multi part assignment. This can now cater up to  5 parts to a new assignment,  each with their own due dates – which could be useful for large/iterative or group projects.

Skype has been installed on all the Pool rooms PC’s, and uses the handheld/tie microphones. So if you are planning to invite a guest speaker from afar, they could be “present” in your lecture via Skype.

Learning greening

The Greening of ICT is an awareness of the issues associated with the use of IT within the tertiary education sector, i.e. the reduction of sector carbon footprint and associated energy costs (JISC 2009).  Here at Aston, we are running a number of initiatives associated with improving the sustainability of the campus – detailed in the Environment and sustainability web pages.  Also within this website CLIPP explain how the use of virtual classrooms and webinars (using Elluminate) can help with this campus wide push to both improve sustainability and enhance the student experience.

More recently CLIPP assisted Dr John Blewitt to run an entire conference online, covering these very issues.  We used Elluminate in conjunction with Blackboard to create a synchronous online experience, with presenters from across the globe.  The whole event ran very well, and not only show-cased the tools and their potential we have on offer for staff and students to learn “at a distance”, it also demonstrates our on-going commitment to reduce carbon emissions.  Dr Blewitt has since edited the four (video) presentations from the day, and added them to a new website explaining the ideas that underpinned the conference themes.

Media and Learning Technologies’ Portfolio

You can now browse all the significant teaching and promotional projects which Media and Learning Technologies (CLIPP’s media service) has produced in the past three years on our Portfolio pages on the Aston University website. There’s a brief summary of each project and what we ended up delivering, as well as links to the video content itself (where possible).

I’m really pleased that we now have this resource as a testimony to what we can achieve, but it’s really just a small part of what we do. With every new project, we’re adapting and developing our skills and knowledge further, to ensure that we continually improve  the creation of high-quality learning and promotional materials which effectively reach their target audiences. Please check the Portfolio pages regularly in the future as I will be adding not only the latest completed projects as we deliver them but also some of the classic work we did between 2004 and 2008, and hopefully even earlier.

Should you need any more information – or have any comments – about any of the projects on the Portfolio pages, then please don’t hesitate to contact me on 0121 204 4232 or at n.w.birch@aston.ac.uk.

Research in Learning Technology

Research in Learning Technology is the journal of the Association for Learning Technology. It aims to raise the profile of research in learning technology, encouraging research that informs good practice and contributes to the development of policy. The journal publishes papers concerning the use of technology in learning and teaching in all sectors of education, as well as in industry.

On January 1 2012 this became an Open Access journal and, as a result,  the last 19 Volumes are freely available at the journal’s new web site http://researchinlearningtechnology.net/.

Captain Aston Vs MAP

This stylish video has been produced to highlight the potential of My Aston Portal (MAP) to all Aston students. MAP hosts a range of tools to support learning and personal development.

The video was crafted by our own Steve McHale from the Aston MLT department, part of The Centre for Learning Innovation and Professional Practice (CLIPP). Credit and thanks also go to CLIPP staff; Paul Gorman (The Captain), and the Zara Kendrick (Sidekick).

We are the Learning Development Centre

This week sees our latest video – a promo for the Learning Development Centre at Aston University – go live, for all students (new and returning) to watch. Our brief was to make a video that explained what was on offer at the LDC and how students could benefit from using it. We wanted to steer clear of the traditional and sometimes impersonal ‘talking heads’ approach, so we hit upon the idea of showing the staff as friendly and approachable, using signs to give some factual information and then filming in the LDC, using text projected onto surfaces for the user comments.

Featuring excellent camerawork and editing from Colin Roach, and full participation and winning smiles from the LDC team, it’s turned out even better than we’d hoped and has impressed everyone who’s seen it so far. It’s even been shown as an example of the work of CLIPP at the Aston Advance, the gathering of the University’s senior executives.

I’m delighted that we were able to try out this new style of video, and that the end result is so strong and distinctive.

virtual classroom support

Dr Mike Peters explains the innovative use Blackboard Collaborate (Eluminate) to facilitate the learning of Mathematics for Work Based Learners.

See also Dr Ozren Despic use of Virtual Classrooms to Support Peer Learning

Please note Elluminate has been rebuilt and rebranded. It is now called Collaborate, and includes features from Wimba and Elluminate platforms. We will be evaluating Collaborate this year. Elluminate continues to be available via Blackboard for all at Aston.

Diverse Conference June 2011

The 11th DIVERSE (Developing Innovative Visual Educational Resources for Students Everywhere) Conference, held at the Dublin City University Campus, Eire, is intended as a showcase for excellence and innovation in the field of video and videoconferencing in education: teaching, research, management and so on.

This year saw presentations around the themes of Digital Video Projects, Visual Literacy in New Media, E-health, and Social Media and saw contributions from academics, learning technologists and other interested parties from Europe, Africa, North America and Australasia.

It was to be a special conference for me because I was presenting a poster for the first time – more of that later. After being serenaded by a close harmony quartet (surely every conference starts like this, doesn’t it?) we kicked off with Professor Roy Pea of Stanford University introducing the revolutionary DIVER camera. This was an eye-opening and exciting piece of kit that had evolved out a dual need to capture panoramic video of a single event, and to be able to select areas of that video for re-editing. The camera uses a simple but high-quality panoramic lens and has advanced software that ‘undistorts’ the resulting image into a full panoramic video recording. Sections of the captured video can then be highlighted as separate ‘Dives’, which can be annotated too. The cameras are being successfully used in all manner of teaching environments, not least teacher training, and I’d certainly like to investigate their use here in the near future. There’s even an iPhone lens attachment that allows panoramic recording straight onto your phone!

While some of the sessions may not have trodden the new ground that they could have done, there were plenty of interesting presentations to be had. Mike O’Donoghue from the University of Manchester gave a very pertinent talk on creatively designing video for teaching and learning which was very interesting to practitioners like me and a wider teaching and learning technologist audience alike, referencing his 20 or so years experience in this field. He has some very interesting guidelines and educational videos which have been formulated for the MA in Digital Technologies, Communication and Education at Manchester.

Over in the e-Health arena, there was a good presentation by Aoife Ni Mhuiri from the Institute of Tralee about how screencasting can be used to provide a reusable learning object to support teaching and learning of Anatomy and Injury Management. It uses video clips of injuries to players/athletes during major championships, races or games for analysis along with interactive anatomical images/graphics to provide a short DVD or interactive web-based courseware. It was a very impressive and comprehensive teaching package that is already showing great successes in teaching and treatments alike.

The time came for me to present my poster about how Media & Learning Technologies support final year Spanish Language students in a module which requires them to write a dramatic script and make a short film. I opted to make something that was different from the traditional A0 paper poster; instead coming up with a video poster. This was a good way of incorporating both the explanatory text and plenty of video clips that documented the production process and compared materials from before and after our interventions. It went down very well and plenty of debate arose about some of the technical proficiencies and artistic abilities which we ascribe to Digital Natives, that may not actually be present in the first place.

All in all, a good conference with plenty of food for thought.

SCHOMS Conference May 2011

The focus of this year’s annual SCHOMS conference, hosted at Newcastle University, was very much around technology enhanced learning spaces. Prof Stephen Heppell provided an inspirational opening keynote based on the premise that it was no longer acceptable to just “satisfy” students, he saw the provision of designed-for-purpose technology enhanced learning spaces as key to institutions’ responsibility to “delight” them. He supported this argument with a survey of current GCSE students who, while not quite sure what University would be like, naturally expected that the environment and technology would be significantly better than what they had at school. A well-illustrated presentation of numerous case studies featuring modern schools and academies proved just what a challenge most Universities now face to meet these expectations.
Prof Mike Neary’s following session took a much more academic approach which challenged the concept that students know, or even have the right to demand, what they want from higher education. At Lincoln this has led to a new initiative called Student as Producer which will replace the traditional Learning and Teaching Strategy – something definitely worth tracking over the next few years.
The first day rounded off with a session from Jos Boyce, Senior Research Fellow of Learning Spaces at the Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Design (CETLD) and author of “Towards Creative Learning Spaces”. Through illustrated examples of learning space design from around the world Jos challenged the concept of students as “rational consumers” and identified post-occupancy evaluation as one of the most important tools to really inform effective future spaces.

Day two started with a tour of Newcastle’s new “zoned teaching cluster” – a 170 seater PC lab which is divided into four colour coded zones but without any physical partitions. One zone is permanently accessible to students for open access learning but the others are bookable for teaching either as three individual or one large area. Despite some skepticism particularly about noise overspill, the area has been received very well by both staff and students with very impressive utilisation rates.
Most of the rest of the day was given over to the extensive suppliers’ exhibition in The Great North Museum which proved a useful opportunity to network with equipment providers and colleagues across the sector. The formal proceeding were concluded by a presentation by Mark McCallister, Associate Director, Office of Academic Technology, University of Florida and current President of CCUMC – the SCHOMS equivalent in the US. It was encouraging to see so many similarities in both organizational structures and challenges and offered many opportunities for closer collaboration. Mark was particularly interested in the unique SCHOMS Benchmarking Survey which was announced at the SCHOMS AGM earlier in the day.
The conference dinner was held at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts with an impressive view over the Tyne and concluded with a special commissioned tilting of the Millennium Bridge (see photo above).

The final day focused on case studies around technologies and spaces at other HE institutions. Particularly interesting sessions came from Jim Sheach (U of Edinburgh) on the growing demand for and use of informal learning spaces and Oliver Ireson (U of Birmingham) on the development of a Learning Technology Adoption toolkit but recordings of all sessions will be available to members on the SCHOMS website shortly.

Need some TLC?

Yes you do! Well – we all require some TLC occasionally. Of course I’m referring to the new Technology and Learning Community web site (TLC): http://tlc.aston.ac.uk which provides advice and guidance on appropriate and potential uses of technology enhanced learning (TEL), here at Aston. It is aimed at all staff or students wishing to know more about a specific technology. TLC serves the needs of “those in the know”, who will appreciate the powerful search engine to quickly locate resources, and those who are just curious. The intuitive navigation structure also serves to encourage those new to TEL to discover and understand the potential of certain tools and applications. It is a public website, therefore we are incorporating resources, case studies, and guides generated by Aston, but also linking to effective practice and guides across the globe.  It has been created to answer the important questions of; “why, what, and how do I exploit learning technologies to enhance the learning experience.”

This website is being continually enhanced, and is being built for the use of Aston staff and students, so it is imperative that we get your feedback for improvement. Contact Kevin Brace in CLIPP to give us your ideas. The “Community” aspect of the web site is part of the ongoing work. Broadly speaking we will aim to create features to enable discussions around particular tools. Watch this space. Being a public site, we also want others in academia to benefit from the resource.  Send us your comments, link to us, and suggest content. Sharing resources and knowledge is vital in this current economic climate.

Moving to Blackboard 9.1

For those wishing to know more about our impending move to Blackboard 9.1, please access the new resources added to the TLC Blackboard page, to find all those answers to your pressing questions.