133,497 research outputs found

    I am not a superhero but I do have secret weapons! : using technology in higher education teaching to redress the power balance

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    This article explores the role of technology in supporting student learning. It expresses the view that university/college students need to have educators who act as 'superheroes' seeking to understand their students' views of the world and their learning experiences within it. The author explores how a range of 'secret weapons' namely learning and communication technologies have been used by a reluctant adopter (not a superhero) to simply and effectively engage and empower students in the classroom. The overall aim of this approach was to offer students an opportunity to learn in a way that will put them in a strong position to be successful not only at university but also in their life ahead. Beginning with a discussion of the current UK learning context and the power dynamics that exist within the university classroom, the article then goes on to offer practical and pragmatic advice on using a specific range of technologies to support student learning. These technologies are a student response system called Socrative (available as a free smartphone app); Google Sites (a free website building tool - used for enhancing case studies and designing authentic assessments); tablet computers and audio (voice) feedback recorders. The paper concludes with a range of general tips for those adopting new technologies. These include involving the wider team (fellow academics and learning technologists) as well as students. Additionally it encourages thinking about pedagogical and practical approaches that need to be considered when adopting new technology either in the classroom or in assessment

    Beyond lecture capture: Student-generated podcasts in teacher education.

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    Podcasting in higher education most often takes the form of lecture capture or "coursecasting" as instructors record and disseminate lectures (King & Gura, 2007, p. 181). Studies published within the past five years continue to prioritise podcasting of lectures for the student audience, and to test the effectiveness of such podcasts via traditional pencil and paper assessments covering the material delivered via podcast (Hodges, Stackpole-Hodges, & Cox, 2008). A premise of this article is that in order to enhance learning outcomes via podcasting, it is necessary to move beyond coursecasting, toward podcasting with and by students, and to value key competencies and dispositions as learning outcomes. This article reports on a pilot study undertaken with teacher education students in an online ICT class, where students investigated podcasting and created reflective podcasts. The pilot study aimed to engage students actively in generating podcasts, incorporating a wider view of assessment and learning outcomes. Student-generated podcasts were self-assessed, and shared online in order to invite formative feedback from peers. A range of positive outcomes are reported, whereby students learned about and through podcasting, engaging in reflection, problem solving and interactive formative assessment

    Evaluating the use of lecture capture using a revealed preference approach

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    This article discusses the introduction of lecture capture technology on a large undergraduate module with diverse student cohorts. Literature has so far relied on surveying students to discover their use of the technology or attempted to quantify the impact of watching lecture recordings on assessment performance. Alternatively, the principal contribution of this article is an evaluation of the use of the recorded lectures using a revealed preference approach. Specifically we identify to what extent students watched lecture recordings, rather than simply claimed to watch them when asked to provide comments on the technology. Data indicates the number of distinct students who watched recordings, the frequency with which they watched recordings, the average length of viewings as well as the time of day when lectures were viewed. We monitored viewings over two academic years, identifying ‘spikes’ in the number of viewings in the days before tests, as well as regularities in the viewing patterns across the two years. We analyse the data to assess the extent to which students used the recordings, how and when they watched the recordings. We conclude that the students value lecture recordings, making more extensive use of the recordings than has been identified in the literature to date. Ultimately, lecture recordings are suggested to offer valuable support for students’ independent study

    Law Learning in Action: An Action Learning Project to Evaluate Processes and Outcomes of using Law E-learning Objects in Social Work Education

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    This document reports on a research project funded by the Social Care Institute for Excellence to evaluate the processes and outcomes (for social work students and educators) of using a suite of e-learning objects within law teaching on social work degree programmes. The e-learning objects in question were published by SCIE in 2007, and those involved in their development were keen to explore how they were being used, and what their impact might be. The research, which started in 2008 and reached completion in 2010, has tracked a group of educators in 6 universities as they have engaged in a process of collaborative capacity building, through participation in a learning set designed to support their own engagement with e-learning and to develop skills in evaluating their outcomes for students. A full list of the SCIE law e-learning objects and their associated learning outcomes is given at Appendix 1

    Discovering communities of social e-learning practice

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    Teaching and Professional Development Fellowship Report 201

    Locating image presentation technology within pedagogic practice

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    This article presents data gathered through a University for the Creative Arts Learning and Teaching Research Grant (2009-2010); including a study of existing image presentation tools, both digital and non-digital; and analysis of data from four interviews and an online questionnaire. The aim of the research was to look afresh at available technology from the point of view of a lecturer in the visual arts, and to use the information gathered to look more critically at the available technology

    The latent potential of YouTube - Will it become the 21st Century lecturer's film archive?

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    YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) is an online, public-access video-sharing site that allows users to post short streaming-video submissions for open viewing. Along with Google, MySpace, Facebook, etc. it is one of the great success stories of the Internet, and is widely used by many of today's undergraduate students. The higher education sector has recently realised the potential of YouTube for presenting teaching resources/material to students, and publicising research. This article considers another potential use for online video archiving websites such as YouTube and GoogleVideo in higher education - as an online video archive providing thousands of hours of video footage for use in lectures. In this article I will discuss why this might be useful, present some examples that demonstrate the potential for YouTube as a teaching resource, and highlight some of the copyright and legal issues that currently impact on the effective use of new online video websites, such as YouTube, for use as a teaching resource.Comment: To be published in October 2008 issue of CAL-laborate (http://science.uniserve.edu.au/pubs/callab/index.html
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