See my story: Collaborative Inquiry #toldwithvoice #ontCL #ossemooc #npdl http://t.co/NropGOARS9 — Deborah McCallum (@Bigideasinedu) September 12, 2014 Deborah McCallum

CC BY-NC-SA flickr photo by giulia.forsythe I know every now and again there’s a discussion about why we include the ‘e’ in eLearning. Or maybe even eAssessment. Surely after all this time it can be taken for granted that technology plays a part in our daily workflows and subsequently has a role in assessment and feedback?I’ve been giving some thought to the ‘e’ in Feedback lately and wondered, does it even matter? What role does technology - the ‘e’ - have upon the student experience of receiving (good) feedback? What proportion of students are really all that bothered about the feedback in the first place? Some literature suggests up to 20% of students don’t collect their feedback. Other literature suggests students only access feedback if their mark differed from what they expected. I’m also pretty sure I read something about students not returning to ‘old’ feedback e.g. last year’s work. [I'll try to dig out these links/papers again].For those students that are concerned with feedback, what actually constitutes ‘good’ feedback? I think ‘good’ feedback has to boil down to scaffolding students to achieve the set learning outcomes e.g. improving performance and perhaps feed into future assessments. Literature might tell us there can be a trade off between quality and timeliness of feedback. For example brief but timely feedback might be of more value than more detailed feedback provided 4 weeks down the line. So there’s a balance to be had here. Time Vs Detail.So where does the ‘e’ fit in here? Beyond the obvious benefits of reduced paper and travel, does it matter?To muddy the water further, I wonder what students evaluate as being good. Is it the same as what we think, pedagogically, is good? I’ve seen some work that suggests students liked receiving audio feedback as it was something they could return to easily or that it was more personal and had more of a human touch to it. However, my own work showed that less than half of students in my survey (n=860) were interested in receiving audio feedback - is that because they may never have experienced it? Other work has suggested formative audio feedback did not improve student performance in summative work (in comparison with written feedback sample). So I think questioning the impact of the 'e' here is valid so that we can really introduce systems, processes and procedures that are fit-for-purpose.I think ultimately, students would accept good/useful paper based feedback over poor eFeedback. But moreover, I wonder if we might reach a point where what we think is good from a pedagogical perspective doesn’t align with how students evaluate it/us in the NSS. What will happen then? Do we change our practice so students really are customers or consumers or do we stick to our pedagogic argument? With the invasion of silicon valley into the education landscapes, this could be an area to watch. Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

In part I of this series, we talked about the preparation of existing content as you move toward conversion into online delivery. As we discussed, we first perform analysis to identify the updates and changes to the content since its last revision. Then we spend time trimming off any excess information that’s not needed for our objective. In part II, we’ll look at the last two questions that I used to guide me through the process of moving content to the new format:          How do I organize the content?          How to I put it all together?

We are in an era of urgent need for digital and media literacy skills. Our students cannot, not should not wait anymore. As a result, pedagogical changes must be made now in order to facilitate the process of students acquiring the necessary skills, while still increasing their achievement. The power of digital media is already […]

#125145242 / gettyimages.com The following is a basic Thinglink that represents the different levels of reading difficulties and basic strategies for scaffolding instruction:   //www.thinglink.com/card/552293768997371904 Common Reading Difficulties and corresponding strategies. Related articles Metacognition, Common Reading Difficulties & Edtech ThingLink Now Lets You Annotate Videos, Too Tagged: Big Ideas in Education, education, Google, IPad, Literacy, […]

Sheila MacNeil's recent post 'Living with the VLE Dictator' really got me thinking and questioning the role of the VLE and the different narratives bounding around HE at the moment. From her post, I came across D'Arcy Norman's post: 'On the false binary of LMS Vs. open', and via a twitter discussion between Sheila and Martin Weller, to this post by Jim Groom and Brian Lamb on Reclaiming Innovation.For quite some time it's felt like everyone is against the VLE. The cool thing to do is to rip it apart and be 'disruptive' (a term in itself which I hate). Remember 'the VLE is Dead' debate? These go beyond Blackboard Vs Moodle Vs Whatever. Often the debate is about the actual presence of any restrictive, centralised, corporate, closed, VLE. But I have many issues with these debates and as Sheila points out, getting rid of the VLE would cause mayhem.The reality of higher education today is that some mechanism is needed to support learning, teaching and assessment (and its administration, etc). We have the VLE. Yes we know VLEs are not the most innovative products in the tech industry, but do they really need to be? My work in surveying students to attend to VLE Minimum Standards / Baseline suggests what they're asking for is relatively basic stuff - access to information (contact details, etc), notes/slides or even recordings of lectures, and to be able to submit their work online. So just because students practically live in Facebook, it doesn't mean we have to be there. And just because they'll create groups and discuss work there it doesn't mean we should control it. Or even replicate it.Now I don't mean to pick apart Jim and Brian's post here as I respect both of them massively, but there are just too many points that I disagree with - so what I have to say here is less about me disagreeing with them in particular, but more with these popular debates that have been circling for a while.The notion that the closed VLE encourages silos is hugely false. Yes I'm an advocate of openness as well but the culture within HEIs is not all that open. Yes there are certain places doing good stuff and some wonderful people doing amazing work, but by and large the 4 HEIs I've worked at over the past 10 years balk at the idea of putting their content 'out there' (and even more so at level 7 where content == CPD income). I've worked on funded OER projects but beyond the scope of the project and its funding period, rolling that innovation out wider is unbelievably difficult. So no, the VLE doesn't encourage silos, it is the modularisation of education which is inherently silo based, and thus is reflected in the system which serves and supports it. A drastic change to the structure, administration and teaching of higher education will be followed by a more reflective/reflecting system.Something else I disagree with is the view of doing everything possible to 'minimise reliance on an enterprise VLE'. This is awful advice, not least because generally, the institutional support is there to ensure the system is available and working. Those free and open services you might come to rely on could start to charge (as we've seen many times) or even worse, close shop all together. That would also be relying on academic staff to be skilled enough to find and use an open site to publish on, and then confident enough to be able to migrate content to a new platform when shit hits the fan.On a related point, I kind of recognise that VLEs don't encourage wider digital literacies or web skills, they only develop skills that are useful to that setting and irrelevant when the student leaves. Well, to some degree this is true, but navigating a 'clunky' VLE is not a million miles away from navigation a clunky web, and the practice of communicating in a VLE forum is not a million miles away from interacting on some other platform. So there is some transferability there, but that situation wouldn't be any different if we used Wordpress or anything else out there - we'd be conditioning people to a particular system. Furthermore, D'Arcy highlights his 'Law of eLearning Tool Convergence' which is relevant, in that: "Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached". I believe this is true. The very nature of education and its accountability and quality processes demand control. Going off piste just wouldn't work!The reality of 'disruption' in education is not what many commentators suggest. Yes MOOCs have got the attention of the media and of many VCs, etc, but to think that they will completely transform education is a huge falsity. What was the last thing to truly disrupt education - and I mean to disrupt it so much that it fundamentally changes learning, teaching and assessment? The web as a whole, yes. An individual system, not so much.I think many commentators have to be either utopian or dystopian about technology in HE. Considering those at either end of a continuum, you'll find 'Reality' somewhere in the middle. Technological advances will seldom have a truly disruptive effect on higher education because it is not a tech industry. It's a people industry. And as such, the success of any technology will ultimately depend on a) how it's implemented and b) how it's received by the people that use it (students and staff). That's not to say technology doesn't or won't have an impact, but we're talking about higher education here. Things take waaayyy toooooo long to change!Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

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CC BY-SA flickr photo by quinn.anyaSo as of the 1st October, I'll officially be a part-time PhD student. I'm registered within the University of Liverpool and supervised by Helen O'Sullivan (internal) and Chris Jones (external) from Liverpool John Moores University.I'll be studying the use of social media within medical education, and in particular looking at how student use of various social media tools and practices. Or at least I think that's what I'm going to be looking at - I've been open in that this is an area I'm interested in (SoMe) and have reasonably good access within our School of Medicine. I've engaged in some literature early on and hope that a systematic review will help narrow down exactly what it is I am asking.I'm sure this will be a challenge, especially given mini-me will be arriving in November, and I'm really looking forward to learning more about research and being a researcher. I've done bits of research over the years and published a few times, but I'm aware there so much for me to learn. I'm also conscious that I will have to curb the varied topics I'm really interested in.So here goes....So as well as the other stuff a blog here, there'll be some #PhDProgress posts as well :-)Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

First Nations, Metis & Inuit cultures are built upon oral traditions. From time immemorial, Talking Circles have been essential to maintaining and passing down important information of a culture. This strategy is also a great tool that can be used to create a metaphorical ‘bridge’ between teachings of the First Nations, Metis, Inuit, & Western […]

As I've blogged previously, last year I done a reasonably large 3 phased piece of work to audit existing practice within my Faculty at the University of Liverpool, as well as survey academic staff and students. Well I'm happy to say the staff survey part is now published in the latest volume of Research in Learning Technology.The staff survey didn't exactly receive a huge amount of responses but I think it's of interest because of the topics it covers. I hope people find it useful anyway.Further to earlier work carried out by the student union (SU) along with strategic discussions regarding technology-enhanced learning (TEL), this research aimed to identify the attitudes and experience of teaching staff in relation to specific uses of technology in learning and teaching. Data obtained through an online questionnaire (n=100) suggest that teaching staff are generally agreeable to the need for consistency in the virtual learning environment and identify specific criteria to be included within ‘minimum standards’; have some experience and interest in solutions to enable online submission, marking and feedback; and whilst there is more resistance, there was still interest in the provision of recorded lectures. Respondents overwhelmingly identified lack of time as a significant barrier to engaging with TEL, as well as other factors such as lack of skills and support. Reed, P (2014) Staff experience and attitudes towards Technology Enhanced Learning initiatives in one Faculty of Health & Life Sciences. Research in Learning Technology. 2014, Vol 22.Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License