Toastmasters International is a very large nonprofit educational organization, with offices in 126 countries. Throughout its history, it has served over 4 million people, helping them develop and master their communication, public speaking and leadership skills. Today, the nonprofit serves more … Continue reading →

[Post by Greg Gammie, Implementations Manager at GeoMetrix Data Systems Inc.] Our company president, Justin Hearn, mentioned in a previous post that we’ve decided to continue to offer customizable learning management systems and talent management systems. But the concept of customization can be daunting for some organizations, especially if they’ve had a bad experience in […]

CC licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Pen WaggenerFor longer than I care to remember, I’ve been wishing there was greater emphasis on open text books in the UK. It seems like discussions around OER with American colleagues is somewhat disjointed, as open text books feature so heavily over there, and are so sparse here. There are huge initiatives across California and Washington, to name but two. I know there is lots of good work across the UK HE sector around open education but I think open text books offer some of the most transparent and obvious benefits for students i.e. easy access across platforms, including multimedia, FOR FREE! What’s not to love, right?So, you can imagine my delight that the University of Liverpool has successfully received JISC funding to explore ‘the institution as e-textbook publisher’. In the first instance for this project, the University will publish two open text books under Creative Commons licenses [CC BY-NC-ND I think]:Essentials for Financial Management: authored by Jason Laws of our Management School; Using Primary Sources: A Guide for Students: authored by Jonathon Hogg from History. The project is a collaboration between the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), the University Library and Liverpool University Press. Now ok, I won’t be involved in this phase as I’m not in HSS but I’m still mega-excited that we’re getting involved in this area, and hopefully, a sustainability plan will be in place to roll this initiative out more broadly across the University when the funding ceases. Fingers crossed!How good is this???If you want to learn more about exactly what's going on, feel free to holler at Andrew Barker (Head of Academic Liaison) or Anthony Colt (Director of Liverpool University Press), and if you're involved in anything like this I'd love to hear about it!Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

Art Shape is a non-profit organisation that runs a countywide programme of arts courses and projects with a specific focus on disability issues and social inclusion. Based in Brockworth, Gloucestershire, in the UK, Art Shape was established in 1993. The … Continue reading →

[Post by Greg Gammie, Implementations Manager at GeoMetrix Data Systems Inc.] Continued from previous post. Our statement of work (SOW) document answers the five basic questions of who, what, where, when and, in this case, how much. The SOW identifies the customer representative requesting the work along with the specialist at GeoMetrix responsible for the […]

Even though June is official end of a study year, we still got aver 200 message from you with various ideas for improvements via UserVoice. Thus we made June or official "improve everything" month, in particular we: Set all embedded … Continue reading →

I've been thinking about visualising a student's assessments diary on a timeline for quite a while now, and that has been spurred with a conversation with a colleague Peter Alston. It was timely that I came across some stuff when accessing the new briefing papers on assessment and feedback in the JISC toolkit.What typically happens in many schools/faculties/institutions, is that many modules are assessed by way of:Traditional high stakes exam or essay;With significant weighting;And assignment deadlines all within the same 7-14 day period. So typically twice a year students are mega stressed to meet 4 (or more) high stakes deadlines. If we visualise this, assessments are all bunched together at the end of semesters and there is a lot of stress. So it's logical we think about:How we assess students, both formatively and summatively;The burden of assessment across a period of time placed upon students.I'm not going to touch too much onto setting meaningful assessments, but more so about the nature and timing of those assessments. We don't necessarily consider what else students have on i.e. another 3 high stakes assessment tasks. So the call to introduce lower stakes assessment is great for this reason, let alone providing greater opportunity to feed forward into future assignments.As an example, I introduced my final year eLearning Multimedia students to a continuous assessment of reflective blogging, which I thought worked really well - even for a subject where we don't traditionally emphasise the practice of reflection. The result - meaningful short pieces of writing, with lower stress levels, and ongoing feedback (by way of comments and even peer feedback). I would definitely follow suit again.(Figure 1. visualises three alternatives for assessments, but these could really blend to include a mix of low and medium stakes assessments).Now I seldom see a discussion across modules, to deliberately focus on a) when we are assessing students, and b) how we're assessing them. Shouldn't such a discussion be paramount to curriculum development at a programme level to ensure students are not a) over assessed, and b) are assessed by meaningful tasks rather than the same old same old?As I said this something my colleague is interested in within the School of Life Sciences here at Liverpool, and I'm keen to get something going across the other schools as well.If you are interested in this area, it's worth following the links through to the JISC toolkit as there is plenty of good reading to be had, in particular, the work of the ESCAPE Project at Hertfordshire.Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

[Post by Greg Gammie, Implementations Manager at GeoMetrix Data Systems Inc.] Continued from previous post. We’ve found that our SOW process works on several levels and in a number of project stages. In the design phase, the SOW process provides the person requesting the work to define a clear picture of the project requirements. The […]

[Post by Arden Rose, Account Manager at GeoMetrix Data Systems Inc.] Veronica Zaman, vice president of Human Resources and Learning at Scripps Health in San Diego, Calif., believes that learning culture and programs play an important role in the success of any large company. Read what she had to say in a question and answer […]

After a triple booking and some hectic late cancellations, I was able to present my work to date on VLE minimum standards at the ALT North West Special Interest Group, convened by Chris Jones and Alex Spiers of Liverpool John Moores University.It was a great event (unsurprisingly) and I managed to share quite a bit of info. There was also some great discussion about some of the things - for example the inclusion of past exam papers or online discussion forums in minimum standards. In fact, the terminology of 'minimum standards' was discussed - UCLAN call their's the Digital Shift Project, which puts a nice creative spin on it. I think we've decided to stick with Blackboard Baseline.Anyway, I've embedded my slides from Slideshare below, so feel free to access/share as you see fit. Slideshare notes feature hasn't been working great so I've pasted them in below.Peter@reedyreedles Presentation of work around VLE Minimum Standards at the North West ALT SIG (7/5/14) from Peter Reed Presentation NotesThis presentation shares the work I’ve done over the past year. I have received a small grant from ELESIG to disseminate this work. The presentation will share my work around minimum standards, and in particular sector-wide subscription to VLE Minimum standards and activity at UoL    Criteria identified across the sector included in their minimum standards.  The most popular….    Work from the Liverpool Guild of Students was one key driver for this work. Their report identified significant inconsistencies between blackboard module areas and called for a plicy action. This has been picked up in the new University TEL strategy, and furthermore, played a significant role in a three phase audit I’ve conducted within the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences.  In both a staff (n=102) and student (n=840) surveys, the same question was asked. Respondents identified criteria they felt should be included in any series of minimum standards. An ‘other’ option enabled wider responses.  Student responses. The most popular items selected included: Lecture Notes/handouts Past exam papers (although this is more likely relating to some type of sample question(s) to familiarise themselves with the type of questions they would face in summative assessment, rather than necessarily the past 5 years worth of complete papers. Further Reading Timetable Contact details for module leader  Staff responses were similar - although there is a similar pattern in responses, fewer responses were received for each item.  Comparison of student and staff responses  Comparison of student and staff responses   This slide demonstrates the individual items with the largest difference in responses between student and staff. Often staff are concerned about releasing past exam papers because e.g. they may reuse papers each year. Housing/access of papers can be an issue also. Repository can solve this Module Specs is an interesting issue because they already exist. Why are staff hesitant? Perhaps a concern that they’re written for a different audience but closer inspection suggests otherwise.  Which criteria should we include in any policy, and how many student responses warrants includsion? For example, over half of student responses want online discussion forums in every module area…  Computing services department have developed a custom Bb building block to pull information from TULIP - our central system housing module specs. Each piece of information is held in its own field and can be accessed.  Tulip view 1  Tulip view 2  Bb view 1 - Module overview page will be automatically created for every module  Bb view 2   Ethical approval has been granted to investigate students desires for minimum standards in more detail e.g. how they access and why they want these things. This work has also proposed a conceptual framework for considering minimum standards, based on the work of management theorist Frederik Herzberg (1960s). His two factor theory suggests factors that cause dissatisfaction are not necessarily the same as those that cause satisfaction. I am proposing this might be true of many of the minimum standards e.g. they may prevent dissatisfaction but not cause satisfaction if present. More can be read at http://thereeddiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/tel-herzbergs-two-factor-theory.html  I have mapped these dissatisfiers (hygiene factors) and satisfiers (motivators) against Maslow’s heirarchy of needs.  This adapted SIEME model demonstrates the impact of motivators and hygiene factors, and suggests resolving dissatisfaction should be a priority ahead of satisfiers.   The Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License