On reification: A reinterpretation of designed and emergent practice

This paper is a response to the article: ‘Examining the five‐stage e‐moderating model: designed and emergent practice in the learning technology profession, published in ALT‐J 11 (1). Whilst we agree with the concerns of the authors on the problems of commodification and the increasing control of learning technology from a financial or predominantly management perspective, we wish to offer a reinterpretation of the research by taking a stricter analysis of the events described by the authors

Grounded Theory as an approach to studying students’ uses of learning management systems

This paper presents the first phase of a qualitative study of students’ use of a Learning Management System (LMS). A group of students at Kingston University with experience of two different systems were afforded the opportunity to study the relationship between the interface to an LMS and the usability of the system

UK open access life cycle

In the centre circle, we have used the 7 stages of the publishing process as described by Neil Jacobs (Jisc), this is followed by institutional processes – of course not all institutions will have all of these processes up and running, e.g. we don’t all have a CRIS. We then included publisher services that directly impact upon the work of the open access team and also Jisc OA services. We then went on to map Jisc OA and above campus services to the life cycle – doing this we immediately found an issue with Publication Router, which is why we have included it twice, once where it currently affects the life cycle and once where we think it should sit – at point of acceptance. Finally, we added the 6 sections of OAWAL showing where we think that fits with the life cycle

Assessment of computing in the mathematics curriculum using Numbas

This case study discusses the use of the Numbas e-assessment system to assess computing skills across several modules in a mathematics undergraduate degree programme. The modules include basic computing, quantitative analysis of data, and numerical methods. Several approaches are discussed which fit with the teaching of SPSS, R and MATLAB, including randomised data files and questions which can replicate, and therefore mark, calculations made with R data frames and numerical algorithms, such as root finding and curve fitting. In each case, Numbas offers the opportunity to automatically mark and offer immediate feedback to the student. The application of questions inside a computing module is discussed, with a positive response from students to both practice material and hybrid tests, which include some automatic marking alongside submission of the students’ code for manual review. There is clear rationale for using an e-assessment system which is already familiar to students, with features such as adaptive marking and the scaffolding of questions, however limitations to the use of Numbas for this purpose are also discussed

Automatic assessment of mathematical programming exercises with Numbas

As programming has become a common feature of undergraduate mathematics degrees, there has been an increasing focus on how to teach and assess the subject to mathematicians. The potential benefits of e-assessment of basic programming exercises have many parallels with assessment in mathematics where e-assessment tools are widely used: the chance to give instant feedback to students offers an opportunity to allow students to work at their own pace, accommodating the disparate background in programming that often exists in undergraduate mathematics cohorts. And the randomisation of question content not only offers a powerful tool for practice, with students able to repeat similar problems over and over, it also can offer some protection against plagiarism in a subject where, just like a solution to some mathematical problems, student answers to identical problems are likely to be very similar. This paper considers an extension to Numbas to automatically assess programming exercises and the successful implementation of the resource in undergraduate modules using the programming languages R and Python