One thing I have often wondered about when considering videos/animations/audio files is that unlike something written on a piece of paper, the information in multimedia presentation moves on quite quickly. With paper, one can get a sense of the whole, see the sequence, refer back quickly to what went before. With audio or video, information, and often quite complex information, is presented at the pace of the speaker, and it takes a bit of effort to go back and review a segment (i.e. not a glance of an eye). Therefore, for technical topics like chemistry, is there an issue with…
Category: E-Learning
Lunchtime T&L Session: Video to Support Teaching
The College of Sciences and Health is hosting a series of lunchtime sessions to disseminate examples of learning, teaching and assessment methods being employed on programmes across the College. These events are designed to provide colleagues with an opportunity to learn from each-other, and to provide an opportunity to share examples of practice collected through the annual monitoring process. On Wednesday, 11th December 2013, 1:15pm to 2:45pm: 1:15 – 1:45 – Steve Meaney, School of Biological Sciences, Broadcast Video 1:45 – 2:15 – Bryan Duggan, School of Computing, Free tools for recording video 2:15 – 2:45 – Michael Seery, School of…
Flipping Lectures and the Blackboard Retention Centre
I attended a useful workshop today on the Blackboard Retention Centre, which I was aware of before, but never really looked at. However, it looks like it could be quite useful. Perhaps the reason it doesn’t look immediately useful is that the initial options set up automatically by the retention centre are too broad. When I first noticed the alerts, I had about 750. If I have two groups of students doing labs at different times, but was too lazy to set up groups, then half the class flag an alert. Therefore first task will be to turn off all alerts…
Flipped Classroom Debate
Educational innovations are a bit like political parties; people tend to advocate them passionately or dismiss them disparagingly, with both groups relying on legacy rather than evidence for their views. This week, the flipped classroom hit the headlines, with a USA Today article that presented a study of flipping the “STEM classroom”. The preliminary results found that flipping the classroom had no difference in problem solving, attitude to learning, and exam performance. It was remiss of the journalist of this article not to pick up what others later did; that the staff-student ratio at the institution in question was 1:9…
Teaching Fellowship 2013
My work on enabling students to prepare for lectures has gathered some momentum again this year with the awarding of a Teaching Fellowship for a project involving second year students. Most work to date has involved Year 1 students, focussing on introducing core concepts in advance of a lecture. These pre-lecture activities are probably best described in an Education in Chemistry article previously published. This new project extends the concept to second years, and expands on the amount of information presented in advance of the lecture. The idea is that by providing much of the “content delivery” of lecture in…
Using WordPress for E-Portfolios
Overview
The Resource Pack aims to show how WordPress web publishing platform (WordPress.org) can be a useful tool in creating and presenting e-portfolios. It aims to show what can be done technically to integrate various elements of an e-portfolio: the documentation of learning, conversation with peers and tutors, and presentation of the ‘product’ for assessment and/or feedback.[Jan 2012]
The rise and rise of clickers in chemistry
As recently as 2008, a review of clickers in Chemistry Education Research and Practice had difficulty finding reports of their use in chemistry lecture rooms. In the intervening years, the increase in usage has been nothing short of meteoric. It’s interesting to survey the recent literature to consider how clickers are used in chemistry. Simple response The first category is those who use clickers in a simple check of the class’ understanding of a topic – do they know x? King (JCE, 2011, doi: 10.1021/ed1004799) describes the use of clickers to allow a class to identify the ‘muddiest point’, with…
UnimPrezi
Prezi arrived on the scene about two (maybe three?) years ago. Since its introduction, conference attendees’ snoozing during a succession of PowerPoints has been interupted by a sense of sea-sickness induced by well-meaning presenters and their carefully crafted Prezis. All Prezis I have seen are like a PowerPoint presentation riding along a rollercoaster. They are linear in format, usually contain bullet-points (a major faux-pas in the eyes of Prezi-purists) and have a start, middle and end. They offer no additional advantage to PowerPoint. I don’t really like admitting this to the learning community, but I don’t really like Prezi. Exhibit…
On the general wonderfulness of the Learning, Teaching, and Technology Centre at DIT
I’ve done a few courses at DIT’s Learning Teaching and Technology Centre (LTTC) and am just finishing my latest, the brilliant MSc (Applied E-Learning). It’s proof, yet again, of the diversity of talent, the pragmatic inspiration, and the extent of expertise of the staff at the LTTC. Not that more proof is needed. The Centre have just hosted their second DRHEA E-Learning Summer School this week, themselves following on from in-house summer schools that have run for several years. I loitered around for the last two days at the summer school this year, and harassed a few attendees wh0 were…
Micropublishing E-books for Higher Education
The usual hype about new e-toys is familiar territory with e-books. Writing in 2008, before Kindle was launched (bK), Mark Nelson was writing in Educause that ‘some experts predict 2007 – 2009 will be the transition years for the higher education e-book market’. Obviously this hasn’t happened here, but HE publishers are gearing up for whenever a changeover does happen, with the likes of Coursesmart – a platform for a consortium of education publishers. While there is no competition with the publishing giants, I think a lot of academics have material that with some amount of work could be presented…