Group items tagged

This bulletin is designed to keep all our colleagues and contacts up to date on our latest news, events, resources and funding opportunities.

"What is a Virtual Experiment? A Virtual Experiment or VE is a highly interactive web application. Unlike a simulation a VE does not usually model any part of the experiment; but is an interface to a set of pre-recorded experimental states derived from the original experiment. The users are given the tools to access the apparatus via the screen (mouse, pad or touch screen) and record the results themselves"

"This new book from the celebrated author of The Language of New Media is the first to offer a rigorous theory of the technology we all use daily - software for media authoring, access, and sharing. "

A good book for the SALT reading group?

"I have always liked David White's ideas about digital visitors and residents. And in the training sessions we run we find an increasing individual differentiation in people;s confidence and competence in using digital technologies. In this video David White (@daveowhite, http://twitter.com/daveowhite) of the University of Oxford explains how the Visitors and Residents model provides a framework to understand individuals' engagement with the Web based on motivation and context. In part 1 of this series, he argues that the metaphors of 'place' and 'tool' best represent the use of technology in contemporary society and allow us to better adapt to the challenges of new forms of academic practice."

"There are many systems available for issuing badges to recipients, however all of the systems we have come across (including BlackBoard) need the recipient to be a registered user of that specific system. This became a stumbling block for us as we would like to issue badges based on the more frequented face to face elements the Elevate Team offer. Workshops, Masterclasses and group sessions are all based away from systems such as BlackBoard, so how could we issue badges?"

"Findings from the Student Academic Experience Survey 2014 commissioned by the Higher Education Academy and the Higher Education Policy Institute show that while full-time undergraduate students in UK universities have high levels of satisfaction - 86% are fairly or very satisfied with their course - wellbeing among some students is lower than in the general population."

"Contract cheating is the process whereby students auction off the opportunity for others to complete assignments for them. It is an apparently widespread yet under-researched problem. One suggested strategy to prevent contract cheating is to shorten the turnaround time between the release of assignment details and the submission date, thus making it difficult for students to make arrangements with contractors. Here, we outline some characteristics of the current market for contract cheating and demonstrate that short turnaround times are unlikely to prevent contract cheating because requested turnaround times for university-level assignments completed via contract cheating are already short (average 5 days). In addition, for every contractor awarded a job, there are an average of 10 others offering to complete it within the specified time suggesting that there is abundant excess capacity in the market."

""If I have to sit through YET ANOTHER freaking 'professional development' session based on these cockamamie theories, I am going to pluck my eyeballs out and throw them at whatever charlatan the administration hired to conduct said session."- professor on an online academic forum discussing learning myths, including the pyramid."

"Routledge is pleased to offer the Library & Information Science community free access to a collection of articles highlighting MOOCs and librarianship. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free, online classes designed to provide university-level education to a large number of students. As MOOCs become a mainstream part of higher education, libraries will play an important role in the advancement of these innovative learning opportunities."

"Pushing the laziest student in class to work a little bit harder can be an infuriating task for lecturers. However, where one-to-one mentoring and encouraging words have failed, peer pressure might just work, according to a study on how to motivate so-called "shirkers"."

"The UK Change Agents Network is pleased to announce a call for papers for the inaugural edition of the Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership & Change. The journal will support research into partnerships between staff and students that identify, lead and deliver change in education across all disciplines. This edition will share and celebrate the outcomes of staff and students working in partnership on innovation and change projects. The project is co-funded by Jisc and the University of Greenwich."

In higher education, it's not how much time you spend with students, but what you do with it that should count

"Welcome to DnA's Open Source and Free software page. For DnA, the use of Open Source and Free software complements many of DnA's own core values and provides a wealth additional free support for users. The Open Source Software movement developed in the early 1980s and provides accessibility and life-changing support for users unable to access computer software due to high costs."

"This document summarises the key findings of a review of the National Student Survey (NSS). The NSS, first launched in 2005 , collects feedback from undergraduate students in the UK, via a survey, on their experiences of various aspects of their courses. The review was commissioned by the UK Higher Education funding bodies, and undertaken by NatCen Social Research in partnership with the Institute of Education and the Institute for Employment Studies."

"Despite being recognized as a fundamental part of the educational process and emphasized for several decades in medical education, the influence of the feedback process is still suboptimal. This may not be surprising, because the focus is primarily centered on only one half of the process - the teachers. The learners are the targets of the feedback process and improvement needs to be shifted. Learners need to be empowered with the skills needed to receive and utilize feedback and compensate for less than ideal feedback delivery due to the busy clinical environment."

"Many educational contexts now make use of student response devices - devices, which allow a student or group of students to send a response to a question back to a tutor in a classroom or lecture theatre. There is a wide array of devices and it can be very hard to choose which one you would like. This blog post is Part 1 of 2. In this post, I will look at the features that response systems can have. In the second part, I will look at some specific systems and highlight their best features. "