Week 2 webinar recording now available

25/04/2013 in Course information

Thanks to everyone who took part in ocTEL’s weekly webinar yesterday.

If you missed all or part of the week 2 webinar, the materials from the session are now available at the links below:

Everything is also available on the Course Materials page, which is updated weekly with materials from each live webinar.

Join us next Wednesday at 12:30 BST for the week 3 webinar on Active Learning. Check the Course Materials page for more information.

Signposts

24/04/2013 in Course information

Hopefully now you now feel confident about finding the places, people and opportunities within ocTEL that might best support your learning. With so much activity going on across channels, one of our challenges is providing ways for you to find your way in this broad landscape, highlighting and directing you to clusters of activity that might be useful to you. As the course evolves we are trying to respond to your needs so in this post I wanted to signpost some places you might not have been aware of which will allow you to make new connections.

Read the rest of this entry →

ocTEL Week 2 Webinar

22/04/2013 in Course information

Join our weekly webinar at 12.30 on Wednesday 24 April, via Blackboard Collaborate 11.

The link for the Week 2 webinar will be made available via the Course Materials page on Wednesday morning.

This week’s webinar

This week Helen Beetham, an expert on learners’ experiences of TEL and on digital literacy, will help us to focus on the learner perspective. During the webinar you will find out how much you really know about your digital learners and explore some myths that can get in the way of understanding learners’ needs. You will consider what aspects of learners’ digital capability are most relevant to their educational success and look in more detail at what we mean by digital literacy.

About the presenter

Helen Beetham has written widely on digital literacies and is currently synthesis consultant to the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme. Previously she has led research programmes on learners’ experiences of e-learning and on curriculum design for technology enhanced learning. She is the author of many articles, chapters and online resources, and the editor of Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age (second edition available from Routledge in May).

We will make the recording of this session available via the Course Materials page on the ocTEL website.

Webinar help and FAQ’s

For help prior to the webinar and some frequently asked questions please visit our help page.

If you have any questions contact octel-tech@alt.ac.uk.

What are your expectations of ocTEL?

21/04/2013 in Course information, Evaluation

As noted in Friday’s overview, the team is keen to hear your feedback about ocTEL, and to act on it! We also have fairly detailed plans for a broader evaluation of ocTEL, which includes investigating impact on course participants. I have written in more detail on my blog about the thinking behind the evaluation, as well as the key evaluation questions we’re looking to address. These are organised in four themes:

  • Impact on staff competency (value in practice)
  • ocTEL Content and Design
  • ocTEL Discourse and Knowledge
  • ocTEL Community and Sustainability

There is also a sub-theme looking at the collaborative approach to open authoring and the impact of ocTEL on the course team.
Read the rest of this entry →

Approaches, concepts and a few new faces

19/04/2013 in Course information

Here’s a brief round-up of the first week of the course. This week was all about TEL Concepts and Approaches, but we also welcomed a number of new faces and quite a few who had missed the induction period. So welcome to all!

This week the aim for you was to:

  • become familiar with a range of concepts and approaches relevant to TEL
  • start reflecting on how these could be applied with your students
  • get a feel for what learning technology is and what learning technologists do
  • contextualise your approach within a wider field of theory

and many of you engaged with these aims by reflecting on the five stories about how technology has enhanced learning and the questions Liz Masterman was thinking about in this week’s webinar.  At time of writing there have been 56 posts on the forum for Week 1’s Powerful and relevant TEL approaches. Imogen Bertin “couldn’t pick one” so started one topic about five stories. Eric Mazur’s talk and the flipped classroom stimulated a really interesting discussion as has the Sugata Mitra video and the theme of collaboration.

Read the rest of this entry →

Week 1 webinar recording now available

18/04/2013 in Course information

Thanks to everyone who took part in ocTEL’s weekly webinar yesterday.

If you missed all or part of the week 1 webinar, the materials from the session are now available at the links below:

Webinar Recording

Webinar Presentation by Liz Masterman

Webinar Chat

Everything is also available on the Course Materials page, which is updated weekly with materials from each live webinar.

Join us next Wednesday at 12:30 BST for the week 2 webinar on understanding learners’ needs. Check the Course Materials page for more information.

Meet the team

16/04/2013 in About this course, Course information

With apologies for the fact that it’s twelve days into the course before we’ve made this available, we now have an ocTEL team page on the site. Here you can see photos and bios of the people who have played a part in putting the course together. ocTEL is very much a virtual team — we’ve had one face-to-face meeting in the seven months of the project — so in some cases this is as much as I’ve ever seen of my colleagues too.

The writing and tutoring of ocTEL are being provided without charge, so I hope everyone will at some point extend some thanks to those who have given their time for this. You can see who’s done what on the Course Materials page. The webinar presenters throughout the course are also gifting their time. The management, administration, technical infrastructure and evaluation are being supported through the Leadership Foundation in Higher Education, and we’re grateful to them as well. For more details see our About page.

Not included on the team page yet are our many volunteer support tutors on the course. So let me add a big thank you to the tutors who have taken part so far: Sue Barnes, John Davies, Clare Denholm, Devampika Getkahn, Doug Gowan, Sarah Horrigan and Ruth Johnstone. Later on you’ll be meeting tutors with surnames in the second half of the alphabet! We’ll add all the names to the team page in due course.

Taking advice

15/04/2013 in Course information

ocTEL has been up and running for over a week now. After a start where the momentum of the email discussion threatened to run away with itself, Stephen Downes, who is a ‘critical friend’ on the project, shared his advice to OcTEL. We’ve taken that advice to heart and this post outlines how we’ve sought to embrace his suggestions.

Stephen advises:

  • set up a system whereby you are sending out one email a day to people
  • in this email, put your course announcements at the top
  • also put a link to the mailing list archives, or (even better) links to the current topics on the board archives

… you can use this system to incorporate ‘publish in your own space’ responses

  • create a mechanism to allow people to register their blogs
  • set up an aggregator of participant blogs
  • include the aggregator listings in the once-a-day email

Additionally

  • aggregate the Twitter posts for the course tag (I forget what it was; I’m sure it’s in an email somewhere)
  • aggregate from the diigo group – https://groups.diigo.com/group/alt-octel
  • list these posts in your once-a-day email

One email a day: the Daily Newsletter

When creating the ocTEL platform we were conscious of the need to push information to participants in a timely and useful way. From day one we had included the MailPress plugin for WordPress for distributing a daily and weekly newsletter. Read the rest of this entry →

Big questions and learning the ropes

12/04/2013 in About this course, Course information, progress report

Here’s quick overview and recap as the induction part of ocTEL draws to a close and we approach the start of the main course next week.

The aims we set for this part were for you to

  • have a sense of different Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) contexts and some of their strengths and weaknesses
  • understand the range of prior experiences and expectations of the course participants, including those from different cultures, and the implications of these for this form of TEL
  • achieve basic confidence in navigating, discussing and otherwise participating in the ocTEL course.

One of the main activities was to frame a ‘big question’ about Technology Enhanced Learning and there’s been a great array of these. Diana Laurillard gave us a classification of them in her webinar presentation:

Participants' big questions

Diana Laurillard’s analysis of the TEL questions raised by participants

Thanks also to Tom Franklin who provided a more fine-grained analysis of questions posed via the JiscMail list (simple version below, or more comprehensive version on Tom’s blog):

One of the observations I’ve made in commenting on a few of the blog posts I’ve seen is that our suggestion that you come up with a ‘big’ question has led many of you (not unreasonably) to frame your questions in general and abstract terms that could be applied to the whole sweep of Higher Education and the role of technology within it. That’s fine, but big questions can also be personal and concrete ones. For example, your interest in peer assessment and support is a big issue for you if you see this as the only way that you can make your new course work effectively. So don’t be afraid to frame your questions in personal and local terms, as this will mean that, if you hold the questions in mind as you work through the rest of the course, it will focus you on practical ideas that you can apply in your day-to-day practice.

We also encouraged you to introduce yourselves to others, and this has demonstrated both the diversity of experience among participants and the enthusiasm for TEL-related professional development. The diversity was a lesson for us as course designers as well, as we saw the Death by Acronyms forum topic emerge. We will be reviewing all the materials for the rest of the course to ensure we are not too blinkered by the UK-centric origin of ocTEL.

Some questioned whether it was really such a good idea to encourage a thousand people to introduce themselves to each other. In the process of the introductions and the sharing of big questions, a lot of ‘discussion traffic’ was generated and some people felt overwhelmed (indeed some may still do so). The JiscMail list is probably where there’s been most evidence of people being uncomfortable with the communication channel (and I’ve said what we would do differently, with hindsight). We’ve taken the lessons for this course, but hopefully there are also lessons in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of different communication channels that have broader implications for TEL. Meanwhile, the JiscMail list seems to have established at least temporary equilibrium (many unsubscribed in the early, busy days as numbers fell from around 800 to just over 700, but they’re now back up to 790+ as we welcome new registrations).

I hope some of you will feel that, over the last nine days, you’ve got some new insights about what works and doesn’t work for you, as in Sandra Huskinson’s message:

Experimenting has been interesting via the different channels of communication. I’ve found I get replies relatively quickly via all forms of media. Keeping tweets short is a challenge. The learning in either format is good although things are limited in twitter useful links are posted. I don’t think there is a ‘best’ for reflection, challenging or learning as I found each format did this in its own way.

In case you’re a bit of a numbers and trends geek, here are a few figures on the different channels of ocTEL communication as of the time of writing (mostly taken from our Course Reader, which is the best way to track all ocTEL discussions) :

Please be assured that no one person is keeping on top of all of this activity! ocTEL deliberately gives you the choice of which of these channels to use for each activity, according to what you feel is most convenient and rewarding. I’ll be interested to see the trends in how these figures change over the coming weeks.

If you’ve read all the way down to here, thank you, and I hope you feel you’re getting the hang of it. That basic confidence really is the one most valuable thing you can carry forward into the rest of the course.

The materials for Week 1, TEL Concepts and Approaches, will be emailed round on Monday. If you’re eager to get under way with them, they will be available on the website some time on Saturday morning (UK time), under Course Materials.

 

ocTEL Week 1 Webinar

12/04/2013 in Course information

Join our weekly webinar at 12.30 on Wednesday 17 April, via Blackboard Collaborate 11.

You can access the Week 1 webinar via this link (please note the session will not be live until Wednesday morning).

This week’s webinar

This week’s webinar has two parts. First, there will be a short introduction and networking session, allowing participants to introduce themselves and raise any questions. The main presentation will be led by Liz Masterman, Academic IT Services, University of Oxford. Liz will draw together some of the key themes that have emerged from her research interviews with lecturers, staff developers and learning technologists, in which she explored the different ways in which they engage with technology-enhanced learning. These themes include the role of theory, accommodating students’ varied needs and preferences, reusing and sharing learning materials, and the relationship between institutional and grass-roots initiatives in promoting TEL. In the discussion that will follow Liz’s presentation, participants will be encouraged to reflect on the relevance of each theme to their own practice.

About the presenter

Liz Masterman is a Senior Researcher in the Academic IT Services group at the University of Oxford. She has been conducting research into lecturers’ engagement with digital technologies in both HE and FE since 2004, primarily in the fields of learning design and open educational resources. She has also led two investigations into the student digital experience, which additionally included eliciting the perspectives of academic staff. Liz was a trustee of ALT from 2009-2012.

We will make the recording of this session available via the Course Materials page on the ocTEL website.

Webinar help and FAQ’s

For help prior to the webinar and some frequently asked questions please visit our help page.

If you have any questions contact octel-tech@alt.ac.uk.

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