What is digital learning for campus-based students?

What do we mean by digital learning? As someone whose role it is to be Head of Digital Learning, it is perhaps understandable that this is something that keeps me awake at night. I’m used to introducing myself at the proverbial bar as a chemist and getting the response about Breaking Bad or CSI or how my fellow drinker didn’t really like chemistry at school. With digital learning, it is usually a response relating to something technical – how platform X (no not that one) is terrible or something about virtual reality – or to be honest, a polite squinting…

Supporting students with VLE study prompts

At university level the common understanding is that we used scheduled contact time – lectures, tutorials, seminars, recitation, and blessed laboratories – to share with students whatever content we think is important about our topic. That time will typically account for anything between 25 – 50% of the workload we think students will spend on their topic. The remainder is generally classified something like “independent study time” where students are meant to learn their topic – eh – independently. I have had a long fascination with what actually happens in that “independent study time”. Busy Work The answer is complex…

AI and academic plagiarism: cause for concern?

The future of the essay as an assignment type is reportedly increasingly in doubt as new AI bots are becoming cleverer. The Guardian reported that academics were “stunned” by the latest outputs and opined that academics, journalists, and programmers’ job security were in doubt (not the programmers… won’t someone think of the programmers?!). As someone who has had to write more than enough essays on various topics in history in the last few years, I have a selfish interest in hoping that the demise of this format is rapidly accelerated. I decided to try the latest one getting attention (Chat…

Thoughts on the OfS’ “Blended Learning Review” Panel Report

The OfS have published their Blended Learning Review; comprising both the independent panel report, as well as the OfS response on things they think have regulatory implications. The panel report is very good, and is the first that I have seen that really tries to look at the landscape post COVID (while acknowledging that responses are still very much COVD influenced). So many reports and research on the pandemic to date have focussed on what students “liked” and “didn’t like” in COVID (with what seems to be a common finding that 66% of students “like” something that “33% “don’t like”)….

Design considerations for video as a learning resource

There is obviously a long history of incorporation of video as a learning tool in higher education, and of course over the last two years during the P-word, the use of video as a teaching resource has exploded. I had started a preamble on whether this was a good thing or not, but that became so long that’s going to be a separate post. (Hint: it probably isn’t.) Here the focus is on the use of video in a way that benefits learning. The challenge of video of course, is that while it’s a very good teaching tool – we…

Describing different types of virtual labs

Recently I spoke in Dublin at the 2nd DCU Virtual Labs Seminar Series. DCU and others are working in a project led by Chemistry at Maynooth University, funded by the Irish Government’s Human Capital Initiative. The focus of the presentation was on design of virtual settings – in particular bringing together (1) what we know about learning in complex settings such as labs, (2) what we know about learning in general, and (3) what we know about good e-learning design, and in the talk I ran through a prototype case study of designing a virtual HPLC experiment with these three…

Setting up OBS for screen sharing presentations and webinars

The video below looks at how to overlay presentations with a mask so that it wraps up various media into a single cohesive presentation that you can screen share. The positioning of the speaker’s webcam in virtual presentations has never been quite satisfactory. In Zoom, you disappear altogether, while in Teams you are relegated to a little blob at the bottom of the screen. There is often value in having a larger speaker view; to impart the human gestures accompanying presentation or for particular teaching moments where you might want to share some detail on camera. David Read told me 10…

A new book on teaching chemistry in higher education

This summer I published a very special book on teaching chemistry in higher education. Each chapter in the book contains some approach on teaching chemistry, written by someone who has implemented that approach more than once in their own setting. Chapters explain how the approaches are grounded in the literature, explain the rationale for the approach, and then go on to give some detail on the implementation and outcomes of the approach. Thus the book intends to be useful to those new or reconsidering approaches to teaching chemistry in higher education, as well as those involved in education development. While…

A view from Down Under

I’ve spent the last two week in Australia thanks to a trip to the Royal Australian Chemical Institute 100th Annual Congress in Melbourne. I attended the Chemistry Education symposium. So what is keeping chemistry educators busy around this part of the world? There are a lot of similarities, but some differences. While we wrestle with the ripples of TEF and the totalitarian threat of learning gains, around here the acronym of fear is TLO: threshold learning outcomes.  As I understand it, these are legally binding statements stating that university courses will ensure students will graduate with the stated outcomes. Institutions…

Mayer’s Principles: Using multimedia for e-learning (updated 2017)

Anyone involved in e-learning will know of the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, which draws together information processing model (dual coding), cognitive load theory (working memory), and the notion of active processing. You can read a little more of this in this (old) post. Anyway, for most of us who don’t do full on e-learning, Mayer’s principles have value when we make things like videos or multimedia that we wish the students to interact with outside of their time with us. As such, Mayer’s principles, as reported in The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning are well cited. Mayer has just…