At the Newcastle Teaching and Learning conference in April, I received a NUTELA award for my presentation “Who wants to be millionaire as a game for Pharmacy Curriculum”. I have used an adapted version of this game as part of my biology seminars for Stage 1 Pharmacy-students. I did this to make the seminar sessions more fun and engaging thanks the competitive nature of the game, but at the same time to test a new approach to facilitate student knowledge retention on a difficult topic of biology, such as immunology is.
The game worked well and the data collected showed that it augments student knowledge retention. Student feedback showed that the game activity was very engaging and that students appreciated working in teams for the game. Therefore, a second aim to keep this game in the seminar sessions, is to help students to practise the team-work skills that they will need in their career. In the feedback form, students acknowledged that they prefer a game activity to a seminar and underlined how enjoyable this is. One student said: “Much better than seminars” Another student said: “Thoroughly enjoyed the session”.
Thanks to the NUTELA award, I was able to fund part of my journey to the Biennal Monash Pharmacy symposium in Prato (Italy) last July, where I presented my work to Pharmacy educators coming from all the world. It was a great experience, I networked with a number of colleagues who expressed interest in the game and in applying it in their own institutions.
The Advance HE National Teaching Fellowship scheme is a prestigious, national competition where nominees submit a reflective account of their approach as an educator, hoping to be one of the 55 NTF’s created annually. The University is delighted to announce that all three of the institution’s nominees have been awarded National Teaching Fellowship.
Dr Lindsey Ferrie, School of Biomedical Sciences
Dr Lee Fawcett, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics
Turnitin have organised an interactive webinar on contract cheating, presented by Dr. Thomas Lancaster and Dr. Irene Glendinning.
The webinar will discuss contract cheating, including recent developments in the contract cheating industry and consider why we need to take action to address contract cheating.
The webinar will launch the fourth International Day of Action against Contract Cheating, which takes place on October 16, 2019, and provide opportunities for you to make suggestions and ask questions about the event.
The first webinar will be on Wednesday 14th August at 11:00 British Summer Time. Register here.
The second webinar will be on Monday 16th September 14:00. Register here.
Newcastle Educators is a peer-led community of educators, who value the opportunity to get together and discuss common interests and who are committed to continued professional development and peer review.
Newcastle Educators bring together this community through a series of events called EduBites.
These lunch-time sessions cover a wide range of topics related to learning and teaching, and are a chance to hear from colleagues, make connections with other educators and share ideas, all over a spot of lunch.
We also run an informal and supportive peer observation scheme – get in touch to find out more.
Newcastle Educators community is for all academics and professional service staff with an interest in learning and teaching at the university. From those just embarking on their careers to those with a wealth of experience to share.
By Graeme Redshaw-Boxwell, Learning Enhancement and Technology Team Manager
Following on from a University wide consultation undertaken at the start of the academic year, LTDS have further developed the Learning and Teaching Development programme for 2019/20.
From September 2019 the Learning and Teaching Development programme will move to a combination of both face to face and online support.
This new holistic offer will include pathways through the programme which can support:
Staff new to Newcastle University:
o Looking for how they can get started with Newcastle University supported teaching, learning and assessment tools, techniques and pedagogies with a set of Learning and Teaching Essentials online, face to face workshops and webinars.
o Needing to evidence their work for professional recognition by Advance HE against the UK Professional Standards Framework through the Newcastle Education Practice Scheme for probationary requirements.
Professional services and academic staff wishing to take advantage of support in evidencing their work for professional recognition by Advance HE against the UK Professional Standards Framework through the Newcastle Education Practice Scheme (NEPS).
Existing staff in using technologies and exploring pedagogies to enhance learning, teaching and assessment through new Quick Guides online, and scheduled workshops and webinars in September and January.
Programme teams in developing new or revising existing programmes or programme portfolios with bespoke sessions.
School based bespoke sessions which build on Learning and Teaching Essentials and Quick Guides.
What’s different?
A new set of Learning and Teaching Essentials and TEL Quick Guides will be available online, for reminders and self paced familiarisation with tools, techniques and policy related to learning and teaching at Newcastle University. There will be fewer scheduled workshops and webinars, which, from September 2019 will be focussed in September and January.
Scheduled workshops continue to be listed at http://elements.ncl.ac.uk and all LTDS run workshops described there can also be offered as school based bespoke sessions.
Thank you to everyone who took part in the launch of the Education Strategy Series ‘The Art of the Possible’ on 1-5 July 2019. It was excellent to see so many staff from across the campus engaging with this first week of activities under the theme Technology Enhanced Learning.
Throughout the week we explored The Art of Accessible and Inclusive Digital Content through interactive practical workshops, lightning talks showcasing some excellent approaches to creating accessible and flexible resources, and video case studies. We also welcomed Alistair McNaught, Subject Specialist in Accessibility and Inclusion on Thursday 4 July. Alistair delivered a mixture of practical, strategic and collaborative sessions to raise awareness and confidence in digital accessibility, and the new public sector web accessibility legislation.
Dr Chloe Duckworth from the School of History, Classics and Archaeology has used engaging, bespoke online resources and a range of practical group activities to create a relaxed learning environment for her students.
Find out more from Chloe in the video below as she describes how she considers accessibility issues and ensures an inclusive approach to teaching.
If you are interested in reading more about Chloe’s case study or other case studies of effective practice take a look at the case studies website.
Professor Suzanne Cholerton, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Education, introduces this brand new series of Education Strategy focussed events, showcasing ‘The Art of the Possible’.
This first week focusses on Technology Enhanced Learning given our commitment in the Education Strategy to an educational experience supported and enhanced by technology.
Find out more from Professor Cholerton in the video below.
All events and activities will be delivered in a light, fun and adventurous way and we are looking forward to engaging with colleagues from across the University. Take a look at the programme and find out how to register.
If you are interested in future ‘The Art of the Possible’ events and other learning and teaching news, events and case studies sign up to the learning and teaching newsletter.
Alistair McNaught, Subject Specialist, Accessibility and Inclusion
A long time coming…
Disability legislation has required organisations to make “reasonable adjustments” for disabled people since 1995. Unfortunately, the legislation did not define what a reasonable adjustment might look like. For the next 23 years, equalities legislation tried to improve the lived experience of disabled people, but without clarity about what was ‘reasonable’ it often failed. Many disabled students drop out of University courses not because the intellectual challenge is too hard, but because negotiating the basic resources is a daily uphill struggle.
The new public sector web accessibility legislation changes everything. For the first time ever it makes a concrete link between a failure to make a reasonable adjustment and a failure to meet the “accessibility requirement” for websites, VLEs and VLE content. The accessibility requirement for digital content is well established – so it’s very easy to tell if resources fail the ‘reasonable adjustment’ test.
Competence more than compliance
This does not mean not every teaching professional now has to become an accessibility professional, any more than an academic referencing a paper is expected to be an information professional. What it does mean is that professional communicators are expected to communicate using conventions and practices that minimise barriers. With a significant proportion of teaching staff having self-taught IT skills it’s little surprise that we don’t always know the best way to make our resources accessible. But the relevant skills are learned very quickly. They also benefit considerably more students than the 10% with visible or invisible disabilities.
Accessibility for everyone
For too many years, accessibility has “belonged to” the disability support team. This is as unrealistic as hygiene in a restaurant belonging to the chef, with nobody else having awareness of training. Higher education institutions have complex digital ecosystems and accessibility needs to be a ‘hygiene factor’ that threads through the organisation’s policy and practice. The encouraging thing is that the vast majority of accessibility is a combination of good design, good practice, good resources, good pedagogy and good procurement policies. What is there not to like?
Find out more
In the Education Strategy Series: The Art of the Possible, Alistair McNaught will work with different groups of staff in the University to try to do what accessibility should do for everyone: enlighten, empower, support and inspire. Bring your own experience, skill and ambition – the catalysts for culture change.
Whilst I’m normally on this blog talking about Numbas, this post is dedicated to something else that I take a keen interest in: lecture capture. It describes a pilot project that was funded by the NUTELA group to deploy short, re-purposed ReCap videos in a large engineering module. These were made available to students in addition to the full length ReCap lecture capture, and sat alongside formative tests associated with the content.
A disclaimer, before I go any further… this is a dump of my current thoughts on the topic, and it will save the next person who asks me about ReCap/short videos from suffering me talking at them for an hour! As a result, it’s part project report, opinion piece and tutorial! Despite lacking any focus whatsoever, I hope that you find something interesting…
Motivation
I have been interested for some time in the use of lecture capture. I originally wasn’t a fan, mainly citing a hatred of hearing my own voice! I have managed to get over that though, and spend a lot of time in computer clusters, where I see first-hand the benefits of ReCap for students. I am particularly fond of telling the story of asking a student which ‘psych-up’ music he was listening to on his headphones before a big class test… he was listening to me giving a lecture!
Whilst the opportunity to catch up on lectures is clearly very beneficial – in particular, as the associated report mentions, for students with disabilities and those competing in elite sport (and I’ll also throw in those with families or caring responsibilities) – it does not appear to be the primary use of ReCap. This aligns completely with what I see in our computer clusters, which is predominantly students using the resource to prepare for class tests and exams.
Let me reiterate that I’m a big fan of the ReCap provision, before going on to make the following two observations:
1) Our current set up of teaching resources is often very siloed within the VLE. Typically a module might have a separate Blackboard folder for each of lecture notes, additional resources, formative assessments, whatever else… and certainly the default is a separate folder of ReCap videos. But if students are revising a topic for an exam, putting practicalities aside, it seems to make sense for the video content on a topic to sit side-by-side with the other course material.
This was just one of the motivations for our course material tool “Coursebuilder” (which will be the topic of my next blog post here as it happens), to have a stronger integration between different course resources. And it is surprisingly easy (after discovering the method as part of this project) to embed videos next to your lecture notes in Blackboard itself. See the Process for creating videos section below.
2) Slightly more pertinent to this post, our ReCap videos are presented to students as a separate video for each teaching session. Again from a practicality perspective, this seems like the only sensible thing to do, but from the student perspective, is this box-set of lectures the best way for the “series” to be divided, if it is being used for revision? Often topics are split over multiple lectures, or multiple topics are covered in one lecture. In maths, the subject of this project, lectures often contain distinct sections of theory and application/exercises. The student might only be interested in one of those when they come to revise.
A note on the indexing of ReCap videos for mathematics… You may have noticed that ReCap videos containing PowerPoint automatically generate a list of contents. Panopto basically identifies section headings in the presentation. In mathematics, it is rare to see a PowerPoint presentation, they are usually delivered using the visualiser or whiteboard, or as a LaTeX document. Content information can be added, but only manually after the fact.
The Project
Last Spring, colleagues in engineering maths, David Swailes and John Appleby, approached me to discuss short videos in the ENG1001 Engineering Mathematics module. David had heard of the work of Professor Chris Howls at the University of Southampton, who had successfully used short personal capture videos to enhance a calculus course. We discussed several possible formats for short videos, including something on the lines of what Chris had done, but the nature of the ENG1001 module lent itself to a slightly different and straightforward approach: to re-use a previous year’s ReCap collection. This is because almost precisely the same module content has been delivered (very successfully) over a number of years; last year’s ReCap videos would be almost identical to this year’s.
