Designing Learning Landscapes: Mobile, Open, Inclusive

May 30 2014. Conference website

Landscaping student engagement: Andrea Sella (UCL)

My Learning Landscapes. Time-poor academic

Moodle and bitrot.

Facebook. Can we turn VLEs into something which attracts people's attention?

If not completely clear, 5% of students will suck time. 5% of 370 is lots.

Build something a bit different - consistent layout - establish key components in sensible place - split material into sections - lay down rules of engagement early

“post this to the forum”

  1. directives from the great leader
  2. admin Q&A
  3. section-specific fora (lab, NMR, p-block)
  4. Fun and Frolic (TV programmes, news items, etc)
  5. Wishlist Forum

“plaigurism”

put a picture on each course page

make the distractions slightly relevant

bribe the students to make the distractions.

Confident-based marking

conclusions: - running an e-learning site properly takes a lot of time - building a site like this takes a lot of time and effort - it can take a long time to convince colleagues to do what you're doing - thinking that e-learning is a way to free up staff time is a delusion from people who don't teach

thought: in advocating good VLE use, it's important to propgate the message that the course leader's engagement is way way way more important than any particular technology

Assessment

Tim Smale (Keele)

Google docs / forms

staff: great to see live data students: reported that didn't impede examination

Joan Fletcher (Goldsmiths)

Role playing and audio feedback via VLE. Drama students to play other side of the roleplay

mining roleplays for further formative learning: listen to role-plays later at their leisure

Questions

good question about recordings and review: what happens in the room is not the same as what you can see in the video. Feedback from service user important

Contested Territories Panel

I didn't get very much from this, other than we've been having trouble with technology in learning for 40 years.

Learning Analytics / Open Learning Resources

Doug Clow (OU)

Learning Analytics talk from the OU. Social network analysis; finding those who are unconnected in forum interactions; change in rate of engagement in forum strongly connected with student beginning to have trouble (well, duh); strong predictive power of microassignments with final score. Slides

Lindsay Jordan (University of the Arts)

Poem about pi, song about ‘diegetic’ and other difficult words. (Open, but learning not as good as it could have been: structure imposed rather than emergent from students).

Questions

mostly focussed at hte learning analytics angle. MYK: given the strong predictive power of microassignments, why bother having a final exam? Other question about sharing the PHP scripts to interact with OU's legacy databases.

John Fothergill

Leading by example. Business course for materials scientists. Simulation. Podcasts. Rap.

“it would only take me an hour or so on a Sunday afternoon to record a 10-minute podcast”