Interesting post. I think that it is worth looking into the history of these things, and in nearly all cases what we see is that initially universities have developed their own thing in house, because there was no alternative, and then later moved to commercial offerings. This is true of operating systems (developed in house until IBM, DEC,…[Read more]

Many thanks for taking the trouble to research the issue and follow up you original tweet, and point us at some of the literature. I really appreciate that, and found the GEES article helpful, with the start of somewhere to go. I will explore the other material more tomorrow.

You raise some interesting points, and I would agree that MCQs often are at the lower end of Bloom’s taxonomy. However with care they don’t have to be. I have seen MCQs (mostly in numerate disciplines) that require you to work through the problem and come to an answer; memory is not sufficient you need to understand the nature of the problem,…[Read more]

Wouldn’t it be nice if student and staff time were considered equally valuable! My proof that they are not is the lecture. The lecture is known to the least efficient form of learning, but it is an extremely efficient form of teaching. A couple of hours of preparation and an hour of delivery and 180 people have had an hour’s lecture and it has…[Read more]

The first thing I would say is that different technologies (including paper) have different affordances, so that you will lose some things that you gained from paper and gain a variety of different ones. It also means that a certain amount of effort will be required to get used to a slightly different way of marking.

In Turnitin it is possible…[Read more]

It might be useful to think about ipsative assessment (as opposed to norm or criterion based assessment). In ipsative assessment the student is assessed against their prior learning and their desired learning. Of course, this can cause difficulties if you are trying to follow a curriculum for the whole cohort.

Rosemary,

you make some interesting points here. For me the critical question is always “what is the problem you are trying to solve?” or something like that. In other words, I wouldn’t start with the technology. Is there an area in your practice that you would like to improve (this could be anything from a conceptual difficulty that students…[Read more]

Jennifer,

I don’t know which sector you work in, but in schools (in the UK at least) so much of what children have to learn is dictated by the curriculum, and exam results are so important for both children AND schools that it can be very difficult to give children much autonomy most of the time. I have just been watching this video…[Read more]

I think that there is considerable scope for analytics to support learning in a variety of ways. In particular, I think that it can be used to support student success through early diagnosis of issues (preferably before they become problems). Using analytic techniques it may be possible to spot correlations between behaviours and later problems.…[Read more]

An excellent review of some of the pros and cons of using forums, even if I don’t agree with everything you say.

For me one of the advantages of a forum is the ability to have threaded discussions, but this forum doesn’t really seem to support them the result is that you read through the postings in order they were written rather than having them…[Read more]

I’d be interested. I have never tried collaborative mind mapping before.

Indeed, and subjects like music, maths and chemistry have particular problems, as we don’t even have good ways of entering those on a computer.

I remember one project at an FE college doing outreach work in basic skills, and everything in maths was sent via the computer, but students faxed their work in as doing equations on a computer is so…[Read more]

I suppose my question is why is there so much focus on using technology effectively?

Perhaps a little explanation is needed to make this clear. As some one once said its “education, education, education” or as someone else once didn’t quite say “its all about the learning, stupid”.

For me, too often things start from the technology with…[Read more]