December 2022 – FMS TEL

2022 Roundup

This post summarises posts from 2022 – thank you to all of our contributors!

We hope you have enjoyed learning more about the work we do in FMS TEL, below are a few areas we covered and successes we had in 2022. If you have any suggestions for content for 2023 we would love to hear from you.

Awards and Prizes

Ashley Reynolds and Eleanor Gordon were delighted to be announced winners of the ‘Best Video Award’ during the NU Teaching & Learning Conference for their video ‘Creating and using animations to explain concepts’.

Eleanor Gordon (left) and Ashley Reynolds (right)

Work done by the School of Dentistry and FMS TEL Team won first prize at the Trans-European Pedagogic Anatomical Research Group Hybrid Conference this year, for the presentation on ‘Adopting a flexible approach to professional anatomy spotter exams during COVID’. Newcastle Staff can view the poster here for an overview or read the internal news item on SharePoint.

2022 Conferences

For the second year running we ran our very own FMS TEL conference. We had sessions on Accessibility, Augmented Reality, Lab Teaching, Escape Rooms and more. The materials are available on the FMS TEL Conference 2022 page.

Several members of the FMS TEL team also attended the NULT Conference this year, giving strong representation of the team. We delivered sessions on Developing audio commentated interviews, Designing Convertible Teaching and Using Canvas Commons.

Technology, Software and Systems

WRS Screenshot: individual workload summary

This year we showcased The FMS Workload Reporting System (WRS) and the new Personal Tutoring Application.

We explored 3D scanners and 360° Cameras and advanced our use of Canvas and PowerPoint.

Tips and Guides

We did quick fix posts for Screen Sharing with Presenter View, Additional scroll bars in canvas and Searching Outlook Emails.

We have shared guides on Captioning, Transcription and, how to improve teaching with Motion tracking in Recorded Presentations and the use of timers in synchronous teaching.

Assessment and Feedback were important topics this year with posts on Instant Feedback, Live Feedback, Virtual Oral Presentations and Effective Rubrics.

Thank You!

The blog is edited by a different FMS TEL team member every month, and many team members have taken on this task, as well as contributing posts to the blog – thank you to all of you! Our thanks also go to those colleagues who have offered their examples of practice for us to showcase here. We look forward to working with many more of you in 2023.

FMS TEL Conference 2022 – behind the scenes

This post is a review of the conference experience by FMS TEL members John Keogan and Andy Stokes.

This years conference was going to be a bit different to any conference we had ran in the past, the decision was made for the 2022 conference to be hybrid! We would run in-person presentations, online only sessions, and some sessions would be a hybrid of both. We were excited to take advantage of the video-conferencing technologies on offer within the University.

Using lessons learnt from last years online version, we set out tasks to complete and deadlines to meet.

The Tasks

We divided the main tasks between us and ran through the list of jobs involved in preparing for the conference. We quickly realised that there was lot more involved than we initially thought!

The main tasks included:

timetabling
booking rooms
communications (including mail merges)
creating online conference materials

One aspect of the preparation was getting word out about the conference. We approached schools within the faculty and asked them to put up posters in areas with heavy footfall, as well as staffrooms. We put up posters in cafes, corridors and even lifts – please let us know if you saw them! We also requested that the campus messaging screens carried information about the conference in FMS areas.

Tips

Room Bookings

Consider your criteria before booking, for example:
- ‘Is the room big enough?’
- ‘Do the speakers work?’
- ‘Can we connect a laptop to the projectors?’
The room bookings website is not always accurate when you nominate the relative criteria; i.e. ‘Hybrid’, ‘videoconference’ etc.
Give yourself enough time to visit the rooms in person (It’s also worthwhile booking the rooms for when you plan to test them, as they can be snapped up pretty quickly in term time).
Reserved your rooms well in advance!

Technology

Contact the Audio Visual team for a demonstration of the hybrid technology. They showed us how to set up and use the cameras and mics, and also how to troubleshoot common problems.
Consider your booking platform and its limitations, we used workshops.ncl which required us to use an iCal maker so delegates could add the events to their diaries.
Familiarise yourself with video editing software. As a team we edited the recordings using a mix of ReCap, Premiere Pro and Adobe Rush.
Schedule a block of time to review captions. We have some excellent posts on how to edit your captions.

Conclusion

Overall, the conference was a great success and we all enjoyed our time being part of the 2022 FMS TEL Conference team.

Being new to running a conference we developed skills and knowledge during the journey. The encouragement and support from our team helped ensure that we fulfilled our tasks and that looming deadlines were met.

We learned things that we will do different, or better, next year and we hope the tips shared in this post will be a good starting point for anyone wanting to run their own conference.