The recent Pizza, Pop and Practice workshop on Sound and Vision, looking at making recordings and short video clips for use in teaching, was a tremendous success.
Participants enjoyed their pizza and pop, whilst learning about Audacity (which enables you to make short sound recordings and clips), Animoto (which allows you to make short video clips to advertise events or explain simple concepts – see Jo’s video about the workshop below), as well as looking at ways to use Microsoft Office Mix to create videos and recordings for use in powerpoints or online.
Thanks to everyone who came along and thanks in particular to Lucy Keating, Marc Bennett, Jo Robinson-Lamb and Nuala Davis for delivering such interesting workshops!
All of the materials from the workshops are now available on this blog.
Interested in using these materials in your teaching? Contact LTDS for more information and support.
On the 17th of December, the Learning and Teaching Development Service will be launching their new website, alongside the new Case Studies database.
The new LTDS website replace the old QuILT website, and will provide University staff will a clear route to find the things you need related to learning and teaching development and teaching quality assurance at Newcastle University.
We have many workshops and webinars running, and we will be developing a new booking system in the New Year.
The new Case Studies database has over 100 examples of good teaching practice across the University. Use it to inspire and support you in your teaching.
We don’t always find out about the next steps for our FutureLearners, so it was great to meet up with Bryan Wallace recently and hear how studying “Hadrian’s Wall: Life on the Roman Frontier” was a step on the ladder to signing up at for a part time Roman Frontier Studies MA here at Newcastle University.
Office Mix is a PowerPoint plugin that enables you to take new and existing presentations and transform them into interactive online learning resources that you can easily publish to your website and/or Blackboard. You can use the tool to add:
An excellent range of resources, including some more advanced features, like embedding mixes in webpages, can be found at mixforteachers.com
When you come to publish your mixes you can either publish to a personal account or use your University account which Microsoft refers to as ‘Work or School Account’. Simply sign in with your username@newcastle.ac.uk (e.g. nmb84@newcastle.ac.uk) and your university password.
If you want to track your students’ progress and engagement with your mixes via your Blackboard Module you can use the integrated Office Mix tool in the VLE. This will give you stats on a range of things that you can link to individual students including how many attempts they took to answer questions and time spent on specific slides.
Please note: Office Mix is currently in Beta which means that it could change or be removed completely in the future. We believe this is very unlikely given the growing popularity of the product and as your mix PowerPoints will remain functional as presentations it is very low risk experiment should you wish to try it.
If you wish to install Office Mix on a University machine simply request that your computing officer apply the following policy: ‘4 NUIT Office Mix Beta’
I was delighted to be asked to represent one of three UK FutureLearnpartner institutions at the first FutureLearn Asia Pacific Partner Forum, held in Shanghai, 24 & 25 November 2015.
Partner Forums are one of the things that make working with the FutureLearn partnership so useful. A chance to meet others a few times a year who are facing the same challenges, providing regular opportunities to share experiences and learn from each other, as well as influence the development of the platform. And we do really influence the development of the platform. Previously Partner Forums have happened in London, but with recent expansions in the Asia Pacific partnership, an inaugural Forum was planned in Shanghai, aiming to replicate meetings in the UK, but for Asia Pacific partners.
I set off to meet up in Shanghai with Kate Dickens, Project Lead for FutureLearn from University of Southampton, Joanna Stroud, Project Lead for FutureLearn from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Simon Nelson, CEO of FutureLearn, and 4 of his staff. We took part in a very well organised and intensive two day forum with around 70 representatives from HEIs and specialist organisations based in the Asia Pacific region, from countries including Australia, Malaysia, Japan, and Korea, as well as several Chinese institutions and representatives from the British Council and Consulate.
In a packed two days, as well as getting to know each other, we got to know a bit about how the approaches developed within UK and European FutureLearn partners were being received by more recent Asia Pacific partners, and had the opportunity to share with each other some of the things we have learned in our time developing and delivering free online courses with FutureLearn.
FutureLearn’s mantra for free online courses, which appears at the beginning of nearly every presentation, is to ‘Tell stories, provoke conversation and celebrate success’.
As Newcastle University courses have consistently succeeded in achieving higher than average engagement with our courses, I was asked to present a session on Effective Storytelling in Newcastle’s free online courses, and to sit on a panel discussing approaches to course development and sharing top tips.
For the panel session, which took place on the morning of day 2, I was on the stage with Kate Dickens from University of Southampton, David Major, Learning Technologist from FutureLearn, and Professor Hongling Zhang from Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), Lead Educator on the Intercultural Communication free online course. The session was facilitated by Kate Sandars, Partnership Manager from FutureLearn and was based on questions from the floor, which were many, and discussion around them, which was lively. The session was very much about the practical aspects of developing and delivering free online courses, and about how this aligns with institutional strategy. The panel session overran and there was much continued discussion in the following tea break.
Just before lunch on day 2 I presented a half hour slot on ‘Effective Storytelling’ in our free online courses at Newcastle University. I was pleased to be asked to do this session, as our courses consistently achieve higher than the FutureLearn average for social learning (engagement of learners with discussion and comments), and we also achieve higher than the average FutureLearn full participation rate (the nearest metric we have to ‘course completion’) – with our Ageing Well: Falls course having the highest full participation rate of any FutureLearn course to date, at 57% of those who started the course.
This indicates to us that there is something about our approach to working with teams of educators on developing our courses which works. Our focus on learning design is crucial to course success and we do focus on it a lot, right from course conception to delivery.
Why is storytelling so important? Well I think that the telling stories analogy is a great one for us to focus on. It enables us to talk about course creation in a different way, it encourages us to examine what is special about storytelling and storytellers. Why do stories work? Why are they compelling? What qualities to they have which are different to campus based courses? How can we replicate some of that in free online courses? And why is making courses online so different to making campus based programmes?
The session went down really well, and there was further lively discussion afterwards over a delicious lunch with colleagues from Monash University, the University of Malaya, RMIT, Fudan University, SISU and others.
An afternoon tea reception hosted by the British Council ended the Forum, which was an amazing privilege to be asked to attend, and which profiled the work of the University and its approach to online course development which has generated much interest from Asia Pacific HEIs. We look forward to following up with these contacts over the coming weeks. Many thanks go to Simon Nelson and his team at FutureLearn for asking us to represent established partners, for giving us the opportunity to profile our work and courses in the Asia Pacific region, and for looking after us so well in Shanghai.
In session 3 of our 3P event on Friday 27th we had a look at sound recording and sound file use. Here are a few resources we used for this part of the session:
Experience tells me that if you are doing anything with sound the quality of the recording is important – here’s a post showing that a decent microphone is a must.
If you’re sad there was no PhotoStory in this session you can see how to do something similar in Powerpoint or with Movie Maker (but let’s face it Animoto makes short work of this).
The University’s Innovation Fund awards are designed to encourage the development of new or innovative approaches to learning and teaching and to enable their dissemination across the University.
The Innovation Fund is a fantastic opportunity to propose and deliver projects with real benefit to learning, teaching, and the student experience.
Past projects have also offered stepping stones to other internal and external learning and teaching opportunities and funding (eg: evidence for the reward and recognition of teaching; HEA schemes).
Whilst Innovation Fund projects can offer opportunities to undertake educational research, it is essential that the primary focus of projects is on improving the student learning experience.
Workshops for prospective applicants to the Innovation Fund are available giving an overview of the purpose of the fund, and the responsive and strategic strands of funding.
Presentations will be made by winning Innovation Fund project teams.
Guidance will be available from the Careers Service about employing students as part of an Innovation Fund project.
Introduction to the application process, key dates, and where to find further information will also be included:
To go alongside the summer 2015 run of our Hadrian’s Wall course we held a panel discussion on the theme of “Why do we employ Visualisations“. Dr Rob Collins chaired the session and posed questions from learners on the course to our lead Educator, Professor Ian Haynes, and to Bill Griffiths, Head of Programmes at Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums.
Researchers from the School of Medical Education have won funding for a project which interviews future students to discover what they might expect from their University learning experience.
Laura Delgaty, Lynne Rawles, Joanna Matthan, Sally Munford and Claire Guilding submitted a proposal to the University’s Innovation Fund in order to complete the work.
The project looks specifically at how young people use technology and the sorts of technologies they may expect from their future learning environment.
The project also ties in with the University’s own five-year strategy to enhance their digital capability to ensure that they are catering to the needs of future generations of students.
Principal Investigator Laura Delgaty said: ‘What was really interesting was talking to these 15/16 year olds and hearing how they actually use technology.
‘We were incredibly surprised by the things that were really important to them because they were not necessarily the things that we thought.’
The project encouraged school students across Tyne and Wear to consider what attracted them to certain types of technology
‘For most of them the most important thing was that all of the software they were being asked to use could work on a number of different devices, allowing them to choose what brand of phone or i-pad etc. they wanted without being tied to a certain brand or model.
‘Obviously they asked for lots of chargers to be available but one really surprising thing was that they said that they expected fresh drinking water to be available in all teaching spaces.
‘That was just something that we’d never thought about, but I think these students are very alive to healthy lifestyle choices and drinking water is something that they expect the learning environment.’
‘It was amazing the amount of time these school students put in on answering the questions and the amount of detail they went into.
‘Some even described how they wanted different spaces to smell!
‘But what really came across was that they don’t think of technology as something new or separate. This will help contribute to the way we think about our five year strategy.
‘They think of it as something that is just there, that is just always part of their lives and which should be easy and functional and barely noticeable.’
The Innovation Fund supports projects which aim to provide innovative approaches to learning and teaching in the University.
This project was successful in the Strategic Project strand the call for this semester’s strategic strand closes on 15th January 2016.
There is also a Postgraduate Innovation Fund competition for innovative approaches to postgraduate learning or to enhancing the postgraduate experience.
