I’m always a little envious when people tell me they were students of chemistry at Glasgow during Alex Johnstone’s time there. A recent read from the Education in Chemistry back-catalogue has turned me a shade greener. Let me tell you about something wonderful. The concept of working memory is based on the notion that we can process a finite number of new bits in one instance, originally thought to be about 7, now about 4. What these ‘bits’ are depend on what we know. So a person who only knows a little chemistry will look at a complex organic molecule…
Category: E-Learning
Why do academics use technology in teaching?
This week is All Aboard week in Ireland, essayed at “Building Confidence in Digital Skills for Learning”. I am speaking today in the gorgeous city of Galway on this topic, and came across this paper in a recent BJET which gives some useful context. It summarises interviews with 33 Australian academics from various disciplines, on the topic of why they used technology in assessment. While the particular lens is on assessment, I think there are some useful things to note for those espousing the incorporation of technology generally. Four themes emerge from the interviews The first is that there is…
Rounding up the peer review and digital badge project
Marcy Towns’ lovely paper from 2015 described the use of digital badges in higher education chemistry, specifically for assessment of laboratory skills. This work was important. The concept of badges had been around for a while. When I first came across them while doing an MSc in E-Learning back in 2010, laboratory work seemed an obvious place to use them. But while the technology promised a lot, there wasn’t feasible systems in place to do it. And what exactly would you badge, anyway? And would undergraduate students really take a digital badge seriously? Towns’ work was important for several reasons. On…
Using the Columbo approach on Discussion Boards
As pat of our ongoing development of an electronic laboratory manual at Edinburgh, I decided this year to incorporate discussion boards to support students doing physical chemistry labs. It’s always a shock, and a bit upsetting, to hear students say that they spent very long periods of time on lab reports. The idea behind the discussion board was to support them as they were doing these reports, so that they could use the time they were working on them in a more focussed way. The core aim is to avoid the horror stories of students spending 18 hours on a…
Using digital technology to assess experimental science
The following was a pre-conference piece submitted to a Royal Society conference on assessment in practical science. Summary A modern laboratory education curriculum should embrace digital technologies with assessment protocols that enable students to showcase their skills and competences. With regards to assessment, such a curriculum should: incorporate the digital domain for all aspects related to experimental work; preparations, activities, reflections; provide a robust and valid assessment framework but with flexibility for individuality; emphasise to students the role of documenting evidence in demonstrating skills and competences by means of micro-accreditation, such as digital badges. This paper summarizes how some digital…
Video: e-portfolios for documenting learning in the 21st century
Here is a talk I gave to school teachers at an NCCA event in Dublin Castle earlier this year. It discusses: Why and how we should enable students create digital artefacts to document their learning? Practical approaches to doing this – discussing digital badges and wikis in particular.
Finding out about Learning Analytics
I’m attending the JISC Learning Analytics network meeting (information), which is giving a good overview on the emerging development of learning analytics, and its integration into higher education. Learning analytics aims to harness data about students interactions and engagement with a course, whatever can be measured, and use that in an intelligent way to inform and empower students about their own academic journey. Of course, one of the major questions being discussed here is what data is relevant? This was something I explored when looking at developing a model to help tutors predict student performance and identify at-risk students (see CERP:…
What are your thoughts on lecture flipping?
I am giving a keynote at the AHEAD conference in March, and the lecture itself will be a flipped lecture on lecture flipping. The audience will be a mixture of academics and support staff from all over Europe and beyond, and the idea is that they will watch the presentation in advance (hmmmm) and we will then use the time during the actual conference presentation to discuss emerging themes. I will be highly caffeinated. In order to address some of the issues around lecture flipping that face most educators, I would be interested to hear thoughts from lecturers and support…
A future direction for clickers?
Clickers are routinely used to survey class on their understanding of topics or test their knowledge with quizzes, and as technology has developed, there have been clever ways of doing this (See: The Rise and Rise…). One issue that arises is that as lecturers, we don’t have a convenient way to know what individual students think, or what their answer is. Enter this recent paper from BJET, An Augmented Lecture Feedback System to support Learner and Teacher Communication. This paper describes a clicker-based system, but instead of (or as well as) a lecturer viewing a chart of responses, the lecturer sees the…
Showing hints in Blackboard Quizzes
A previous post showed how to include hints and worked examples in quiz questions in the now old Blackboard, BB 8. With the new Blackboard 9, is this still possible? It seems the hint option (i.e. an alert box) still works. Including the code shown below using the HTML editor option, a button is included in the question text: <form name=”myform”> <p>(This is the Question text)What is the answer to 1 + 23</p> <p><input type=”button” value=”Hint” onclick=”alert(‘This is a hint’)” /></p> </form> Note that the question text can be subsequently edited. The hint text “This is a hint” in the above…