Electronic management of assessment – administrative perspectives

Book synopsis: In 2014, the Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE) Consortium initiated a wide-ranging, two-year-long research and dissemination project focusing on the use of technology in assessment and feedback. Our aim was to understand and improve processes, practices, opportunities and tools available to the institutional members of the BLE Consortium. From the project, we produced three research papers investigating current practice and 21 case studies describing both technology-enabled pedagogy and technical development. Now presented as a free ebook, co-edited by Leo Havemann and Sarah Sherman, we offer the flavour of the variety and breadth of the BLE?s activities relating to the project theme as a contribution to the education sector?s widening conversation about the interplay of assessment, feedback, pedagogy and technology

Contextualising the electronic management of assessment lifecycle in Bloomsbury

Book synopsis: In 2014, the Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE) Consortium initiated a wide-ranging, two-year-long research and dissemination project focusing on the use of technology in assessment and feedback. Our aim was to understand and improve processes, practices, opportunities and tools available to the institutional members of the BLE Consortium. From the project, we produced three research papers investigating current practice and 21 case studies describing both technology-enabled pedagogy and technical development. Now presented as a free ebook, co-edited by Leo Havemann and Sarah Sherman, we offer the flavour of the variety and breadth of the BLE?s activities relating to the project theme as a contribution to the education sector?s widening conversation about the interplay of assessment, feedback, pedagogy and technology

Questions of quality in repositories of open educational resources: a literature review

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials which are freely available and openly licensed. Repositories of OER (ROER) are platforms that host and facilitate access to these resources. ROER should not just be designed to store this content – in keeping with the aims of the OER movement, they should support educators in embracing open educational practices (OEP) such as searching for and retrieving content that they will reuse, adapt or modify as needed, without economic barriers or copyright restrictions. This paper reviews key literature on OER and ROER, in order to understand the roles ROER are said or supposed to fulfil in relation to furthering the aims of the OER movement. Four themes which should shape repository design are identified, and the following 10 quality indicators (QI) for ROER effectiveness are discussed: featured resources; user evaluation tools; peer review; authorship of the resources; keywords of the resources; use of standardised metadata; multilingualism of the repositories; inclusion of social media tools; specification of the creative commons license; availability of the source code or original files. These QI form the basis of a method for the evaluation of ROER initiatives which, in concert with considerations of achievability and long-term sustainability, should assist in enhancement and development. Keywords: open educational resources; open access; open educational practice; repositories; quality assuranc

Why is online assessment & feedback a nightmare?

Presentation at M25 Learning Technology Group, 11 November 201

Introduction

In 2014, the Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE) Consortium initiated a wide-ranging, two-year-long research and dissemination project focusing on the use of technology in assessment and feedback. Our aim was to understand and improve processes, practices, opportunities and tools available to the institutional members of the BLE Consortium. From the project, we produced three research papers investigating current practice and 21 case studies describing both technology-enabled pedagogy and technical development. Now presented as a free ebook, co-edited by Leo Havemann and Sarah Sherman, we offer the flavour of the variety and breadth of the BLE's activities relating to the project theme as a contribution to the education sector's widening conversation about the interplay of assessment, feedback, pedagogy and technology

This educational resource could not be opened

An M25 Learning Technology Group Discussion on Barriers to Opening Educational Resources. Slides from presentation / workshop including collated results

Three Lenses on Lurking: Making Sense of Digital Silence

In this chapter, the authors provide a critical exploration of the concept of lurking in online learning spaces through a phenomenological inquiry. The authors begin from a position that lurking is often misunderstood – or perhaps not understood – in education, and that the term itself is quite problematic, as it is typically applied to a disparate range of behaviors by those who perceive them as problematic. The authors then propose three heuristic lenses to make sense of lurking behaviors: lurking as troublesome, lurking as ordinary, and lurking as political. These lenses demonstrate that lurking behaviors not only stem from a range of different motivations but are also situated in a variety of contexts, that is, lurking is personal and contextual. The authors’ aim is not to define or redefine lurking for readers but to provide a critical analysis of what digital silence might mean for their students based on their contextual experience and in the light of critical literature. The authors invite readers to be part of the reflexive analysis by considering what lurking might mean in their own teaching contexts

Recentering open for those at the margins: three lenses on lurking

The group presenting this session was formed through a serendipitous participation in a ‘slow chat’ (#HEdigID) on the topic of OEP. The chat went on long beyond its official end, and we realized that the #HEdigID network was larger than we had observed. It included ‘invisible’ participants who were simply listening, or tuning in once in a while. We began to discuss the practice of ‘lurking’ and the idea of ‘the lurker’. The group conversation which followed revealed some of the complexities of lurking behaviours. What (or who) is a “lurker”? Do we need to rethink what participation means? Why some learners are visible, and others less visible or maybe invisible, remaining on the margins of online and networked learning? Do we need to recenter participation in open spaces – to bring in those who appear to choose to stay on the periphery? It seems there is a need to turn a critical lens onto our assumptions, and think about how ‘privileging the visible’ may constrain and exclude more invisible learners equally interested in learning (Honeychurch et al., 2017; Popovac, M., & Fullwood, C., 2018). Against a prior emphasis on transmission of knowledge, designing for learning in today’s open environments is often ‘designing for participation’. Has the pendulum now swung too far in this direction, such that those who are said to ‘lurk’ are dismissed, derided, or at best, understood through a deficit model? Our proposed lenses on lurking as troublesome, political and ordinary, suggest alternative ways of understanding lurking behaviours, but do not provide an obvious answer to the question of how to engage the lurking learner – or whether the lurker must be engaged. What does learner agency look like in this context? Can we truly design for all? Or should we design for participation – and let lurkers lurk? We are seeking input from participants in online learning spaces – current students or teachers or people who have other roles or with an interest in learning in open environments. Through the discussion/activity, further insights into both the ‘lurker experience’ and inclusive learning design will emerge

Towards Developing AI Literacy: Three Student Provocations on AI in Higher Education

This article reports the reflections of the co-organisers on a recent AI in Higher Education event which was led by students from the University of Leeds and University College London. While academic communities and experts have contributed significantly to the discourse, students’ perspectives have so far been underrepresented. Three student provocations are shared which provided the focus of the discussions during the event. The student co-authors present future-gazing visions of the impact of AI in higher education and beyond. Our collaborative reflections highlight that whether we are seeking to bring about desirable, AI-empowered futures, or aspiring to evade undesirable consequences of these new technologies, it will be vital to develop and enhance the AI literacy of students and educators alike in order to make use of it ethically, creatively and critically

Role of MrgA in Peroxide and Light Stress in the Cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803.

In the unicellular cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803, the mrgA gene is part of the PerR regulon that is upregulated during peroxide stress. We determined that an ΔmrgA mutant was highly sensitive to low peroxide levels and that the mutant upregulated a gene cluster (sll1722-26) that encoded enzymes involved with exopolymeric substance (EPS) production. We made mutants in this EPS cluster in both a wild type and ΔmrgA background and studied the responses to oxidative stress by measuring cell damage with LIVE/DEAD stain. We show that Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 becomes highly sensitive to oxidative stress when either mrgA or the sll1722-26 EPS components are deleted. The results suggest that the deletion of the EPS cluster makes a cell highly susceptible to cell damage, under moderate oxidative stress conditions. Mutations in either mrgA or the EPS cluster also result in cells that are more light and peroxide sensitive, and produce significantly less EPS material than in wild type. In this study, we show that in the absence of MrgA, which is known to be involved in the storage or mobilization of iron, cells can be more easily damaged by exogenous oxidative and light stress