Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching

Training (and that includes e-learning) is a costly and inefficient way for knowledge workers to acquire knowledge and skills in today's workplace; in fact the real learning takes place continuously as people do their jobs. Now reports show that individuals and teams are increasingly using their social media tools and devices to by-pass L&D to solve their own learning and performance problems themselves.

"Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16-32" Cited in Mike Sharples' keynote for Theme 2: Navigating Pathways of the 2011 JISC Innovating e-Learning Conference

Abstract - Staff and students in the UK often dismiss MCQs (Multiple Choice Questions) as being associated with rote learning, but not understanding. However one of the biggest results ever published in education shows how mistaken this attitude is. The most important aspect of deep learning is probably being concerned with reasons rather than only with conclusions. If you want to test for knowledge of reasons then you can easily design MCQs to give the facts and ask about reasons. More interestingly, you can use MCQs that ask about facts to provoke learners to search for reasons. One method is to have students design MCQs (together with automatic feedback explaining why each response is right or wrong): the PeerWise software can organise this as an assignment in large classes. Another method is to use questions delivered by EVS (electronic voting systems) to catalyse peer discussion, even in huge classes. This talk will discuss some of the big educational results, and also psychological research that partially illuminates the mechanism. Supporting website for a SALT seminar presented by Steve Draper of Glasgow University at Swansea on 23rd November 2011.

Effective Assessment in a Digital Age http://t.co/5tjaRMTi + online resources http://t.co/nV6S0EKu #jiscassess

"FASTECH is designed to use readily available technologies to support the systemic enhancement of assessment and feedback strategies and practices at programme, faculty and institutional levels. A key aim is to provide evidence of, and guidelines for, technological improvements and change processes that can be used to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of assessment and feedback at these levels throughout the sector. By welcoming engagements, developing our work with, and inviting contributions from members of the HE community throughout the project, we aim to build a strong community of practice, focussed upon developing understanding of how to improve assessment and feedback practices and environments."

This seems to me to be one of the most significant presentations seen at this year's JISC Innovating e-Learning (online) Conference. It;s particularly relevant as it aligns closely with our own agenda.

Students, educators and others interested in finding the best published content, events and experts for learning new things will be heartened to learn that a new metadata markup standard is in the works to make discovery of learning materials easier than ever. Perhaps more importantly, it will make those materials easier for machines to find. Once finding the right content is a solved problem, many new things could become possible

iSocrates is an educational software program that allows instructors to quickly and easily create digital evaluation rubrics for virtually any assignment.iSocrates allows instructors to generate criteria pull-down menus featuring their most commonly used feedback comments, and to evaluate student performance from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective. iSocrates can also compute a performance score based on instructor-assigned weights and evaluations, and generate printouts of the filled out rubrics to hand back to students.

Interesting site mentioned during a session on Digital Literacies

"Many learners enter further and higher education lacking the skills needed to apply digital technologies to education. As 90% of new jobs will require excellent digital skills, improving digital literacy is an essential component of developing employable graduates. Courses that embed core digital skills, as well as subject specific use of technology, enable students to gain the skills and confidence they need to use digital technology not only to support their learning but also in the workplace. We're working with colleges and universities to embed core digital skills into the curriculum. By digital literacy we mean those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society: for example, the skills to use digital tools to undertake academic research, writing and critical thinking; as part of personal development planning; and as a way of showcasing achievements. "

Enhancing and creating student centred portfolios in VLEs webinar ... context setting blog pos.

"The primary objective of this project is to investigate how elearning applications can be more tightly integrated with virtual learning environments through the use of the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification. A range of popular open source and commercial elearning applications (tool producers) are being used to both identify priorities for integrations with VLEs (or other tool consumers) and also to evaluate the benefits which can be derived from adopting this approach."

""..if we want students to develop critical thinking, judgement and autonomy in assignment production they should be provided with high-level evaluative experiences similar to those of experts. Peer review, students evaluating and commenting on each other's work, is one way to achieve this'"

PeerWise supports students in the creation, sharing, evaluation and discussion of assessment questions. From Twitter: "@busynessgirl Have you seen Peerwise? http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ #socrait (via @polarisdotca)"

Presented during the Activities week of JISC Enhancing e-Learning Conference

Clayton R Wright has produced the latest version of his well-known and well-regarded conference list.

Principles in Patterns (PiP) is a £1 million project partly funded by JISC under its Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design Programme. The project is led jointly by the Development and Innovation Unit of the Information Services Directorate and the Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement (CAPLE) at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. PiP is developing a new technology-supported approach to curriculum design, approval and review at the University of Strathclyde.

"The Design Studio is a developing toolkit which draws together a range of existing and emergent resources around curriculum design and delivery and the role technology plays in supporting these processes and practices. The Studio will provide access to project outcomes and outputs from the JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programmes as they are developed and will continue to be sustained as a community resource after the programmes finish."

"CompendiumLD is a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It is being developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out the design or learning sequence. Feedback from users suggests the process of visualising design makes their design ideas more explicit and highlights issues that they may not have noticed otherwise. It also provides a useful means of representing their designs so that they can be shared with others. CompendiumLD provides a set of icons to represent the components of learning activities; these icons may be dragged and dropped, then connected to form a map representing a learning activity. "

University of Ulster: an approach to curriculum design.