Educational Technology for Healthcare Education :: Blog

The Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE) at the Open University is inviting applications for a week-long residential course down at the OU's Milton Keynes campus. The course, previously known as a 'short fellowship', takes place from the 18th to the 23rd March, 2012,  If you're interested in using and creating Open Educational Resources (OER) and can cadge a week off, see the course page on the SCORE website for further details and how to apply. As an incentive, the event is completely free for HEFCE-funded institutions.

Netskills is UKHE's primary training organisation, based in Newcastle, that's been going for over a decade, and now runs quite a few e-learning-related courses at various UK venues, including Nottingham. They usually cost £130 including a UKHE discount. I've taken a good many Netskills courses over the years, going back to the late 90s, and can strongly recommend their content and approach. They've recently announced their Spring 2012 programme, including topics such as

• podcasting
• e-portfolios
• e-learning essentials
• instructional design for e-learning
• audience response systems in teaching and learning

For further information, see the Workshops programme on the Netskills website.

There's a good 'infographic' on the topic of Facebook and how much, or not, FB use affects academic performance. On the whole not, claims the author, Dr Rey Junco. He bases this claim on a research study he carried out entitled "Too much face and not enough books: The relationship between multiple indices of Facebook use and academic performance" (PDF) published in Computers in Human Behavior. I can't claim to understand his paper, but I am impressed by the 'infographic' he's created which distils the paper findings in a very clear and striking way. If only more academics had such a gift...

You can see his 'infographic' on his blog post The truth about Facebook and grades infographic.

A thread started today on a list for members of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) with the subject "Assessment using word puzzles", which immediately brought up the topic of using crosswords in teaching and e-learning materials. A few RLOs produced by this School use crosswords as self-assessments (eg Moving and Handling in Emergency Situations). The crosswords were produced by freely-available tools requiring little technical expertise to use:

Hot Potatoes - disk application, which has been used primarily in language education for over a decade. You can also create other word puzzles (gapfill, cloze, etc) with this. From the wonderfully-named Half-Baked Software :o)

Eclipse Crossword maker - online service 

 Both create standalone HTML docs with Javascript and CSS, which you can easily integrate into websites, VLEs and whatnot.

Pedagogical uses

More important than being able to create crosswords, is how you can use them in teaching, and what value they have. A very interesting case study, "Crosswords not Cross Words", on the pedagogical uses of crosswords, by Philip Wane of Nottingham Trent University, appears on pp48-51 of the JISC report "Innovating e-learning practice" (PDF). I'm in full agreement with Philip's summary:

"Crossword software has great potential if used appropriately for assisting revision or encouraging critical reasoning. It is easy to use, conceptually familiar and a great first step for staff who lack the confidence or technical abilities to create more complex e-learning objects. Even e-learning experts should not overlook this simple tool."

Plus making and solving crosswords is fun for both teachers and students, and easy to do. 

Another intriguing report which has just been published is entitled "Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities (PDF). As the 'press release' on the LSE website says:

"How can Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per tweet, have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are between 3,000-8,000 words long? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?"

Good question, but on a skim-read the short (11pp) publication seems to answer this. It introduces you to Twitter basics, then discusses pedagogical and research uses for Twitter. Well worth a read, if only to find out what the flip this Twitter thing is. 

 

A UCISA report has just come out with the title "Engaging hearts and minds: Engaging with academics in the use of technology enhanced learning", and is well worth at least a skim-read. It's a collection of 10 case studies from Higher Education institutions in the UK and Ireland illustrating different practical approaches to involving academics and teachers in e-learning. The report can be downloaded as a PDF (8Mb) from the link above. 

Don't mention e-learning

I particularly liked the case study from the University of the Arts, London, entitled "The first rule of e-learning is – no one talks about e-learning". Mention e-learning and you can turn off technophobes, but academics are now routinely using tools (email, web browsers, presentation software, lecture recordings, and more) which not very long ago were considered to be 'educational technology'. The trick is to:

a) use their existing skills with these tools, for instance with Powerpoint converters, to reuse, enhance and further disseminate their teaching materials

b) avoid the use of 'technical' terms such as 'e-learning', not least because we Learning Technologists are hard-pushed to define what the @#$! that is

Instead, concentrate on 'content tools' - web pages, wikis, blogs, discussion fora, etc. - and show teachers how they can use them as a routine part of their everyday teaching, to make educational life richer for themselves and their students. 

Changing fashions

An interesting aside, to this old lag at least, is the increasing use of the term Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) in preference to the unsemantic term 'e-learning' (which is just soooooo noughties, my dear). Times and fashions move on: back in '92, it was all CAL, then we moved to 'educational technology', then 'e-learning'. In the late 90s I was part of the TELL Consortium, funded under the now-extinct TLTP, so I can remember TEL being used sparingly then, but it does seem to have become de rigeur these days. So if you're writing a bid, it might be better, politically, to use TEL rather than 'e-learning'. 

I was struck by two event announcements posted today in the cetis-announce@jiscmail.ac.uk list which illustrate the increasing importance of mobile learning and mobile applications development in UKHE:

• Widget Bash (23-24 March, Bolton). Strictly for technical developers.
• Open Source Junction (29-30 March, Oxford). Managers, policy makers, tech developers.

Both events are free to UKHE staff. More interestingly, both are JISC-funded, which in itself is highly remarkable in a time when money's too tight to mention. Just about the only funding being given out by JISC is to projects in Open Educational Resources (OER) and m-learning, two waves that appeared relatively recently and are still rising. (Arguably mobile learning's been going a while, but it's only taken off with the advent of smartphones with touch-screen interfaces and open Operating Systems.)

The moral is: if you want funding, get into OER and/or mobile learning toot sweet. This university certainly has - the BERLIN project was JISC-funded, and has led to a strong institutional commitment, from the VC downwards, to OER. Going by presentations to the February e-learning community seminar, m-learning will take off on campus shortly. 

Both events above are well worth attending if time allows. Much to my chagrin, I'm otherwise engaged on both dates... :(

Even if you can't make either event, the programme pages contain lots of very interesting info and links, particularly the Widget Bash programme which links to lots of widgets developed under the JISC DVLE programme. 

I was a-hunting online for a tool/service to help me reference sources for an online language course I'm following, and hit Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) which is staggeringly useful. It's a serious tool for researchers, students and teachers, and can output references in all sorts of formats, plus is terrific for referencing online sources as well as books and articles.

What's really handy, from a student viewpoint, is that much of the reference info is auto-generated. For instance, shove in an ISBN and full biblio data for a title appears. Or go to Amazon, find a title, and you can auto-generate a reference for it from the page info. Best of all, it's a Firefox add-on so it's always there for you. It's free unless you want storage over 100Mb which is unlikely for a student.

Your data is stored online and can be synchronised across machines so you can access it wherever you are. The Zotero site even has social networking features to bring researchers together. 

Zotero is produced by the reputable publicly-funded Centre for History and New Media  which has produced a shedload of other very useful tools for researchers. It's a serious and highly-featured scholarly tool, not just a widget that some tech's thought up off the cuff. I've only scraped the surface of its features in this post - you really need to go along to the site and investigate it yourselves. Comments welcome. 

Ok, this isn't e-learning as such, but it's sort of related...

 

The following announcement came around today, and will be of distinct practical interest to the SONET community.

JISC Digital Media (nèe Technical Advisory Service for Images, or TASI) is the official JISC voice on all aspects of images, video, audio, and indeed anything that fits into the category 'multimedia'. Their website is solidly packed with very practical information and is a mandatory bookmark, IMO. Colleagues wanting a guide through the fraught process of finding images which they can use in teaching should have a look at the excellent online tutorial  which is comprised of bite-sized pages.

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 JISC Digital Media has recently finished releasing ten new advice documents. The eLearning-related series covers such diverse topics as Mobile Learning, Audio Feedback and considerations for the delivery of digital media online, as well as offering how-to guides on topics such as adding multimedia to .pdf files.

 To view the documents please follow the link below website;

 http://bit.ly/bkO3sY

 #1 Introduction to e-Learning

 #2 Designing Learning Experiences

 #3 Common Methods for Viewing, Using and Producing Digital Media Resources

 #4 Considering the delivery of digital media online

 #5 Organising Digital Media Content in a VLE

 #6 Mobile Learning for Education

 #7 Providing Live Support to your Community over the Web

 #8 Audio Feedback

 #9 Telling it like it is - a how-to guide on creating audio feedback

 #10 Using Multimedia in a PDF

The September 2010 Issue of the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching is now online and contains papers from authors around the globe. The table of contents is below. JOLT is a fully-online refereed journal, which is free to subscribe to and contains articles of interest to anyone involved in e-learning and online teaching and learning. 

 

A Study of Students’ Learning Styles, Discipline Attitudes and Knowledge Acquisition in Technology-Enhanced Probability and Statistics Education

Un Estudio sobre Los Estilosd de Aprendizaje de los Alumnos, Actitudes de Disciplina y Obtención de Conocimiento de la Probabilidad de Tecnologia - Mejorada y Educación Estadística

Nicolas Christou and Ivo D. Dinov

An Online Graphic Novel: Students’ Experiences and Research Literacy Gains

Una Novela Gráfica Online: Experiencias de los Estudiantes e Investigación sobre Beneficios del Alfabetismo

Stacey Shipwright, Devon Mallory, Lynda Atack, and Paula Demacio

Underlying Factors of Sense of Community in Asynchronous Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Environments

Factores Fundamentales de Sentido de Comunidad en Ambientes de Aprendizaje Colaborativo Apoyado por Computador sin Cronología

Babak Abedin, Farhad Daneshgar, and John D’Ambra

Predictors of Faculty Acceptance of Online Education

Predictores de Aceptación de la Facultad de Educacion Online

Cindy Stewart, Christine Bachman, and Ruth Johnson

Changing Delivery Methods, Changing Practices: Exploring Instructional Practices in Face-to-Face and Hybrid Courses

Cambiando los Métodos de Entrega, Cambiando las Prácticas: Explorando Prácticas De Enseñanza en Cursos Presenciales e Hibridos

Meredith Irvin Toth, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, and Teresa S. Foulger

Making Learning Visible: Using E-maps to Enhance Critical Reading Skills

Desarrollando un Aprendizaje Visible: Utilizando Mapas Electrönicos para Incrementar las Destrezas Lectoras Crïticas

Aziza R. Ellozy and Hoda M H Mostafa

Assessing the Integration of Information Literacy into a Hybrid Course Using Screencasting

Evaluando la Integraciíon de Información sobre Alfabetismo en un Curso Hibrido Utilizando Investigacion de Calidad

Mary Ann Trail and Amy Hadley

Global Students/Global Faculty: A Model for Success Factors in the Use of Off-site Faculty for Online Instruction

Estudiantes Globales/Facultad Global: Un Modelo para Factores de Éxito en el Uso de Facultad a Distancia para Instrucción Online

Barbara L. Stewart, Carole Goodson, and Susan L. Miertschin

Digital Campfires: Innovations in Helping Faculty Explore the Online Learning Wildness

Las Fogatas Digital: Innovaciones en Ayudar al Profesorado a Navegar por el Aprendizaje en Línea Salvaje

Patrick R. Lowenthal and David Thomas

Distance Education Teacher as a Leader: Learning from the Path Goal Leadership Theory

Educación a Distancia el Profesor como un Líder: Aprender de los Ruta del Objetivo Teoría del Liderazgo

Shashi Dewan and Disha Dewan

Using Social Networking Sites to Support Online Individual Health Behavior Change Projects

Utilizando Sitios de Red Social para Apoyar los Proyectos de Cambio en el Comportamiento de Salud Individual

Joshua H. West, P. Cougar Hall, Rosemary Thackeray , and Carl l. Hanson