Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching

"In this paper, we explore the benefits of using social media in an online educational setting, with a particular focus on the use of Facebook and Twitter by participants in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed to enable educators to learn about the Carpe Diem learning design process. We define social media as digital social tools and environments located outside of the provision of a formal university-provided Learning Management System. We use data collected via interviews and surveys with the MOOC participants as well as social media postings made by the participants throughout the MOOC to offer insights into how participants' usage and perception of social media in their online learning experiences differed and why. We identified that, although some participants benefitted from social media by crediting it, for example, with networking and knowledge-sharing opportunities, others objected or refused to engage with social media, perceiving it as a waste of their time. We make recommendations for the usage of social media for educational purposes within MOOCs and formal digital learning environments."

"The existence of 'Learning Styles' is a common 'neuromyth', and their use in all forms of education has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited in the research literature. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that their use remains widespread. This perspective article is an attempt to understand if and why the myth of Learning Styles persists. I have done this by analyzing the current research literature to capture the picture that an educator would encounter were they to search for "Learning Styles" with the intent of determining whether the research evidence supported their use. The overwhelming majority (89%) of recent research papers, listed in the ERIC and PubMed research databases, implicitly or directly endorse the use of Learning Styles in Higher Education. These papers are dominated by the VAK and Kolb Learning Styles inventories. These presence of these papers in the pedagogical literature demonstrates that an educator, attempting to take an evidence-based approach to education, would be presented with a strong yet misleading message that the use of Learning Styles is endorsed by the current research literature. This has potentially negative consequences for students and for the field of education research."

"". .. from your perspective what are the institutional enablers and blockers when it comes to growing the digital capability of an organisation?" asked James Clay in a recent post on this blog. I rather flippantly posted a comment to James's post saying "Culture is a big issue, but I think over reliance (or expectations) that technology alone will somehow wave some magical digital fairy dust and everyone and ergo the institution will be "digital" and digitally literate." This post is my attempt to elaborate that comment."

"The use of technology to maximise the student learning experience is a vibrant area of interest across all tiers of global education. Technology enhanced learning (TEL) is often used as a synonym for e-learning but can also be used to refer to technology enhanced classrooms and learning with technology, rather than just through technology."

"This benchmarking tool is the latest in a series of resources Jisc has produced to help you improve the student experience at your institution. It was produced in collaboration with the National Union of Students (NUS) and The Student Engagement Partnership (TSEP) as part of the Jisc Digital Student Project (digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org/wp/) and the Jisc Change agents' network (jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/change-agents-network)"

"Thirty years ago I attended Prescott College, a small liberal arts college deeply rooted in experiential learning. All of the courses involved writing, and the "journal" was not only a part of the demonstration of competence, but it was used like a physical space for our thinking. It provided us with visible and tangible space to think on. I know "think on" sounds funny, but that is what writing can be. A visible process of thinking."

"At the ALT C conference I went to a few sessions where VLE discussion came up, most notably Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lanclos's session "Are learning technologies fit for purpose?". They asked us to reflect on the main question in groups and nearly all of the discussions came back to complaints about the VLE. Lawrie picked on me to give the first response and I mentioned that the problem was not so much the technology but the "institutional sediment" that builds up around it. "

"In 2012, Duke University began using MOOCs to promote innovation in teaching and learning within the campus community, with the goal of importing successful new pedagogical ideas into Duke classrooms. Since that time, 30 instructors from 28 departments have developed 31 MOOCs on Coursera, attracting 2.8 million enrollments and issuing more than 72,000 certificates. Various examples show how these instructors changed their teaching approach in both MOOCs and traditional courses, including by improving classroom materials and activities, crafting better measures of student learning, and experimenting with new pedagogies to increase engagement and learning."

"This infokit explores gamification and its application to the field of education, learning and teaching. It is written for instructors such as lecturers and teachers, and is also of interest to learning system developers, education technology organisations, metadata specialists, librarians, and anyone concerned with effective learning either within, or outwith, curriculum requirements"

"Politicians who want to improve the quality of teaching through increased competition may ironically simply end up with ever greater systems of centralised control. Following Hayek (the philosopher father of free market economics), I would say this is not the way to make the best of our teachers."

Plagiarism is a folk devil into which is poured many of the challenges, problems and difficulties confronting higher education . This article investigates how software- Turnitin in particular - is 'solving' a particular ' crisis' in universities . However I investigate how alternative strategies for the development of information literacy offer concrete, productive and imaginative trajectories for university staff and students.

Shades of @NewtonsNeurosci here I think.

"In Higher Education Focus Groups and Nominal Group Technique are two well-established methods for obtaining student feedback about their learning experience. These methods are regularly used for the enhancement and quality assurance. Based on small-scale research of educational developers' practice in curriculum development, this study presents the use of a combined approach that potentially offers more benefits than the use of Focus Groups alone. It proposes a combined method, 'Nominal Focus Group', which includes the benefits of in-depth discussion of a Focus Group and the prioritising of results of Nominal Group Technique. These benefits include questions for further exploration, initial data analysis and increased ownership of the process by students. In practice, the method gave rise to rich data and actionable outcomes that were used to make informed curriculum enhancements for the programme teams."

"On 24 April 2015 forty educators from 19 institutions discussed key issues in MOOC design and implementation at a one-day workshop hosted and funded by the University of Reading, a leading member of the FutureLearn MOOC consortium. The workshop offered the opportunity to evaluate practical lessons from the design and delivery of MOOCs, particularly those encouraging skills development. The focus was on problem-based discussion of approaches to teaching and learning, and the extent to which MOOC learning outcomes can be defined, measured, or achieved."