small group for those supporting practitioners to use TEL

[joanwalker65]

I work at the Jisc Regional Support Centre Scotland and my role is supporting staff in FE & HE to use TEL and help institutions achieve their institutional ambitions regarding the use of ICT for learning and teaching.

 

[JohnKerr]

Hi Joan, Everyone else,

John Kerr, Learning Innovation Officer at the University of Glasgow – I’m interested in being part of this group as I help support staff to use TELT.

I am particularly interested in how to support distance learning students and the pedagogical implications of delivering content solely for an online cohort.

[Niall Barr]

Hi Joan and John,

Since this group is more relevant to me than most, and also nice and small, I’d like to join. (I’ve been finding the volume of text in the e-mail digest overwellming,

I think you both know me, but for others, I work in in the Learning Technology Unit at the University of Glasgow, and am also involved with interoperability specification development with IMS Global.

I’m interested in the technology behind learning and teaching, both on-campus and distance. I suspect that one of our big challenges over the next few years is going to be improving the way we support students mixing distance, local-but-not-present and on-campus learning.

[JohnKerr]

Hi Niall,

We still have to be formally introduced!

HE in many respects are still trying to fully explore their VLE and how to use the tools available for greater course delivery and assessment purposes, throwing a MOOC into the mix will challenge even the greatest of educators.

Before an institution adopts MOOC or even a fully taught online course should we send the lecturing staff on one of these courses to see it from a students point of view? To figure out what works and what doesn’t work.  Like this MOOC we are all participating in now.

Support for students is also key.  Things like bandwidth and technology we use to engage with the MOOC have to be considered.  These are not something the institution can help with but should we be setting minimum spec requirements? What are the minimum spec? A low end Android device? Or something with more ‘grunt’ like the Samsung S4 with 8core processor?

These are recommendations we need to think about, making the student aware of what they need in order to participate fully.

[Niall Barr]

Yes, good points. I think the way most lecturers at Glasgow use Moodle as a fairly low key support resource for traditional teaching is perfectly acceptable, however it’s certainly not making full use of the facility, and doesn’t give us a model for distance (or flexible) education.

I agree that it’s probably a good idea for lecturing staff to experience an online course before writing one, but I think people like us need to guide them in the right direction – I’d hate to be trying to convince a non-geek lecturer to get more involved after they’d experienced something like the e-mail torrent of day one of this MOOC.

Technology choices for students is an interesting one…  I like to be as unprescriptive as possible – but we still get occasional support requests from students using unidentified ancient versions of IE on Windows 98, and it’s really quite limiting if we try and support that!

[Niall Barr]

We’re supposed to see if we can arrive at a shared view on:

What can we tell about the range of experiences and preferences among ocTEL participants?
What challenges does this present for the course?

In what ways is a MOOC well or poorly suited to these challenges?

So here’s my initial thoughts…

A very wide range, though generally quite a lot of experience of either using or supporting users of technology in teaching.
The participants/pupils know more than the organisers/teachers… Really it has to be more of a guided discussion.

How rigid is the definition of a MOOC? Is codeproject.com, where lots of expert and inexpert programmers exchange hints, chat about both relevant and irrelevant things and publish example code and peer reviewed tutorials a MOOC?

One thing with this one is that the huge volume of discussion means that many participants are unlikely to see the best bits. Maybe it needs a voting systems (like facebook ‘likes’) to make the best comments more visible.

[elearningcolin]

Hey folks,

Thought I’d join in this discussion as it fits my role pretty well. I’m a TEL Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier Uni and help lecturers around the university to make better use of both Moodle and a range of other learning techs in their teaching. I think we’re supposed to introduce ourselves during this week so, for lack of a better place to do it, here goes! My Profile

Moodle use is similar here at Edinburgh Napier as that described above. Mostly it’s a Doc/PDF/Powerpoint delivery tool, but there are a few great cases of lecturers using it to offer really great blended learning, and even better student support. I run a staff development course called ‘Making Moodle Modules that Shine’ aimed at making more readable, usable and engaging moodle courses, and uptake has been amazing. Lecturers really want to get better at this, but they’re struggling with the time and the skills.

Niall, I also agree with you in that MOOCs have been around for ages, but with a much less defined spec. Forums from 15 years ago could almost fit the bill, where users would post tutorials around particular topics, mostly tech related, and then other users would follow them, comment on them, discuss improvements to the technique, etc. Then too it was the problem of collating the ‘good stuff’. I see this course is using something called the ‘course reader’ to collate people’s external contributions, but there’s so much in there I’m never going to keep up. Definitely a challenge…

Colin

[AlisonChristie]

Hi everyone,

Just a quick message to introduce myself. I’m a Learning Technology Officer for Abertay Uni in Dundee. Our VLE platform is Blackboard. I’m particularly interested in digital curation, digital storytelling, mobile learning amongst other things. Just finished reading JISC’s Mobile Learning InfoKit which I found very useful as we begin to open out our content to mobile devices.

I’ve been pretty low key on the OcTel thus far due to my commitment to my second MOOC with Coursera on Gamification. I will try and participate as much as I can to discussions time permitting as I need to sleep as well:-) 

Alison

[Alicia McConnell]

Hiya,

My name is Alicia. Can i join this group? I live in Norwich so i thought you might like a bit of locational balance. I have been out of th ecountry for the last ten days so trying desperately to catch up. I have never participated in a  MOOC today,  but really want to make the most from this one.

Like you guys I also support lecturers to use TEL in their delivery, have been trying for four years now and it still feels much like an uphill battle. We use Blackboard at CCN rather than Moodle and though recent upgrades are freindlier I always suspected this was holding us back.

Will go and do a bit of reading and come back with some ultra intelligent insight in response to the questions !!

[Ruth Johnstone]

HI

I am a learning technologist at Edinburgh Napier Universitycurrently supporting Moodle and trying to drive forward the benefits of TEL to academic staff. Would be interested in being part of your small band 🙂

Ruth

[Judith Jurowska]

I have subscribed to the posts for this group. Is there something else I need to do to become a ‘voice’?

[Author]

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