elearning@ed – Susan Greig

Elearning@ed 6th May 2016: Keynote – Dr Laura Gogia

Elearning@Ed has become a regular feature of the University of Edinburgh conference calendar – the first one was held back in 2003. I was really pleased to take part this year, to hear great speakers and to meet colleagues from across the University and to announce the CMALT staff development scheme – which I’m very excited to be part of.

Last Friday’s event offered a packed programme, my highlight was the keynote speaker – Dr Laura Gogia MD, PhD, (@GoogleGuacamole), Research Fellow for the Division of Learning Innovation and Student Success at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), USA. VCU is a large urban research focused institution with 31,000 students.

She described how in 2014 her institution started to offer RamPages “VCU’s connected learning platform” – a publicly visible WordPress site. Students maintain their own webpages and blogs. A significant portion of coursework is via blogging. Blogs are aggregated on course site, so students can use external sites if they choose.

Gogia explained that this model of teaching supports student agency and discovery. Students can peer into worlds they wouldn’t normally see in a course based structure. It supports authentic learning products. It was very similar to the approach I experienced as a student on the IDEL course, and I was really excited to see this implemented across a whole institution. It’s fascinating looking at the range of work that is posted on RamPages.

#CuriousCoLab slide by Laura Gogia Image from @Rubyonwheels

Gogia also discussed encouraging students to go beyond text as part of the course “Collaborative Curiosity, Designing Community-Engaged Research” #CuriousCoLab. She described ‘Creative Makes’ which challenges students to find visual imagery for abstract concepts, for example “community” – this was supposed to be a 15 minute activity but the students really enjoyed it and spent way more time on it, shared their creations and used the activity to network with each other. She also advocated multimodal final projects (something else I experienced and really valued, as an MSc Digital Education student) – for example students creating websites rather than essays – this meant students could follow their own interests.

A Nordic smorgasbord Foto: Magnus Fröderberg/norden/org CC BY 2.5 DK

Gogia’s own research has been around digital annotations, additional digital information added by students, so in Twitter this might be Hyperlinks, mentions, hashtags or sharing images and video. She analysed these annotations as a possible indication of networks and is considering if these are indicative of pedagogic connections?

This was a rich and inspiring presentation from which I picked a few tasty morsels of inspiration to share with you in this post. As ever the elearning@ed conference was a smorgasbord of inspiration which I will be dining out on for some time.

UPDATE:

Dr Laura Gogia has reflected on her keynote with this great blog post which offers a close transcript of the full presentation: https://googleguacamole.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/in-search-of-connected-learning-exploring-the-pedagogy-of-the-open-web/

My #connectedlearning #elearninged keynote https://t.co/y9eBEx9Cdf w/ thx for contributions from @jar @sbayne @fionamhale @salomemaloney

— Laura Gogia (@GoogleGuacamole) 11 May 2016

ELearning@Ed Conference – 12 April 2013 – Just how flexible is flexible?

I and several colleagues from the Learning Services team, attended the annual eLearning@Ed conference. This years theme was: “Just how flexible is flexible?”, which attracted a diverse and packed programme with Ray Land invited as a key note speaker and many excellent speakers from across the University. It was well attended and offered a great chance to catch up with colleagues.

A photograph of two leather bound books, their spines bent round into curves so the pages touch — Flexibility
This image is by J.Mark Bertrand is reused with thanks under a Creative Commons licence

My own small contribution to the conference was to put together posters about new features coming up in LEARN (our central VLE) when it is upgraded in the summer:

But enough about me, after a weekend to recover and reflect, these are the edited highlights from the Learning Services Team:

Professor Ray Land of the University of Durham gave a thought provoking talk about the implications, meanings and risks of speed, including an entertaining video of Father Guido Sarducci proposing the Five Minute University to lead into his discussion question: If universities are not about content then what then? This led later to a fascinating quote from Cable Green about the limited percentage of the population who could currently access Higher Education and the possibility of open education to ‘afford the opportunity to satisfy everyone’s right to get as much education as they desire’.

Ray introduced some interesting ideas such as MOOD (Massive Open Online Databases) and the importance of Learner Analytics and data democratisation. Analytics appeared to be a hot topic coming up in a later talk by Assistant Principle Ian Pirie and again in the final panel discussion. Ray also referred to the predicted post-humanist era and the notion of ‘conscious machines’, but commented on the very human characteristic of contemplation and reflection.

Dr Jo-Anne Murray spoke about the recent very successful experience of running a MOOC in Equine Nutrition. They hoped to use this to raise the international profile of the online distance Masters programme in Equine Science as Jo-Anne said they hoped ‘Like One Direction to break America’, applications are just starting to come in for the next intake of the Masters but Jo-Anne was confident that the MOOC had successfully raised both her professional and the Masters programme profile.

Dr Sue Rigby (Vice Principal Learning and Teaching) and EUSA Hazel Marzetti both spoke very positively about the benefits of mainstreaming accessibility exceptions, such as allowing all students to audio record any lecture, or requiring all staff to supply content/reading lists in advance of lectures as this allowed students the flexibility to study in ways that best suited them.

Prof. Jamie Davies gave some interesting reflections on the flipped classroom from a low tech perspective, highlighting the importance of working with students as equals in a trusting, enquiring and exploratory environment.

I hope you enjoy our highlights, but of course this brief post can’t really do justice to the full conference experience, we are already looking forward to next year’s event. Please feel free to add any comments you have about this post or share your own higlights from the conference.