"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?"

"The Technology Strategy Board and the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) are to invest up to £1.1m in exploratory studies into the design of technology-based products and services that will improve learning outcomes. This SBRI competition seeks to stimulate business performance in an already vibrant education technology sector by supporting high-quality design of commercially viable products and services that can be delivered at scale while being affordable and easy to use. See the competition brief"

"Welcome to Google's MOOC Kit! We're excited to provide you with a great resource that includes best practices, important tips, technology guidelines, and strategies to help you inspire and motivate students. We hope you find this information helpful when planning and designing your online course. Whether you have experience teaching online or have never taught a course before, these resources here will help guide you through the process."

"This research project explored good examples of how academic and professional staff are working together in new ways to deliver the best possible student experience.The project addressed the question of how and why these models of good working practices seemed to work well. The research investigated how the change management process was perceived and managed by the key stakeholders, as well as the role of the management, leadership and governance arrangements. Key stakeholders included students as well as staff, and the research considered how the student voice was and is heard in the development of these models. "

"BITE: Recipes for remarkable research is an edited field book capturing the research, learning and experiences of an international network of scholars studying effective and creative research environments. The book encapsulates what it is that enables remarkable research, and offers, as Professor Lizbeth Goodman says, "practical, evidence-based instantiations of ideas and innovations" as well as theoretical knowledge. It is set out as a recipe book, with supporting academic papers and case studies"

"Academics often treat students' discipline-specific literacy as unproblematic. In doing so they may underestimate the difficulties for university students as they move between subjects of study that may involve different disciplines, language genres and academic practices. This paper describes an initiative aimed at supporting students in reading academic articles in preparation for completing an essay for an assessment task. This initiative involved a structured and collaborative two-week tutorial exercise that provided students with practice in using a framework to extract the main ideas from academic readings. Students were surveyed after this exercise, and their reflections of its value are described in this paper. The findings of this study will inform further stages of the project which aim to develop and investigate practical ways to develop student's academic literacy across several business disciplines."

"Objective - To describe the development and implementation of two courses designed to help university students avoid plagiarism. Design - Quantitative and qualitative analysis. Setting - A university in the United Kingdom. Subjects - An unknown number of university students who took a Plagiarism Awareness Program (PAP) course between 2008 and 2011, and approximately 3,000 university students enrolled in a Plagiarism Avoidance for New Students (PANS) course delivered via a virtual learning environment (VLE) between October and December 2012. The authors attempted to collect rates of continued plagiarism among students who had taken plagiarism education courses. The authors also surveyed 702 university students about plagiarism in 2011. Methods - Data collected from PAP participants informed revision of the authors' approach to plagiarism education and led to development of the second course, PANS. At the end of the course, students completed a test of their knowledge about plagiarism. Authors compared scores from students who took a course supervised by a librarian to the scores from students who took the course independently. Main Results - Students reported that many aspects of citation and attribution are challenging (p. 149). The authors discovered that 93% of students who completed the PANS course facilitated by a librarian in-person passed the final exam with a grade of 70% or higher, while 85% of students who took the same course independently, without a librarian instructor, in an online VLE scored 70% or higher (p. 155). The authors report that referrals of students who plagiarized declined significantly (p-value < 0.001) since the implementation of a plagiarism avoidance curriculum. Conclusion - As reported by the authors, first-year university students require more extensive education about plagiarism avoidance. A university plagiarism avoidance program instructed by librarians reduces the total number of students caught plagiarizing an

Oppia is a tool for creating interactive online activities that enable students to learn by doing. Its creators believe that this is often a more effective and efficient way of learning than either watching videos or reading texts, since it allows the student to engage more deeply with the activity in a way that videos or books often do not.

"This report has been developed as part of our research project Flexible Pedagogies: preparing for the future. Technology-enhanced learning is one of five main focus strands embedded within the theme of flexible learning. It offers a summary and analysis of the current state of play, as well as recommendations for developing robust and appropriate flexible pedagogies with a view to influencing policy, future thinking and change within the rapidly-shifting landscape of learning and teaching in HE"

"In part 1, I looked at the shifting definition of educational (or learning) technology; in the second part, I looked at a brief history of educational technology; part 3 explored the rise of the "new professional"; the fourth part discussed the "bipolarisation" of the "new professional". This is the fifth in a series of short posts concerning the field of educational (or learning) technology and the people who are practitioners and theoreticians within the field."

"The NMC Horizon Report > 2014 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE Program. This eleventh edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, giving campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning. The format of the report is new this year, providing these leaders with more in-depth insight into how the trends and challenges are accelerating and impeding the adoption of educati"

"The key opportunity for institutions is to take the concepts developed by the MOOC experiment to date and use them to improve the quality of their face-to-face and online provision, and to open up access to higher education. Most importantly, the understanding gained should be used to inform diversification strategies including the development of new business models and pedagogic approaches that take full advantage of digital technologies."

"Information literacy-the ability to find, evaluate and use information effectively-is an essential skill set. The authors examine how assignments such as case analyses and research reports help business students master these abilities and provide examples of how analytic rubrics with measurable outcomes are particularly suited to assessing these skills. Also demonstrated is how librarians enhance and support student learning of information literacy by teaching in-depth research skills. Working together, professors and librarians can give students a solid foundation in the information-handling skills they need to be effective and productive in the workplace today."

"This workshop was funded as part of one of HEA Social Science's strategic priorities 2013 - 14 'Teaching research methods'."

"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?