[AliSheph]

Hi James

I think you make a good point here, and one I’ve heard of as the ‘holy grail’ of MOOC development, and certainly a more sustainable way of looking at things from a time and cost point of view.

I’m not sure if the possibilities vary by discipline – my view is that in my discipline (business) our audiences for different courses are so diverse that not just the content but tone and feel need to be radically different – e.g. an MBA student with existing business experience has very different needs from an undergraduate who has come to university straight from post-16 education, even if they are studying the same basic syllabus.  Therefore, if I was designing for a particular cohort, the MOOC audience, if different, would find their needs poorly met, in my view, by the course I’d developed for the other, without significant tailoring bordering on a rewrite.  Perhaps I’m just being grumpy!

 

[AliSheph]

What an interesting thread! I usually start small to minimise risk, but that does mean only incremental progress if I am lucky! However, I’m involved at the start of a much bigger project and I will be sharing the Cochrane paper to prompt a discussion about how to try and avoid some of the banana skins, so it’s timely.

[AliSheph]

Hi David

Yes, I think one could extend it to OERs although for an individual OER time commitment may not be as great and tutor is probably creating OER for a purpose related to their day job and then choosing to make it open to other users, which I feel is slightly different – a sort of OER by-product?

[AliSheph]

PS My original studies were in biosciences, so it’s nice to see my old discipline leading the way in educational practice 🙂

[AliSheph]

Thanks for your feedback, Elizabeth – appreciate the time and effort you have put in to this.

I think you have a really good point regarding self-review – I think it will be a good opportunity to ask the students to use the criteria on their own draft work – the chronology will be that that happens after this peer review activity, but I think that could work well as a synthesis of what they have learned. Also like the idea of recording the verbal comments to reflect on quality of review. Will explore the links you have given me as well. Thanks!

[AliSheph]

Interesting posts.  This would a very radical approach in my discipline.  We’re trying reflective logs for the first time, and my aim would be to turn these into a blogging requirement eventually, but cultural shift would be needed, to say the least.

I’ve done some critique of some other methods at:

http://alicesadventuresinedtech.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/octel-week-6-assessment-and-feedback-if-you-do-only-one-thing/

[AliSheph]

Hi Linda

On my OU course, we received the feedback in written form, but we are given our tutors’ contact details should we want to follow anything up.  Occasionally, I have done this by email and even more occasionally by phone.  On OU MAODE courses, we had weekly tutorials in Elluminate in which we also received tutor group-wide feedback (e.g. at the start of a session) and formative feedback on our activities/answers to questions within the tutorial setting.

Regarding engagement, I found the written form of feedback helpful as it was markups and comments on my assignment – very rich and useful for future.  I could also engage when I chose to – given I was fitting the course in round a full time teaching job.  However, the channel to real time communication was an added bonus in the rare event I needed it.

Hope this helps!

[AliSheph]

Thanks Imogen.  There’s so much going on that it’s hard to remember to go back to stuff from a while ago!

 

[AliSheph]

Hi everyone – I’ve been wanting to get back to this but I’ve been on a conference this week…getting some further teaching inspiration (and honing my pub quiz skills :)) !

While I like the relatively loose template I know that not everyone organises their VLE site in what I would see as an intuitive manner which is easy to navigate, or considers accessibility.   For example, I’ve seen jumbles of documents, files that are not named in a comprehensible manner etc.  So, I think guidance should be combined with a light touch audit and then suggestions to those staff whose sites aren’t in line with the guidance.  I’m sure this view would be controversial among some, but I think if we talk about consistency of student experience etc, that doesn’t mean ‘uniform’ but does mean some basic level of comparability between modules.

I had a mobile health check on one of my module sites recently to see how it would appear in the mobile app for Blackboard.  Even though I had not designed the site with this app in mind, the learning technologist told me it looked great, and there weren’t any changes I needed to make – I was quite surprised!

 

[AliSheph]

Agree, Peter – I’ve aimed to build this kind of relationship at each institution I have worked in, and it’s usually paid dividends.  Our IT support team (not learning techs.) told me last week I had gone up in their estimation as I have an android tablet for my personal use – they took this as evidence of technological discernment (rather than cost-consciousness) I think!

[AliSheph]

Thanks Peter- appreciated.

[AliSheph]

Thanks Peter- appreciated.

[AliSheph]

If the link is permanently broken, there’s a nice little YouTube video where Drew breaks information obesity down at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_FBZP53XkE

I felt I should promote a colleague from my former university!

[AliSheph]

If the link is permanently broken, there’s a nice little YouTube video where Drew breaks information obesity down at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_FBZP53XkE

I felt I should promote a colleague from my former university!

[AliSheph]

 

We have some download restrictions as well – I’ve been using Articulate with Powerpoint slides, which is institutionally licensed – not true screencasting but it does what I wanted it to do, which is allow me to talk over a problem that I am solving and have this as a video for my students.  However, I tried Screen-o-matic as part of this activity.

How easy was it to understand how this tool worked?

Extremely – I watched a demo video but probably didn’t need to do even that!

How quickly and easily would you find it to use?

Very – took me about 5 mins to record practice screencast with vis aid and a nice feature was ability to link to recording of me from my webcam, so students can see as well as hear me.  I’ve not seen this on other free tools.

How could you apply this tool in your own teaching?

I can see lots of applications for it – supplementary resources at exam time, video podcasts every week to supplement classes, revision aids etc etc etc!  I notice that the max length is 15 mins which seems fine.  Other tools have 5 mins as the maximum, which isn’t long enough for what I need.

What does this tool  offer that has advantages over your current practice?

I wouldn’t have to use Powerpoint – so I could just start with an Excel spreadsheet or interactive whiteboard tool and build everything up.

Things I would need to consider are – says it works on Mac and PC, so I think that means it won’t work if I tried to record on a tablet (I have an Android tablet).  Not sure about iPad!

Also, regarding upload – if I didn’t want to make public, I would need to save as a video file – limited options in the free version, and I need to explore how these would work within our institutional VLE.  So, some homework for me!  However, subject to those limitations, I will definitely use and recommend to others.

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