Belated Liveblog: eLearning@ed 2016

Last week I was delighted to be part of the team organising the annual eLearning@ed Conference 2016. The event is one of multiple events and activities run by and for the eLearning@ed Forum, a community of learning technologists, academics, and those working with learning technologies across the University of Edinburgh. I have been Convener of the group since last summer so this was my first conference in this role – usually I’m along as a punter. So, this liveblog is a little later than usual as I was rather busy on the day…

Before going into my notes I do also want to say a huge thank you to all who spoke at the event, all who attended, and an extra special thank you to the eLearning@ed Committee and Vlad, our support at IAD. I was really pleased with how the event went – and feedback has been good – and that is a testament to the wonderful community I have the privilege of working with all year round here at Edinburgh.

Note: Although I have had a chance to edit these notes they were taken live so just let me know if you spot any errors and I will be very happy to make any corrections. 

The day opened with a brief introduction from me. Obviously I didn’t blog this but it was a mixture of practical information, enthusiasm for our programme, and an introduction to our first speaker, Melissa Highton:

Connecting ISG projects for learning and teaching  Melissa Highton (@honeybhighton), Director: Learning, Teaching and Web (LTW), Information Services.

Today is about making connections. And I wanted to make some connections on work that we have been doing.

I was here last year and the year before, and sharing updates on what we’ve been doing. It’s been a very good year for LTW. It has been a very busy year for open, inspired by some of the student work seen last year. We have open.ed launched, the new open educational resources policies, we have had the OER conference, we have open media, we have had some very bold moves by the library. And a move to make digital images from the library are open by default. That offers opportunities for others, and for us.

Extract from the Online Learning Consortium's 2016 Infographic

Extract from the Online Learning Consortium’s 2016 Infographic (image copyright OLC 2016)

There is evidence – from the US (referencing the EdTech: a Catalyst for Success section of the Online Learning Consortium 2016 Infographic). with students reporting increased engagement with course materials, with professors, with fellow students. And there is also a strong interest in digital video. MediaHopper goes fully launched very soon, and we are taking a case to Knowledge Strategy Committee and Learning and Teaching Committee to invest further in lecture capture, which is heavily used and demanded. And we need to look at how we can use that content, how it is being used. One of the things that I was struck by at LAK, was the amount of research being done on the use of audio visual material, looking at how students learn from video, how they are used, how they are viewed. Analytics around effective video for learning is quite interesting – and we’ll be able to do much more with that when we have these better systems in place. And I’ve included an image of Grace Hopper, who we named MediaHopper after.

Melissa Highton speaking at eLearning@ed 2016

Melissa Highton speaking at eLearning@ed 2016

Talking of Learning Analytics I’m a great fan of the idea that if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing a 2×2 matrix. So this is the Learning Analytics Map of Activities, Research and Roll-out (LAMARR – a great mix of Hollywood screen icon, and the inventor of wifi!), and there are a whole range of activities taking place around the university in this area at the moment, and a huge amount of work in the wider sector.

We also are the only University in the UK with a Wikimedian in Residence. It is a place entirely curated by those with interest in the world, and there is a real digital literacy skill for our students, for us, in understanding how information is created and contested online, how it becomes part of the internet, and that’s something that is worth thinking about for our students. I have a picture here of Sophie Jex-Blake, she was part of the inspiration for our first Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on women in science. Our Wikimedian is with us for just one year, so do make use of him. He’s already worked on lots of events and work, he’s very busy, but if you want to talk to him about a possible event, or just about the work being done, or that you want to do.

Here for longer than one year we have Lynda.com, an online collection of training videos which the University has signed up to for 3 years, and will be available through your University login. Do go and explore it now, and you will have Edinburgh University access from September. The stuff that is in there, can be curated into playlists, via learn, usage etc.

So, Wikipedia for a year, Lynda.com for three years, MediaHopper here now, and open increasingly here.

Highlights from recent conferences held in Edinburgh, chaired by Marshall Dozier

Marshall: Conferences are such an opportunity to make a connection between each other, with the wider community, and we hope to fold those three big conferences that have been taking place back into our own practice.

OER16 Open Culture Conference Lorna Campbell (@lornamcampbell), Open Education Resources Liaison for Open Scotland, LTW.

This was the 7th OER conference, and the first one to take place in Edinburgh. It was chaired by myself and Melissa Highton. Themes included Strategic advantage of open, creating a culture of openness and the reputational challenges of “open-washing”; converging and competing cultures of open knowledge, open source, open content, open practice, open data and open access; hacking, making and sharing; openness and public engagement?; and innovative practices in cultural heritage contexts, which I was particularly to see us get good engagement from.

There was originally a sense that OER would die out, but actually it is just getting bigger and bigger. This years OER conference was the biggest yet, and that’s because of support and investment from those who, like the University of Edinburgh, who see real value in openness. We had participants from across the world – 29 countries – despite being essentially a UK based conference. And we had around a 50/50 gender split – no all male panel here. There is no external funding around open education right now, so we had to charge but we did ensure free and open online participation for all – keynotes live-streamed to the ALT channel, we had Radio #EDUtalk @ OER16, with live streaming of keynotes, and interviews with participants and speakers from the conference – those recordings are hugely recommended; and we also had a busy and active Twitter channel. We had a strong Wikimedia presence at OER16, with editing training, demonstrations, and an ask a Wikimedian drop-in clinic, and people found real value in that.

Lorna Campbell speaking about OER16 at eLearning@ed 2016

Lorna Campbell speaking about OER16 at eLearning@ed 2016

We also had a wide range of keynotes and I’m just going to give a flavour of these. Our first was Catherine Cronin, National University of Ireland, Galway, who explored different definitions of openness, looking at issues of context and who may be excluded. We all negotiate risk when we are sharing, but negotiating that is important for hope, equality, and justice.

In the year of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death we were delighted to have Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith, who had a fantastic title: Free Willy: Shakespeaker & OER. In her talk she suggested teaching is an open practice now, that “you have to get over yourself and let people see what you are doing”.

John Scally’s keynote talked about the National Library of Scotland’s bold open policy. The NLS’ road to openness has been tricky, with tensions around preservation and access. John argued that the library has to move towards equality, and that open was a big part of that.

Edupunk Jim Groom of Reclaim Hosting, has quite a reputation in the sector and he was giving his very first keynote in the UK. JIm turned our attention from open shared resources, and towards open tech infrastructure, working at individual scale, but making use of cloud, networked resources which he sees as central to sustainable OER practice.

The final keynote was from Melissa Highton, with her talk Open with Care. She outlined the vision and policy of UoE. One idea introduced by Melissa was “technical and copyright debt”, the costs of not doing licensing, etc. correctly in the first place. IT Directors and CIOs need to be persuaded of the need for investment in OER.

It is difficult to summarise such a diverse conference, but there is growing awareness that openness is a key aspect that underpins good practice. I wanted to quote Stuart Allen’s blog. Stuart is a student on the MSc in Digital Education. HE did a wonderful summary of the conference.

Next year’s conference has the theme of Open and Politics and will be co-chaired by Josie Frader and Alec Tartovsky, chair of CC in Poland (our first international co-chair).

Learning@Scale 2016 – Amy Woodgate, Project Manager – Distance Education Initiative (DEI) & MOOCs, LTW.

I am coming at this from a different perspective here, as participant rather than organiser. This conference is about the intersection between informatics approaches and education. And I was interested in the degree to which that was informed by informatics, and that really seems to flag a need to interrogate what we do in terms of learning analytics, educational approach. So my presentation is kind of a proposal…

We have understood pedagogy for hundreds of years, we have been doing a huge amount of work on digital pedagogy, and the MSc in Digital Education is leading in this area. We have environments for learning, and we have environments at scale, including MOOCs, which were very evident at L@S. At University of Edinburgh we have lots of digitally based learning environments: ODL; MOOCS; and the emergence of UG credit-bearing online courses. But there is much more opportunity to connect these things for research and application – bringing pedagogy and environments at scale.

The final keynote at L@S was from Ken Koedinger, at Carnegie Mellon University. He suggested that every learning space should be a learning lab. We shouldn’t just apply theory, but building, doing, providing evidence base, thinking as part of our practice. He talked about collecting data, testing that data, understanding how to use data for continuous improvement. We are a research led institution, we have amazing opportunities to blend those things. But perhaps we haven’t yet fully embraced that Design, Deploy, Data, Repeat model. And my hope is that we can do something together more. We’ve done MOOCs for four years now, and there are so many opportunities to use the data, to get messy in the space… We haven’t been doing that but no-one has been. What was hard about the conference for me was that lots of it was about descriptive stats – we can see that people have clicked a video, but not connecting that back to anything else. And what was interesting to me was the articulation into physical environments here – picking up your pen many times is not meaningful. And so many Learning Analytics data sources are what we can capture, not necessarily what is meaningful.

The keynote had us answer some questions, about knowing when students are learning. You can see when people view or like a video, but there is a very low correlation between liking and learning… And for me that was the most important point of the session. That was really the huge gap, more proactive research, engagement, for meaningful measures of learning – not just what we can measure.

Mike Sharples, OU was also a keynote at L@S, and he talked about learning at scale, and how we can bring pedagoguey into those spaces, and the intersection of diversity, opportunity and availability. One of the things FutureLearn is exploring is the notion of citizen inquiry – people bring own research initiatives (as students) and almost like kickstarter engage the community in those projects. Interesting to see what happens, but an interesting question of how we utilize the masses, the scale of these spaces. We need you as the community working with us to start questioning how we can get more out of these spaces. Mike’s idea was that we have to rethink our idea of effective pedagoguey, and of ensuring that that is sustainable as being a key idea.

Working backwards then, there were many many papers submitted, not all were accepted, but you can view the videos of keynotes on Media Hopper, and there were posters for those not able to present as well. The winner of the best paper was “1A Civic Mission of MOOCs” – which gave the idea that actually there was a true diversity of people engaged in political MOOCs, and they weren’t all trolly, there was a sense of “respectful disagreement”. There were a lot of papers that we can look at, but we can’t apply any of these findings that can be applied without critical reflection, but there is much that can be done there.

It was interesting Lorna’s comments about gender balance. At L@S there were great female speakers, but only 15% of the whole. That reflected the computer science angle and bias of the event, and there felt like there was a need for the humanities to be there – and I think that’s an aspiration for the next one, to submit more papers, and get those voices as part of the event.

Although perhaps a slightly messy summary of the event, I wanted to leave you with the idea that we should be using what we do here at Edinburgh, with what we have available here, to put out a really exciting diverse range of work for presenting at next year’s third L@S!

So, what do people think about that idea of hacking up our learning spaces more? Thinking more about integrating data analysis etc, and having more of a community of practice around online pedagogies for learning@scale.

Amy Woodgate speaking about Learning@Scale 2016

Amy Woodgate speaking about Learning@Scale at elearning@ed 2016

Q&A

Q1) I think that issue of measuring what we can measure is a real issue right now. My question here is about adapting approach for international students – they come in and play huge fees, and there are employers pushing for MOOCs instead… But then we still want that income… So how does that all work together.

A1) I don’t think learning at scale is the only way to do teaching and learning, but it is an important resource, and offers new and interesting ways of learning. I don’t feel that it would compromise that issue of international students. International students are our students, we are an international community on campus, embracing that diversity is important. It’s not about getting rid of the teacher… There is so much you can do with pedagogies online that are so exciting, so immersive… And there is more we can get out of this in the future. I find it quite awkward to address your point though… MOOCs are an experimentation space I think, for bringing back into core. That works for some things, and some types of content really work at scale – adaptive learning processes for instance – lots of work up front for students then to navigate through. But what do others think about using MOOCs on campus…

Comment, Tim) I think for me we can measure things, but that idea of how those actions actually relate to the things that are not measured… No matter how good your VLE, people will do things beyond it. And we have to figure out how we connect and understand how they connect.

Q2, Ruby) Thank you very much for that. I was just a little bit worried… I know we have to move away from simplistic description of this measure, means this thing. But on one slide there was an implication that measuring learning… can be measured through testing. And I don’t think that that that is neccassarily true or helpful. Liking CAN be learning. And there is a lot of complexity around test scores.

A2)  Yes, that chart was showing that viewing a particular video, hadn’t resulted in better learning uptake at the end of the course… But absolutely we do need to look at these things carefully…

Q3) At the recent BlackBoard conference there was the discussion of credit bearing MOOCs, is there any plan to do that now?

A3) This sometihng we can do of course, could take a MOOC into a credit bearing UG course, where the MOOC is about content. What becomes quite exciting is moving out and, say, the kind of thing MSc DE did with eLearning and Digital Cultures – making connections between the credit bearing module and the MOOC, in interesting and enriching ways. The future isn’t pushing students over to the MOOC, but taking learning from one space to another, and seeing how that can blend. Some interesting conversations around credit alliances, like a virtual Erasmus, around credit like summer school credit. But then we fall back of universities wanting to do exams, and we have a strong track record of online MScs not relying on written exams, but not all are as progressive right now.

Q4, Nigel) I’m in Informatics, and am involved in getting introductory machine learning course online, and one of the challenges I’m facing is understanding how students are engaging, how much. I can ask them what they liked… But it doesn’t tell me much. That’s one issue. But connecting up what’s known about digital learning and how you evaluate learning in the VLEs is good… The other thing is that there is a lot of data I’d like to get out of the VLE and which to my knowledge we can’t access that data… And we as data scientists don’t have access.

Comment, Anne-Marie Scott) We are still learning how to do that best but we do collect data and we are keen to see what we can do. Dragan will talk more about Learning Analytics but there is also a UoE group that you could get involved with.

Q5, Paul) That was fascinating, and I wish I’d been able to make it along… I was a bit puzzled about how we can use this stuff… It seems to me that we imagine almost a single student body out there… In any programme we have enthusiastic students desperate to learn, no matter what; in the middle we have the quite interested, may need more to stay engaged; and then there are people just there for the certificate who just want it easy. If we imagine we have to hit all of the audiences in one approach it won’t work. We are keen to have those super keen students. In medicine we have patient groups with no medical background or educational background, so motivated to learn about their own conditions… But then in other courses, we see students who want the certificate… I think that enormous spectrum give us enormous challenges.

A5) An interesting pilot in GeoSciences on Adaptive Learning, to try to address the interested and the struggling students. Maths and Physics do a lot with additional resources with external sites – e.g. MOOCs – in a curated list from academics, that augment core. Then students who just want the basics, for those that want to learn more… Interesting paper on cheating in MOOCs, did analysis on multiple accounts and IP addresses, and toggling between accounts… Got a harvester and master account, looked at clusters…. Master accounts with perfect learning… Harvesting were poorer, then the ones in the middle… The middle is the key part… That’s where energy should be in the MOOC.

Q6) I was intrigued by big data asset work, and getting more involved… What are tensions with making data openly available… Is it competition with other universities…

A6) That’s part of project with Dragan and Jeff Haywood have been leading on Learning Analytics data policy… MOOCs include personally identifiable data, can strip it, but requires work. University has desire to share data, but not there yet for easy to access framework to engage with data. To be part of that, it’s part of bigger Learning Analytics process.

LAK16 Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference Professor Dragan Gasevic (@dgasevic), Chair in Learning Analytics and Informatics, Moray House School of Education & School of Informatics

The Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference, LAK’16, took place in Edinburgh last week. It was in it’s sixth edition. It started in Canada as a response to several groups of people looking at data collected in different types of digital environments, and also the possibility to merge data from physical spaces, instruments, etc. It attracted a diverse range of people from educational research, machine learning, psychology, sociology, policy makers etc. In terms of organisation we had wonderful support from the wonderful Grace Lynch and two of my PhD students, who did a huge amount. I also had some wonderful support from Sian Bayne and Jeff Haywood in getting this set up! They helped connect us to others, within the University and throughout the conference. But there are many others I’d like to thank, including Amy and her team who streamed all four parallel sessions throughout the conference.

In terms of programme the conference has a research stream and a practitioner stream. Our chairs help ensure we have a great programme – and we have three chairs for each stream. They helped us ensure we had a good diversity of papers and audiences, and vendors. We have those streams to attract papers but we deliberately mix the practice and research sessions are combined and share sessions… And we did break all records this time. This was only the second conference outside North America, and most of our participants are based there, but we had almost double the submissions this year. These issues are increasingly important, and the conference is an opportunity to critically reflect on this issue. Many of our papers were very high in quality, and we had a great set of workshops proposed – selecting those was a big challenge and only 50% made it in… So, for non computer scientists the acceptance ratio maybe isn’t a big deal… But for computer scientists it is a crucial thing. So here’s we accepted about 30% of papers… Short papers were particularly competitive – this is because the field is maturing, and people want to see more mature work.

Dragan Gasevic speaking about LAK'16 at eLearning@ed 2016.

We had participants from 35 countries, across our 470 participants – 140 from the US, 120 from the UK, and then 40 from Australia. Per capita Australia was very well represented. But one thing that is a little disappointing is that other European countries only had 3 or 4 people along, that tells us something about institutional adoption of learning analytics, and research there. There are impressive learning analytics work taking place in China right now, but little from Africa. In South America there is one hub of activity that is very good.

Workshops wise the kinds of topics addressed included learning design and feedback at scale, learning analytics for workplace and professional learning – definitely a theme with lots of data being collected but often private and business confidential work but that’s a tension (EU sees analytics as public data), learning analytics across physical and digital spaces – using broader data and avoiding the “streetlight effect”, temporal learning analytics – trying to see how learning processes unfold… Students are not static black boxes… They change decisions, study strategies and approaches based on feedback etc; also had interesting workshop on IMS Caliper; we also had a huge theme and workshop on ethical and privacy issues; and another on learning analytics for learners; a focus on video, and on smart environments; also looking for opportunities for educational researchers to engage with data – through data mining skills sessions to open conversations with with informaticians. We also had a “Failathon” – to try ideas, talk about failed ideas.

We also had a hackathon with Jisc/Apero… They issues an Edinburgh Statement for learning analytics interoperability. Do take a look, add your name, to address the critical points…

I just want to highlight a few keynotes: Professor Mireilla Hildebrandt talked about the law and learning as a a machine, around privacy, data and bringing in issues including the right to be forgotten. The other keynote I wanted to talk about was Professor Paul A Kirshner on learning analytics and policy – a great talk. And final keynote was Robert Mislevy who talked about psychometric front of learning analytics.

Finally two more highlights, we picked two papers out as the best:

  • Privacy and analytics – it’s a DELICATE issue. A checklist for trusted learning analytics – Hendrik Drachsler and Wolfgang Greller.
  • When should we stop? Towards Universal approach – details of speakers TBC

More information on the website. And we have more meetings coming up – we had meetings around the conference… And have more coming up with a meeting with QAA on Monday, session with Blackboard on Tuesday, and public panel with George Siemens & Mark Milliron the same day.

Q&A

Q1) Higher Education is teaching, learning and research… This is all Learning Analytics… So do we have Teaching Analytics?

A1) Great point… Learning analytics is about learning, we shouldn’t be distracted by toys. We have to think about our methods, our teaching knowledge and research. learning analytics with pretty charts isn’t neccassarily helpful – sometimes event detrimental – t0 learners. We have to look at instructional designs, to support our instructors, to use learning analytics to understand the cues we get in physical environments. One size does not fit all!

Marshall) I set a challenge for next year – apply learning analytics to the conference itself!

Student-centred learning session, chaired by Ruby Rennie

EUSA: Using eLearning Tools to Support and Engage Record Numbers of Reps  Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka (@TanyaLubiczNaw), Academic Engagement Coordinator, EUSA; Rachel Pratt, Academic Representation Assistant, EUSA; Charline Foch (@Woody_sol), EUSA, and Sophie McCallum,Academic Representation Assistant, EUSA.

Tanya opened the presentation with an introduction to what EUSA: the Edinburgh University Students Association is and does, emphasizing the independence of EUSA and its role in supporting students, and supporting student representatives… 

Rachel: We support around 2000 (2238) students across campus per year, growing every year (actually 1592 individuals – some are responsible for several courses), so we have a lot of people to support.

Sophie: Online training is a big deal, so we developed an online training portal within Learn. That allows us to support students on any campus, and our online learners. Students weren’t always sure about what was involved in the role, and so this course is about helping them to understand what their role is, how to engage etc. And in order to capture what they’ve learned we’ve been using Open Badges, for which over to Tanya…

Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka speaking about EUSA's use of Learn and Open Badges at elearning@ed 2016

Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka speaking about EUSA’s use of Learn and Open Badges at elearning@ed 2016

Tanya: I actually heard about open badges at this very conference a couple of years ago. These are flexible, free, digital accreditation. Thay are full of information (metadata) and can be shared and used elsewhere in the online world. These badges represent skills in key areas, Student Development badges (purple), Research and communication badges (pink) and ? (yellow).

Tanya shows the EUSA Open Badges at elearning@ed 2016

Tanya shows the EUSA Open Badges at elearning@ed 2016

There have been huge benefits of the badges. There are benefits for students in understanding all aspects of the role, encouraging them to reflect on and document their work and success – and those helped us share their success, to understand school level roles, and to understand what skills they are developing. And we are always looking for new ways to accredit and recognise the work of our student reps, who are all volunteers. It was a great way to recognise work in a digital way that can be used on LinkedIn profiles.

There were several ways to gain badges – many earned an open badge for online training (over 1000 earned); badges were earned for intermediate training – in person (113 earned); and badges were also earned by blogging about their successes and development (168 earned).

And the badges had a qualitative impact around their role and change management, better understanding their skills and relationships with their colleagues.

Sophie McCallum speaking about EUSA's work on training and Open Badges at elearning@ed 2016

Sophie McCallum speaking about EUSA’s work on training and Open Badges at elearning@ed 2016

Rachel: Looking at the learning points from this. In terms of using (Blackboard) Learn for online functionality… For all our modules to work the best they can, 500 users is the most we could. We have two Learn pages – one for CSE (College of Science & Engineering), one for CHSS (College of Humanities and Social Sciences), they are working but we might have to split them further for best functionality. We also had challenges with uploading/bulk uploading UUNs (the University personal identifiers) – one wrong UUN in several hundred, loses all. Information services helped us with that early on! We also found that surveys in Learn are anonymous – helpful for ungraded reflection really.

In terms of Open Badges the tie to an email address is a challenge. If earned under a student email address, it’s hard to port over to a personal email address. Not sure how to resolve that but aware of it. And we also found loading of badges from “Backpack” to sites like LinkedIn was a bit tedious – we’ll support that more next year to make that easier. And there are still unknown issues to be resolved, part of the Mozilla Open Badges environment more broadly. There isn’t huge support online yet, but hopefully those issues will be addressed by the bigger community.

Using eLearning tools have helped us to upscale, train and support record numbers of Reps in their roles; they have helped us have a strong positive quantitative and qualitative impact in engaging reps; and importance of having essential material and training online and optional, in-person intermediate training and events. And it’s definitely a system we’ll continue to have and develop over the coming years.

Rachel Pratt talks about EUSA's training approach, working with student representatives across the University, at elearning@ed 2016

Rachel Pratt talks about EUSA’s training approach, working with student representatives across the University, at elearning@ed 2016

Q&A

Q1) Have you had any new feedback from students about this new rep system… I was wondering if you have an idea of whether student data – as discussed earlier – is on the agenda for students?

A1 – Tanya) Students are very well aware of their data being collected and used, we are part of data analytics working groups across the university. It’s about how it is stored, shared, presented – especially the issue of how you present information when they are not doing well… Interested in those conversations about how data is used, but we are also working with reps, and things like the Smart Data Hacks to use data for new things – timetabling things for instance…

Q2) ?

A2) It’s a big deal to volunteer 50 hours of their time per year. They are keen to show that work to future employers etc.

Q3) As usual students and EUSA seem to be way ahead. How do you find out more about the badges?

A3) They can be clicked for more metadata – that’s embedded in it. Feedback has been great, and the blogposts have really helped them reflect on their work and share that.

SLICCs: Student-Led Individually Created Courses Simon Riley, Senior Lecturer, MRC Centre for Reproductive Health

I’m Simon Riley, from the School of Medicine. I’m on secondment with the IAD and that’s why I’m on this. I’m coming to it from having worked on the student led component in medicine. You would think that medicine would be hugely confined by GMC requirements, but there is space there. But in Edinburgh there is about a year of the five year programme that is student led – spread across that time but very important.

Now, before speaking further I must acknowledge my colleague Gavin McCabe, Employability Consultant who has been so helpful in this process.

SLICCs are essentially a reflective framework, to explore skill acquisition, using an e-portfolio. We give students generic Learning Outcomes (LOs), which allow the students to make choices. Although it’s not clear how much students understand or engage with learning outcomes… We only get four or five per module. But those generic LOs allow students to immediately define their own aims and anticipated learning in their “proposal”. Students can take ownership of their own learning by choosing the LOs to address.

Simon Riley talks about SLICCs at eLearning@ed 2016

Simon Riley talks about SLICCs at eLearning@ed 2016

The other place that this can raise tensions is the idea of “academic rigor”. We are comfortable at assessing knowledge, and assessments that are knowledge based. And we assume they get those other graduate attributes by osmosis… I think we have to think carefully about how we look at that. Because the SLICCs are reflection on learning, I think there is real rigor there. But there has to be academic content – but it’s how they gain that knowledge. Tanya mentioned the Edinburgh Award – a reflective process that has some similarities but it is different as it is not for credit.

Throughout their learning experience students can make big mistakes, and recover from them. But if you get students to reflect early, and reflect on any issue that is raised, then they have the opportunity to earn from mistakes, to consider resilience, and helping them to understand their own process for making and dealing with mistakes.

The other concern that I get is “oh, that’s a lot of work for our staff”… I was involved in Pilot 1 and I discovered that when giving feedback I was referring students back to the LOs they selected, their brief, the rubric, the key feedback was about solving the problem themselves… It’s relatively light touch and gives ownership.

So, here are three LOs… Around Analysis, Application, Evaluation. This set is Level 8. I think you could give those to any student, and ask them to do some learning, based on that, and reflect on it… And that’s across the University, across colleges… And building links between the colleges and schools, to these LOs.

So, where are we at? We had a pilot with a small number of students. It was for extra credit, totally optional. They could conduct their own learning, capture in a portfolio, reflect upon it. And there is really tight link between the portfolio evidence, and the reflective assignment. It was a fascinating set of different experiences… For instance one student went and counter river dolphins in the Amazon, but many were not as exotic… We didn’t want to potentially exclude anyone or limit relevance. Any activity can have an academic element to it if structured and reflected upon appropriately. Those who went through the process… Students have come back to us who did these at Level 8 in second year (highest level senate has approved)… They liked the process – the tutor, the discipline, the framework, more than the credit.

So we have just over 100 students signed up this summer. But I’m excited about doing this in existing programmes and courses… What we’ve done is created SCQF LOs at Level 7, 8, 10 and 11, with resources to reflect, marking rubric, and board of studies documents. I am a course organiser – developing is great but often there isn’t time to do it… So what I’m trying to do is create all that material and then just let others take and reuse that… Add a little context and run onto it. But I want to hold onto the common LOs, as long as you do that we can work between each other… And those LOs include the three already shown, plus LO4 on “Talent” and LO5 on “Mindset”, both of which specifically address graduate attributes. We’ve had graduate attributes for years but they aren’t usually in our LOs, just implicit. In these case LOs are the graduate attributes.

Simon Riley gets very animated talking about Learning Outcomes at eLearning@ed 2016

Simon Riley gets very animated talking about Learning Outcomes at eLearning@ed 2016

What might they look like? Embedded in the curriculum, online and on campus. Level 11 on-campus courses are very interested, seems to fit with what they are trying to do. Well suited to projects, to skill acquisition, and using a portfolio is key – evidencing learning is a really useful step in getting engagement. And there is such potential for interdisciplinary work – e.g. Living Lab, Edinburgh CityScope. Summer schools also very interested – a chance for a student to take a holistic view of their learning over that period. We spend a lot of money sending students out to things – study abroad, summer schools, bursaries… When they go we get little back on what they have done. I think we need to use something like this for that sort of experience, that captures what they have learnt and reflected on.

Q&A

Q1) That idea of students needing to be able to fail successfully really chimes for me… Failures can be very damaging… I thought that the idea of embracing failure, and that kind of start up culture too which values amazing failure… Should/could failure be one of your attributes… to be an amazing failure…

A1) I think that’s LO5 – turning it into a talent. But I think you have touched on an important aspect of our experience. Students are risk averse, they don’t want to fail… But as reflective learners we know that failure matters, that’s when we learn, and this framework can help us address this. I look to people like Paul McC… You have students learning in labs… You can set things up so they fail and have to solve problems… Then they have to work out how to get there, that helps…

Q1) In the sporting world you have the idea of being able to crash the kit, to be able to learn – learning how to crash safely is an early stage skills – in skateboarding, surfing etc.

Keynote, supported by the Centre for Research in Digital Education: In search of connected learning: Exploring the pedagogy of the open web Dr Laura Gogia MD, PhD, (@GoogleGuacamole)Research Fellow for the Division of Learning Innovation and Student Success at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA, chaired by Jen Ross

Jen: I am really delighted to welcome Laura Gogia to eLearning@ed – I heard her speak a year or so ago and I just felt that great thing where ideas just gel. Laura has just successfully defended her PhD. She is also @GoogleGuacamole on Twitter and organises a Twitter reading club. And her previous roles have been diverse, most interestingly she worked as an obstetrician.

Laura: Thank you so much for inviting me today. I have been watching Edinburgh all year long, it’s just such an exciting place. To have such big conferences this year, there is so much exciting digital education and digital pedagogy work going on, you guys are at the forefront.

So I’m going to talk about connected learning – a simpler title than originally in your programme – because that’s my PhD title… I tried to get every keyword in my PhD title!

Laura Gogia begins her keynote with great enthusiasm at eLearning@ed 2016

Laura Gogia begins her keynote with great enthusiasm at eLearning@ed 2016

Let me show you an image of my daughter looking at a globe here, that look on her face is her being totally absorbed. I look for that look to understand when she is engaged and interested. In the academic context we know that students who are motivated, who see real relevance and benefit to their own work makes for more successful approaches. Drawing on Montesorri and other progressive approaches, Mimi Ito and colleagues have developed a framework for connected learning that shapes those approaches for an online digital world.

Henry Jenkins and colleagues describe Digital Participatory Culture that is interactive, creative, about sharing/contributing and informal mentoring. So a connected teacher might design learning to particularly use those connections out to the wider world. George Siemens and colleagues talk about digital workflow, where we filter/aggregate; critique; remix; amplify – pushing our work out into a noisy world where we need to catch attention. Therefore connected learners and teachers find ways to embed these skills into learning and teaching experiences…

Now this all sounds good, but much of the literature is on K-12, so what does connected learning mean for Higher Education. Now in 2014 my institution embarked on an openly networked connected learning project, on learning experiences that draw from web structure and culture to (potentially) support connected learning and student agency, engagement and success. This is only 2 years in, it’s not about guaranteed success but I’ll be talking about some work and opportunities.

So, a quick overview of VCU, we have an interesting dynamic institution, with the top rated arts college, we have diverse students, a satellite campus in Quatar and it’s an interesting place to be. And we also have VCU RamPages, an unlimited resource for creating webpages, that can be networked and extended within and beyond the University. There are about 16k websites in the last year and a half. Many are student websites, blogs, and eportfolios. RamPages enable a range of experiences and expression but I’ll focus on one, Connected Courses.

Connected Courses are openly networked digital spaces, there are networked participatory activities – some in person, all taught by different teaching staff. And they generate authentic learning products, most of which are visible to the public. Students maintain their own blog sites – usually on RamPages but they can use existing sites if they want. When they enroll on a new course they know they will be blogging and doing so publicly. They use a tag, that is then aggregated and combined with other students posts…

So, this is an example of a standard (WordPress) RamPages blog… Students select the blog template, the header images, etc. Then she uses the appropriate tag for her course, which takes it to the course “Bloggregate”… And this is where the magic happens – facilitating the sharing, the commenting, and from a tutors point of view, the assessment.

Laura Gogia shows the VCA/RamPages

Laura Gogia shows the VCA/RamPages “Bloggregate” at eLearning@ed 2016

The openly networked structure supports student agency and discovery. Students retain control of their learning products during and after the course. And work from LaGuadia found students were more richly engaged in such networked environments. And students can be exposed to work and experience which they would not otherwise be exposed to – from different sites, from different institutions, from different levels, and from different courses.

Connected learning also facilitate networked participation, including collaboration and crowdsourcing, including social media. These tools support student agency – being interdependent and self regulated. They may encourage digital fluency. And they support authentic learning products – making joint contributions that leads to enriched work.

A few years ago the UCI bike race was in Virginia and the University, in place of classes, offered a credited course that encouraged them to attend the bike race and collect evidence and share their reflections through the particular lens of their chosen course option. These jointly painted a rich picture, they were combined into authentic work products. Similarly VCU Field Botany collaboratively generate a digital field guide (the only one) to the James Richer Park System. This contributes back to the community. Similarly arts students are generating the RVArts site, on events, with students attending, reflecting, but also benefiting our community who share interest in these traditionally decentralised events.

Now almost all connected courses involve blogging, which develops multimodal composition for digital fluency and multiple perspectives. Students include images and video, but some lecturers are embedding digital multimodal composition in their tasks. Inspireed by DS106, University of Mary Washington, our #CuriousCoLab Creative Makes course asks students to process abstract course concepts and enhance their digital fluency. They make a concrete representation of the abstract concept – they put it in their blog with some explanation of why they have chosen to do this in their way. The students loved this… They spent more time, they thought more on these abstract ideas and concepts… They can struggle with those ideas… This course was fully online, with members of the public engaged too – and we saw both students and these external participants did the creative make, whether or not they did the reflective blogging (optional for outside participants).

In terms of final projects students are often asked to create a website. These assignments allow the students to work on topics that really talk to their heart… So, one module can generate projects on multitasking and the brain, another might talk about the impact on the bombing of Hiroshima.

I’ve talked about connected learning but now I’d like to turn to my research on student blogging and tweeting, and my focus on the idea that if students are engaged in Connected Learning we require the recognition and creation of connections with people, and across concepts, contexts and time. I focused on Blogging and tweeting as these are commonly used in connected learning… I asked myself about whether there was something about these practices that was special here. So I looked at how we can capture connected learning through student digital annotation… Looking at hyperlinks, mentions, etc. The things that express digital connection… Are they indicative of pedagogical connections too? I also looking at images and videos, and how students just use images in their blog posts…

Because the Twitter API and WordPress allow capture of digital annotations… You can capture those connections in order to describe engagement. So, for the class I looked at there were weekly Twitter chats… And others beyond the course were open participants, very lightly auditing the course… I wanted to see how they interacted… What I saw was that open students were very well integrated with the enrolled students, and interacting… And this has instructional value too. Instructors used a similar social network analysis tool to ask students to reflect on their learning and engagement.

Laura Gogia speaking about linking and interaction patterns at VCU as part of her eLearning@ed 2016 keynote

Laura Gogia speaking about linking and interaction patterns at VCU as part of her eLearning@ed 2016 keynote

Similarly I looked at psychology students and how they shared hyperlinks… You can see also how sources are found directly, and when they access them exclusively through their Twitter timeline… That was useful for discussing student practice with them – because those are two different processes really – whether reading fully, or finding through others’ sharing. And in a course where there is controversy over legitimate sources, you could have a conversation on what sources you are using and why.

I found students using hyperlinks to point to additional resources, traditional citations, embedded definitions, to connect their own work, but also to contextualise their posts – indicating a presumption of an external audience and of shaping content to them… And we saw different styles of linking. We didn’t see too many “For more info see…” blog posts pointing to eg NYT, CNN. What we saw more of was text like “Smith (2010) states that verbal and nonverbal communication an impact” – a traditional citation… But “Smith 2010” and “nonverbal” were both linked. One goes where you expect (the paper), the other is a kind of “embedded description” – linking to more information but not cluttering their style or main narrative. You couldn’t see that in a paper based essay. You might also see “As part of this course, I have created a framework and design structure for..”… “this course” links to the course – thinking about audience perhaps (more research needed) by talking about context; framework pointed to personal structure etc.

I also saw varying roles of images in blog posts: some were aesthetic, some were illustration, some as extension. Students making self-generated images and videos incorporated their discussion of that making process in their blog posts… I particularly enjoyed when students made their own images and videos.

Laura Gogia talks about the Twitter patterns and hyperlinking practices of her research participants in her eLearning@ed 2016 keynote

Laura Gogia talks about the Twitter patterns and hyperlinking practices of her research participants in her eLearning@ed 2016 keynote

In terms of Twitter, students tweeted differently than they blog. Now we know different platforms support different types of behaviours. What I noticed here was that students tweeted hyperlinks to contribute to the group, or to highlight their own work. So, hyperlink as contribution could be as simple as a link with the hashtag. Whilst others might say “<hyperlink> just confirms what was said by the speaker last week”… which is different. Or it might be, e.g. “@student might find this on financial aid interesting <hyperlink>, now that inclusion of a person name significantly increases the chances of engagement – significantly linked to 3+ replies.

And then we’d see hyperlinks as promotion, although we didn’t see many loading tweets with hashtags to target lots of communities.

So, my conclusions on Digital Annotations, is that these are nuanced areas for research and discussion. I found that students seldom mentioned peer efforts – and that’s a problem, we need to encourage that. There is a lack of targeted contribution – that can be ok and trigger serendipity, but not always. We have to help students and ourselves to navigate to ensure we get information to the right people. Also almost no images I looked at had proper attribution, and that’s a problem. We tell them to cite sources in the text, have to do that in the images too. And finally course design and instructor behaviour matters, students perform better when the structure works for them… So we have to find that sweet spot and train and support instructors accordingly.

I want to end with a quote from a VCU Undergraduate student. This was a listening tour, not a formal part of research, and I asked them how she learned, how they want to learn… And this student talked about the need for learning to be flexible, connected, portable. Does everyone need an open connected space? No, but some do, and these spaces have great affordances… We need to play more here, to stay relevant and engaged with that wider world, to creatively play with the idea of learning!

Q&A

Q1) It was fantastic to see all that student engagement there, it seems that they really enjoy that. I was wondering about information overload and how students and staff deal with that with all those blogs and tweets!

A1) A fabulous question! I would say that students either love or hate connected courses… They feel strongly. One reason for that is the ability to cope with information overload. The first time we ran these we were all learning, the second time we put in information about how to cope with that early on… Part of the reason for this courses is to actually help students cope with that, understand how to manage that. It’s a big deal but part of the experience. Have to own up front, why its important to deal with it, and then deal with it. From a Twitter perspective I’m in the process of persuading faculty to grade Twitter… That hasn’t happened yet… Previously been uncredited, or has been a credit for participation. I have problems with both models… With the no credit voluntary version you get some students who are really into it… And they get frustrated with those that don’t contribute. The participation is more structured… But also frustrating, for the same reasons that can be in class… So we are looking at social network analysis that we can do and embed in grading etc.

Comment – Simon Riley) Just to comment on overload… That’s half of what being a professional or an academic is. I’m a medic and if you search PubMed you get that immediately… Another part of that is dealing with uncertainty… And I agree that we have to embrace this, to show students a way through it… Maybe the lack of structure is where we want to be…

A2) Ironically the people with the least comfort with uncertainty and unstructured are faculty members – those open participants. They feel that they are missing things… They feel they should know it all, that they should absorb it at. This is where we are at. But I was at a digital experience conference where there were 100s of people, loads of parallel strands… There seems to be a need to see it all, do it all… We have to make a conscious effort at ALT Lab to just help people let it go… This may be the first time in history where we have to be fine that we can’t know it all, and we know that and are comfortable…

Q3) Do you explicitly ask students not to contribute to that overload?

A3) I’m not sure we’re mature enough in practice… I think we need to explain what we are doing and why, to help them develop that meta level of learning. I’m not sure how often that’s happening just now but that’s important.

Q4) You talked a lot about talking in the open web in social media. Given that the largest social networks are engaging in commercial activities, in political activities (e.g. Mark Zuckerberg in China), is that something students need to be aware of?

A4) Absolutely, that needs to be there, alongside understanding privacy, understanding attribution and copyright. We don’t use Facebook. We use WordPress for RamPages – have had no problems with that so far. But we haven’t had problems with Twitter either… It’s a good point that should go on the list…

Q5) Could you imagine connected courses for say Informatics or Mathematics…? What do they look like?

A5) Most of the math courses we have dealt with are applied mathematics. That’s probably as far as I could get without sitting with a subject expert – so give me 15 mins with you and I could tell you.

Q6) So, what is the role of faculty here in carefully selecting things for students which we think are high quality?

A6) The role is as it has ever been, to mark those things out as high quality…

Q6) There is a lot of stuff out there… Linking randomly won’t always find high quality content.

A6) Sure, this is not about linking randomly though, it’s about enabling students to identify content, so they understand high quality content, not just the list given, and that supports them in the future. Typically academic staff do curate content, but (depending on the programme), students also go out there to find quality materials, discussing reasons for choosing, helping them model and understand quality. It’s about intentionality… We are trying to get students to make those decisions intentionally.

Digital Education & Technology Enhanced Learning Panel Session, chaired by Victoria Dishon

Victoria: I am delighted to be able to chair this panel. We have some brilliant academic minds and I am very pleased to be able to introduce some of them to you.

Prof. Sian Bayne (@sbayne), Professor of Digital Education in the School of Education, and Assistant Principal, Digital Education

I have a slight identity crisis today! I am Sian Bayne and I’m Professor of Digital Education but I am also newly Assistant Principal, Digital Education. It’s an incredibly exciting area of work to take forward so I thought I’d talk a bit about digital education at Edinburgh and where we are now… We have reputation and leadership, 2600 PG online students, 67 programmes, 2m MOOC learners, and real strategic support in the University. It’s a good time to be here.

Sian Bayne speaking about her exciting new role, at eLearning@ed 2016

Sian Bayne speaking about her exciting new role, at eLearning@ed 2016

We also have a growing culture of teaching innovation in Schools and a strong understanding of the challenges of academic development for and with DE. Velda McCune, Depute Director of IAD, currently on research leave, talks about complex, multilateral and ever shifting conglomerations of learning.

I want to talk a bit about where things are going… Technology trends seem to be taking us in some particular directions…We have a range of future gazing reports and updates, but I’m not as sure that we have a strong body of students, of academics, of support with a vision for what we want digital education to look like here. We did have 2 years ago the Ed2020 trying to look at this. The Stanford 2025 study is also really interesting, with four big ideas emerging around undergraduate education – of the open loop university – why 4 years at a set age, why not 6 years across your lifetime; paced education – 6 years of personalised learning with approaches for discipline we’re embedded in and put HE in the world; Axis flip; purpose learning – coming to uni with a mission not a major… So it would be interesting to think of those ideas in this university.

UAL/LSE did a digital online hack event, Digital is not the future, to explore the idea of hacking the institution from the inside. Looking at shifting to active work. Also a great new MIT Future of Digital Education report too. And if you have any ideas for processes or approaches to take things forward, please do email or Twitter me…

Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal, Online Learning (@honeybhighton)

I am also having quite an identity crisis. Sian and I have inherited quite a broad range of activities from Jeff Haywood, and I have inherited many of the activities that he had as head of IS, particularly thinking about online learning in the institution, number of courses, number of learners, what success would look like, targets – and where they came from – get thrown about… Some are assumptions, some KPI, some reach targets, some pure fantasy! So I’ll be looking at that, with the other Assistant Principals and the teams in ISG.

Melissa Highton talks about her forthcoming new role, at eLearning@ed 2016

Melissa Highton talks about her forthcoming new role, at eLearning@ed 2016

What would success look like? That Edinburgh should be THE place to work if you want to work on Digital Education, that it is innovative, fund, and our practice must be research informed, research linked, research connected. Every educator should be able to choose a range of tools to work with, and have support and understanding of risk around that… Edinburgh would be a place that excellent practitioners come t0 – and stay. Our online students would give us high satisfaction ratings. And our on campus learners would see themselves continuing studies online – preferably with us, but maybe with others.

To do that there are a set of more procedural things that must be in place around efficiency, structures, processes, platforms, to allow you to do the teaching and learning activity that we need you to do to maintain our position as a leader in this area. We have to move away from dependence on central funding, and towards sustainable activity in their departments and schools. I know it’s sexy to spin stuff up locally, it’s got us far, but when we work at scale we need common schools, taking ideas from one part of the institution to others. But hopefully creating a better environment for doing the innovative things you need to do.

Prof. David Reay (@keelincurve); Chair in Carbon Management & Education Assistant Principal, Global Environment & Society

Last year at eLearning@ed I talked about the Sustainability and Social Responsibility course, and today I’ll talk about that, another programme and some other exciting work we are doing all around Global Change and Technology Enhanced Learning.

So with the Online MSc in Carbon Management we have that fun criteria! We had an on campus programme, and it went online with students across the world. We tried lots of things, tried lots of tools, and made all sorts of mistakes that we learned from. And it was great fun! One of my favourite students was joining the first Google Hangout from a bunker in Syria, during the war, and when she had connectivity issues for the course we had to find a tactic to be able to post content via USB to students with those issues.

David Reay speaks about the new Online

David Reay speaks about the new Online “Sustainability & Social Responsibility” MSc at eLearning@ed 2016

So that online course in Sustainability and Social Responsibility is something we’ve put through the new CAIRO process that Fiona Hale is leading on, doing that workshop was hugely useful for trying those ideas, making the mistakes early so we could address them in our design. And this will be live in the autumn, please do all take a look and take it.

And the final thing, which I’m very excited about, is an online “Disaster Risk Reduction” course, which we’ve always wanted to do. This is for post earthquake, post flooding, post fire type situations. We have enormous expertise in this area and we want to look at delivery format – maybe CPD for rescue workers, MOOCs for community, maybe Masters for city planners etc. So this is the next year, this is what I’ll speak about next year.

Prof. Chris Sangwin (@c_sangwin), Chair in Technology Enhanced Science Education, School of Mathematics

I’m new to Edinburgh, joined in July last year, and my interest is in automatic assessment, and specifically online assessment. Assessment is the cornerstone of education, it drives what people do, that is the action they undertake. I’ve been influenced by Kluger and DeNiki 1996 who found that “one third of feedback interventions decreased performance”. This study found that specific feedback on the task was effective, feedback that could be seen as a personal attack was not. Which makes sense, but we aren’t always honest about our failures.

Chris Sangwin talks about automated approaches to assessing mathematics, at eLearning@ed 2016

Chris Sangwin talks about automated approaches to assessing mathematics, at eLearning@ed 2016

So, I’ve developed an automatic assessment system for mathematics – for some but not all things – which uses the computer algebra system (CAS) Maxima, which generates random structured questions, gives feedback, accommodates multiple approaches, and provides feedback on the parts of the answer which does not address the question. This is a pragmatic tool, there are bigger ideas around adaptive learning but those are huge to scope, to build, to plan out. The idea is that we have a cold hard truth – we need time, we need things marking all the time and reliably, and that contrasts with the much bigger vision of what we want for our students for our education.

You can try it yourself here: http://stack.maths.ed.ac.uk/demo/ and I am happy to add you as a question setter if you would like. We hope it will be in Learn soon too.

Prof. Judy Hardy (@judyhardy), Professor of Physics Education, School of Physics and Astronomy.

I want to follow up my talk last year about what we need to focus on “awareness” knowledge, “how to” knowledge, and we need “principles” knowledge. Fewer than a quarter of people don’t modify approaches in their teaching – sometimes that is fine, sometimes it is not. So I want to talk about a few things we’ve done, one that worked, one that did not.

Judy Hardy talks about modifying teaching approaches, at eLearning@ed 2016

Judy Hardy talks about implementing changes in teaching approaches, at eLearning@ed 2016

We have used Peerwise testing, and use of that correlates with exam performance, even when controlling for other factors. We understand from our evidence how to make it work. We have to move from formative (recommended) to summative (which drives behaviour). We have to drive students ownership of this work.

We have also used ACJ – Adaptive Comparative Judgement – to get students to understand what quality looks like, to understand it in comparison to others. They are not bad at doing that… It looks quite good at face value. But when we dug in we found students making judgments on surface features… neatness, length, presence of diagram… We are not at all confident about their physics knowledge, and how they evidence that decision… For us the evidence wasn’t enough, it wasn’t aligned with what we were trying to do. There was very high administrative overheads… A detail that is easily overlooked. For a pilot its fine, to work every day that’s an issue.

Implementing change, we have to align the change with the principles – which may also mean challenge underlying beliefs about their teaching. It needs to be compatible with local, often complex, classroom context, and it takes time, and time to embed.

Victoria: A lot of what we do here does involve taking risk so it’s great to hear that comparison of risks that have worked, and those that are less successful.

Dr Michael Seery, Reader, Chemistry Education. (@seerymk)

Like Chris I joined last July… My background has been in biology education. One of the first projects I worked on was on taking one third of chemistry undergraduate lab reports (about 1200 reports_ and to manage and correct those for about 35 postgraduate demonstrators. Why? Well because it can be hard to do these reports, often inconsistent in format, to assess online and I wanted to seek clarity and consistency of feedback. And the other reason to move online was to reduce administrative burden.

Michael Seery speaks about moving to online learning (image also shows the previous offline administrative tools), at eLearning@ed 2016

Michael Seery speaks about moving to online learning (image also shows the previous offline administrative tools), at eLearning@ed 2016

So Turnitin (Grademark) was what I started looking at. But it requires a Start Date, Due Date, and End date. But our students don’t have those. Instead we needed to retrofit it a bit. So, students submitted to experimental Dropbox, demonstrators filtered submissions and corrected their lab reports, and mark and feedback returned immediately to students… But we had problems… No deadline possible so can’t track turnaround time/impose penalties; “live” correction visible by student, and risk of simultaneous marking. And the Section rubrics (bands of 20%) too broad – that generated a great deal of feedback, as you can imagine. BUT demonstrators were being very diligent about feedback – but that also confused students as minor points were mixed with major points.

So going forward we are using groups, students will submit by week so that due dates ad turnaround times clearer, use TurnItIn assessment by groups with post date, and grading forms all direct mark entry. But our challenge has been retrofitting technologies to the assessment and feedback issue, but that bigger issue needs discussion.

The format for this session is that each of our panel will give a 3-5 minute introductory presentation and we will then turn to discussion, both amongst the panel and with questions and comments from the audience.

Panel discussion/Q&A

Q1) Thank you for a really interesting range of really diverse presentations. My question is for Melissa, and it’s about continuity of connection… UG, online, maybe pre-arrival, returning as a lifelong learning… Can we keep our matriculation number email forever? We use it at the start but then it all gets complex on graduation… Why can’t we keep that as that consistent point of contact.

A1, Melissa) That sounds like a good idea.

Q2) We’ve had that discussion at Informatics, as students lose a lot of materials etc. by loss of that address. We think an @ed.ac.uk alias is probably the way, especially for those who carry on beyond undergraduate. It was always designed as a mapping tool. But also let them have their own space that they can move work into and out of. Think that should be University policy.

A2, Melissa) Sounds like a good idea too!

Q3) I was really pleased to hear assessment and feedback raised in a lot of these presentations. In my role as Vice Principal Assessment and Feedback I’m keen to understand how we can continue those conversations, how do we join these conversations up? What is the space here? We have teaching networks but what could we be missing?

A3, Michael) We all have agreed LOs but if you ask 10 different lab demonstrators they will have 10 different ideas of what that looks like that. I think assessment on a grade, feedback, but also feed forward is crucial here. Those structures seems like a sensible place.

A3, Judy) I think part of the problem is that teaching staff are so busy that it is really difficult  to do the work needed. I think we should be moving more towards formative assessment, that is very much an ideal, far from where we are in practice, but it’s what I would like to see.

Q4) A lot of you talked about time, time being an issue… One of the issues that students raise all of the time is about timeliness of feedback… Do you think digital tools offer a way to do this?

A4, Judy) For me, the answer is probably no. Almost all student work is handwritten for us… What we’d like to do is sit with a student to talk to them, to understand what is going on in their heads, how their ideas are formed. But time with 300 students is against us. So digital tools don’t help me… Except maybe Chris’ online assessment for mathematics.

A4, Chris) The idea of implementing the system I showed is to free up staff time for that sort of richer feedback, by tackling the limited range of work we can mark automatically. That is a limited range though and it diminishes as the subject progresses.

A4, David) We implemented online submission as default and it really helped with timings, NSS, etc. that really helped us. For some assessment that is hard, but it has helped for some.

A4, Michael) Students do really value that direct feedback from academic staff… You can automate some chemistry marking, but we need that human interaction in there too, that’s important.

A4, Sian) I want to raise a humanities orientated way of raising the time issue… For me time isn’t just about the timeline for feedback, but also exploring different kinds of temporality that you can do online. For our MSc in Digital Education we have students blog and their tutors engage in a long form engaged rich way throughout the course, feedback and assessment is much richer than just grading.

Q5) In terms of incorporation of international students here, they are here for one year only and that’s very short. Sometimes Chinese students meet a real clash of expectations around language proficiency, a communication gap between what assessment and feedback is, and what we practice. In terms of technology is there a formative model for feedback for students less familiar with this different academic culture, rather than leaving them confused for one semester and then start to understand.

A5, David) It’s such an important point. For all of our students there is a real challenge of understanding what feedback actually is, what it is for. A lot of good feedback isn’t badged properly and doesn’t show up in NSS. I love the idea of less assessment, and of the timing being thought through. So we don’t focus on summative assessment early on, before they know how to play the game.. I agree really.

A5, Judy) One thing we don’t make much use, is of exemplars. They can be very valuable. When I think about how we get expertise as markers, is because of trying to do it. Students don’t get that opportunity, you only see your own work. Exemplars can help there…

The panel listening to questions from the floor at eLearning@ed 2016

The panel listening to questions from the floor at eLearning@ed 2016

Q6) Maybe for the panel, maybe for Fiona… One thing to build in dialogue, and the importance of formative assessment… Are you seeing that in the course design workshops, use of CAIReO (blog post on this coming soon btw), whether you see a difference in the ways people assess….

A6, Fiona) We have queues of people wanting the workshop right now, they have challenges and issues to address and for some of them its assessment, for others its delivery or pace. But assessment is always part of that. It comes naturally out of storyboarding of learner activities. BUt we are not looking at development of content, we are talking about learning activity – that’s where it is different. Plenty to think about though…

Comment, Ross) Metaphor of a blank piece of paper is good. With learning technologies you can start out with that sense of not knowing what you want to achieve… I think exemplars help here too, sharing of ideas and examples. Days like today can be really helpful for seeing what others are doing, but then we go back to desks and have blank sheets of paper.

Q7) As more policies and initiatives appear in the institution, does it matter if we believe that learning is what the student does – rather than the teacher? I think my believe is that learning occurs in the mind of the learning… So technologies such as distance and digital learning can be a bit strange… Distance and digital teaching maybe makes more sense…

A7) I think that replacing terminology of “teaching” with terminology of “learning” has been taking place. Hesper talks about the problems of the “learnification of education”, when we do that we instrumentalise education. That ignores power structures and issues in many ways. My colleagues and I wrote a Manifesto for Teaching Online and we had some flack about that terminology but we thought that that was important.

Q8) Aspirationally there would be one to one dialogue with students… I agree that that is a good aspiration… And there is that possibility of continuity… But my question was to what extent past, present, and future physical spaces… And to what extent does that enable or challenge good learning or good teaching?

A8, Judy) We use technology in classrooms. First year classes are flipped – and the spaces aren’t very conducive to that. There are issues with that physical space. For group working there are great frustrations that can limit what we can do… In any case this is somewhat inevitable. In terms of online education, I probably have to hand to colleagues…

A8, David) For our institution we have big plans and real estate pressures already. When we are designing teaching spaces, as we are at KB right now, there is a danger of locking ourselves into an estate that is not future proof. And in terms of impinging on innovation, in terms of changing demands of students, that’s a real risk for us… So I suppose my solution to that is that when we do large estate planning, that we as educators and experts in technology do that work, do that horizon scanning, like Sian talked about, and that that feeds into physical space as well as pedagogy.

A8, Sian) For me I want leakier spaces – bringing co-presences into being between on campus and online students. Whole area of digital pedagogical exploration we could be playing with.

A8, Melissa) There is is a very good classroom design service within the Learning and Teaching spaces team in IS. But there is a lag between the spaces we have today, and getting kit in place for current/future needs. It’s an ongoing discussion. Particularly for new build spaces there is really interesting possibility around being thoughtful. I think we also have to think about shifting time and space… Lecture Capture allows changes, maybe we need fewer big lecture rooms… Does the teaching define the space, or the space that designs the teaching. Please do engage with the teams that are there to help.

A8, Michael) One thing that is a danger, is that we chase the next best thing… But those needs change. We need to think about the teaching experience, what is good enough, what is future-proof enough… And where the need is for flexibility.

Victoria: Thanks to all our panel!

eMarking Roll Out at Abertay  Carol Maxwell, Technology Enhanced Learning Support team Leader, Abertay University, chaired by Michael Seery

I am Carol Maxwell from Abertay University and I am based in the Technology Enhanced Learning support team. So, a wee bit about Abertay… We are a very small city centre university, with 4025 students (on campus) and 2091 in partner institutions. We are up 9 places to 86 in Complete University Guide (2017), And our NSS score for feedback turnaround went up by 12%, which we think has a lot to do with our eMarking roll out.

We have had lots of change – a new Principal and new Vice Chancellor in summer 2012. We have many new appointments, a new director of teaching and learning enhancement, and we’ve moved towards central services rather than local admin. We get involved in the PGCert programme, and all new members of staff have to go through that process. We have monthly seminars where we get around 70 people coming along. We have lots of online resources, support for HEA accreditation and lots of things taking place, to give you a flavour of what our team does.

Carol Maxwell talks about the work of the Abertay Teaching and Learning Enhancement Team, at eLearning@ed 2016

Carol Maxwell talks about the work of the Abertay Teaching and Learning Enhancement Team, at eLearning@ed 2016

So the ATLEF project was looking at supporting assessment and feedback practice with technology, this was when our team was part of information services, and that was intended to improve the University’s understanding and awareness of the potential benefits, challenges and barriers associated with a more systematic and strategic approach to technology-enhanced assessment and feedback, we wanted to accelerate staff awareness of technological tools for assessment.

So we did a baseline report on practice – we didn’t have tools there, and instead had to interrogate Blackboard data course by course… We found only 50% of those courses using online assessment were using Grademark to do this. We saw some using audio files, some used feedback in Grade Centre, some did tracked changes in Word, and we also saw lots of use of feedback in comments on eportfolios.

We only had 2% online exams. Feedback on that was mixed, and some was to do with how the actual user experience worked – difficulties in scrolling through documents in Blackboard for instance. Some students were concerned that taking exams at home would be distracting. There was also a perception that online exams were for benefit of teaching staff, rather than students.

So we had an idea of what was needed, and we wanted to also review sector practices. We found Ferrell 2013, and also the Heads of eLearning Forum Electronic Management of Assessment Survey Report 2013 we saw that the most common practice was e-submission as well as hard copy printed by student… But we wanted to move away from paper. So, we were involved in the Jisc Electronic Marking and Assessment project and cycle… And we were part of a think tank where we discussed issues such as retention and archiving of coursework, and in particular the importance of it being a University wide approach.

So we adopted a new Abertay Assessment Strategy. So for instance we now have week 7 as a feedback week. It isn’t for teaching, it is not a reading week, it is specifically for assessment and feedback. The biggest change for our staff was the need for return of coursework and feedback in 10 working days before week 13, and within 15 weeks thereafter, That was a big change. We had been trialing things for year, so we were ready to just go for it. But we had some challenges, we have a literal grading policy, A+, A, B+ etc. which is harder in these tools.

We had senior management, registry, secretariat, teaching staff, teaching and learning staff discussing and agreeing the policy document. We had EMA champions demonstrating current process, we generated loads of supporting materials to. So one of our champions delivered video feedback – albeit with some student feedback to him that he was a little dry, he took it on the chin. One academic uses feedback on PebblePad, we have a lecturer who uses questions a great deal in mathematics courses, letting students attempt questions and then move on after completion only. We also have students based in France who were sharing reflections and video content, and feedback to it alongside their expected work. And we have Turnitin/Grademark, of which the personalised feedback is most valuable. Another champion has been using discussion forums, where students can develop their ideas, see each others work etc. We also hold lots of roadshow events, and feedback from these have raised the issue of needing two screens to actually manage marking in these spaces.

Carol Maxwell talks about the support for staff in rolling out eMarking at Abertay, at eLearning@ed 2016

Carol Maxwell talks about the support for staff in rolling out eMarking at Abertay, at eLearning@ed 2016

The areas we had difficulty with here was around integration, with workarounds required for Turnitin with Blackboard Grade Centre and literal grading; Staff resistance – with roadshows helping’ Moderation – used 3 columns not 2 for marking; Anonymity; returning feedback to students raised some complexities faced. There has been some challenging work here but overall the response has been positive. Our new templates include all the help and support information for our templates to.

So, where to now… Carry on refining procedures and support, need on going training – especially new staff, Blackboard SITS Integration. More online exams (some online and some off site); digital literacy etc. And, in conclusion you need Senior Management support and a partnership approach with academic staff, students and support services required to make a step change in practice.

Q&A

Q1) I’m looking at your array of initiatives, but seeing that we do these things in pockets. The striking thing is how you got the staff on board… I wonder if we have staff on board, but not sure we have students on board… So what did you do to get the students on board?

A1) There was a separate project on feedback with the students, raising student awareness on what feedback was. The student association were an important part of that. Feedback week is intended to make feedback to students very visible and help them understand their importance… And the students all seem to be able to find their feedback online.

Q2, Michael) You made this look quite seamless across spaces, how do you roll this out effectively?

A2) We’ve been working with staff a long time, so individual staff do lots of good things… The same with assessment and feedback… It was just that we had those people there who had great things there… So like the thinking module there is a model with self-enroll wikis… You end up with examples all around. With the roll out of EMA the Principal was keen that we just do this stuff, we have already tested it. But Abertay is a small place, we have monthly meet ups with good attendance as that’s pretty much needed for PGCAP. But it’s easier to spread an idea, because we are quite small.

Q3) For that 10-15 day turnaround how do you measure it, and how do you handle exemptions?

A3) You can have exemptions but you have to start that process early, teams all know that they have to pitch in. But some academic staff have scaled assessment back to the appropriate required level.

At this point we broke for an extended break and poster session, some images of which are included below.

Amy Burge and Laine Ruus show their posters during the eLearning@ed 2016 Poster Session

Amy Burge and Laine Ruus show their posters during the eLearning@ed 2016 Poster Session

 

Participants explore posters including Simon Fokt's Diversity Reading List poster at eLearning@ed 2016

Participants explore posters including Simon Fokt’s Diversity Reading List poster at eLearning@ed 2016

 

Ross Ward provides an informal LTW drop in session as part of the eLearning@ed 2016 Poster Session

Ross Ward provides an informal LTW drop in session as part of the eLearning@ed 2016 Poster Session

Taking this forward – Nicola Osborne

Again, I was up and chairing so notes are more minimal from these sessions… 

The best of ILW 2016  Silje Graffer (@SiljeGrr), ILW/IAD

ILW is in its fifth year… We had over 263 events through the event, we reached over 2 million people via social media…

How did we get to this year? It has been amazing in the last few years… We wanted to see how we could reach the students and the staff in a better way that was more empowering for them. We went back to basics, we hired a service design company in Glasgow to engage people who had been involved in ILW before… In an event we called Open ILW… We wanted to put people first. We had 2 full time staff, 3 student staff, 20 school coordinators – to handle local arrangements – and created a kind of cool club of a network!

Silje Graffer talks about the Innovative Learning Week team, at eLearning@ed 2016

Silje Graffer talks about the Innovative Learning Week team, at eLearning@ed 2016

So we went back to the start… We wanted to provide clarity on the concept… We wanted to highlight innovation already taking place, that innovation doesn’t just happen once a year. And to retain that space to experiment.

We wanted to create a structure to support ideas. We turned feedback into a handbook for organisers. We had meet ups every month for organisers, around ideas, development, event design, sharing ideas, developing process… We also told more stories through social media and the website. We curated the programme around ideas in play. We wanted to focus on people making the events, who go through a valuable process, and have scope to apply that.

Silje Graffer talks about some of the highlight events from ILW16, at eLearning@ed 201g

Silje Graffer talks about some of the highlight events from ILW16, at eLearning@ed 201g

So I just wanted to flag some work on openness, there was a Wikipedia Editathon on the history of medicine, we had collaboration – looking at meaningful connections between different parts of the university, particularly looking at learners with autism which was really valuable. Creativity… This wasn’t digital education in itself, but the Board Game Jam was about creating games, all were openly licensed, and you can access and use those games in teaching, available from OER. A great example for getting hands dirty and how that translates into the digital. And iGEM Sandpit and Bio Hackathon, are taking ideas forward to a worldwide event. Smart Data Hack continued again, with more real challenges to meet. Prof Ewan Klein gas taken work forward in the new Data, Design and Society Course… And in the Celebratory mode, we had an online game called Edinburgh is Everywhere, exploring Edinburgh beyond the physical campus! And this was from a student. You can browse all the digital education events that ran on the website, and I can put you in touch with organisers.

Next year its happening again, redeveloped and imagined again.

Q1) Is it running again

A1) Yes! But we will be using some of the redesigning approaches again.

 

CMALT what’s coming up  Susan Greig (@SusieGreig),

Are you certified… I am based in LTW and I’m really pleased to announce new support for achieving CMALT within the University. And I can say that I am certified!

CMALT is the Certified Member of ALT, it’s recommended for documenting and reflecting on your work, a way to keep pace with technology, it is certified by peers, update certification every three years. So, why did I do CMALT? When back when I put my portfolio forward in 2008 I actually wrote down my reasons – I hoped to plan for my future careers more effectively, the career path isn’t well definied and I was keen to see where this would take me. And looking back I don’t think that career path has become more clear… So still very useful to do.

Susan Greig talking about support for CMALT, at eLearning@ed 2016

Susan Greig talking about support for CMALT, at eLearning@ed 2016

So, to do CMALT you need to submit a portfolio. That is around five areas, operational issues; teaching, learning and/or assessment processes; the wider context; communication; and a specialist area. I did this as an individual submission, but there is also an option to do this together. And that is what we will be doing in Information Services. We will provide ongoing support and general cheer-leading, events which will be open to all, and regular short productive cohort meetings. There will also be regular writing retreats with IAD. So, my challenge to you is can we make the University of Edinburgh the organisation with the most accredited CMALT members in the UK?

If you are interested get in touch. Likely cohort start is August 2016… More presentations from alt 3rd june, showcase event there in july

Making Connections all year long: eLearning@ed Monthly meet ups  Ross Ward (@RossWoss), Educational Design

Today has been a lovely chance to  get to meet and network with peers… Over the last year in LTW  (Learning, Teaching and Web Services) we’ve looked at how we can raise awareness of how we can help people in different schools and colleges achieve what they are trying to do, and how we can support that… And as we’ve gone around we’ve tried to work with them to provide what is needed for their work, we’ve been running roadshows and workshops. Rather than focus on the technologies, we wanted to come from more of a learning and teaching perspective…Around themes of Interactive learning and teaching, assessment and feedback, open educational resources, shakers, makers and co-creators, and exploring spaces… From those conversations we’ve realised there is loads of amazing stuff coming on… And we wanted to share these more widely…

Ross Ward talks about recent elearning@ed/LTW Monthly MeetUps, at eLearning@ed 2016

Ross Ward talks about recent elearning@ed/LTW Monthly MeetUps, at eLearning@ed 2016

Luckily we have a great community already… And we have been working collaboratively between elearning@ed and learning, teaching and web services, and having once a month meetings on one of the themes, sharing experiences and good practices… A way to strengthen networks, a group to share with in physical and digital shared spaces… The aim is that they are open to anyone – academics, learning technologists, support teams… Multiple short presentations, including what is available right now, but not ignoring horizon scanning. It’s a space for discussion – long coffee break, and the pub afterwards. We have a 100% record of going to the pub… And try to encourage discussion afterwards…

So far we’ve looked at Using media in teaching (January); Open Education – including our Wikimedian in residence (February); Things we have/do – well received catch up (March); Learning Design – excellent session from Fiona (April). We put as much as we can on the wiki – notes and materials – and you’ll find upcoming events there too. Which includes: Assessment and Feedback – which will be lively if the sessions here are anything to go by (27th June); CMALT (27th July); Maker Space (August) – do share your ideas and thoughts here.

In the future we are trying to listen to community needs, to use online spaces for some, to stream, to move things around, to raise awareness of the event. All ideas and needs welcomed… Interesting to use new channels… These tend to be on themes so case by case possibilities…

The final part of our day was our wrap up by Prof. Charlie Jeffrey, who came to us fresh from Glasgow where he’d been commenting on the Scottish Parliamentary election results for the BBC… 

Wrap Up Professor Charlie Jeffrey, Senior Vice Principal.

I’m conscious of being a bit of an imposter here as I’m wrapping up a conference that I have not been able to attend most of. And also of being a bit of an obstacle between you and the end of the day… But I want to join together a few things that colleagues and I have been working on… The unambiguous priority of teaching and learning at Edinburgh, and the work that you do. So, what is the unambiguous priority about? It’s about sharpening the focus of teaching and learning in this university. My hope is that we reach a point in the future that we prize our excellent reputation for learning and teaching as highly as we do our excellent reputation in research. And I’ve been working with a platoon of assistant principals looking at how best to structure these things. One thing to come out of this is the Teaching Matters website which Amy (Burge) so wonderfully edits. And I hope that that is part of that collegiate approach. And Ross, I think if we had blogs and shorter contributions for the website coming out of those meetings, that would be great…

Charlie Jeffrey gives the wrap up at eLearning@ed 2016

Charlie Jeffrey gives the wrap up at eLearning@ed 2016

I’m also conscious of talking of what we do now… And that what we do in the future will be different. And what we have to do is make sure we are fit for the future… Traditional teaching and learning is being transformed by Teaching and Learning… And I wouldn’t want us to be left behind. That’s a competitive advantage thing… But it is is also a pedagogical issues, to do the best we can with the available tools and technologies. I’m confident that we can do that… We have such a strong track record of DEIs, MOOCs, and what Lesley Yellowlees calls he “TESEy chairs”, the Centre of research in Digital Education, an ISG gripped in organisational priorities, and a strong community that helps us to be at the forefront of digital education. Over the last few weeks we’ve had three of the worlds best conferences in digital education, and that’s a brilliant place to be! And an awful lot of that is due to the animation and leadership of Jeff Haywood, who has now retired, and so we’ve asked Sian and Melissa to help ensure that we stay in that absolutely powerful leading position, no pressure whatsoever, but I am very confident that they will be well supported. It’s pretty rare within an organisation to get 90 people to make time to come together and share experience like you have today.

And with that the day was finished! A huge thank you again to all who were part of the event. If you were there – whether presenting or to participate in the poster session or just to listen, I would ask that you complete our feedback survey if you haven’t already. If you weren’t there but are interested in next year’s event or the eLearning@ed community in general, you’ll find lots of useful links below. Video of the event will also be online soon (via MediaHopper – I’ll add the link once it is all live) so anyone reading this should be able to re-watch sessions soon.

Related Resources

More about eLearning@ed

If you are interested in learning more about the eLearning@ed Forum the best place to start is our wiki: http://elearningforum.ed.ac.uk/.

If you are based at Edinburgh University – whether staff or student – you can also sign up to the Forum’s mailing list where we share updates, news, events, etc.

You can also join us for our monthly meet ups, co-organised with the Learning, Teaching and Web Services team at Edinburgh University. More information on these and other forthcoming events can be found on our Events page. We are also happy to add others’ events to our calendar, and I send out a regular newsletter to the community which we are happy to publicise relevant events, reports, etc. to. If you have something you’d like to share with the eLearning@ed community do just get in touch.

You can also read about some of our previous and more recent eLearning@ed events here on my blog:

 

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