get more from your 9-5

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Melissa Highton

Thursday 23 May is Learning at Work Day

“Learning at Work Day” is a national annual awareness campaign to promote and support workplace learning. This year’s theme is “Many Ways to Learn” and since that is what we are all about in IT Services,  all University staff are invited to sample our many ways to learn from a range of face to face sessions, downloadable podcasts and on-line learning material.

There are over a dozen courses that you can book to attend on Thursday 23 May. All classes are free to attend.

Posted in Learning Technologies Group | Tagged | Leave a comment

it.blogs

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Melissa Highton

For many years,  it transpires, our users have struggled with the urls of the three IT departments, apparently the letter Ss  in OUCS, BSP and ICTST caused  much difficulty to people making phone calls. In the light of this our blogs have been rebranded: blogs.it.ox.ac.uk.  Hopefully the  S  in blogs will not continue to confuse.

And perhaps there will be more blogs,  from colleagues in the other teams!

Posted in Learning Technologies Group, models | Tagged | Leave a comment

to flip a classroom must it first have flopped?

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Melissa Highton

Last week I attended a couple of events outside Oxford at which the phrase ‘flipped classroom’ was used so often as to warrant its  happy inclusion in any ‘buzzword bingo’  icebreaker you might be preparing this season.  Along with  ’MOOC’ of course.

Several participants in the sessions were concerned to know how Oxford was responding to the need to flip classrooms.   A flipped classroom model, it seems, involves  recording lectures for students to access out side class, which we do. And then spending time during your remaining contact hours talking to students in small groups, which we do too.

I am a regular reader of Times Higher Education. From there I learn that students will defend  ’ to the death‘ their right to attend traditional lectures and that Oxford comes top of student surveys of the student experience.

“This year’s results show the University of Oxford remains a leader in student experience, up from fourth last year to second. In the measure of “tuition in small classes” Oxford and Cambridge, tied for first. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two ancient institutions also share the top spot when ranked by measure of “high-quality staff/courses” and “helpful/interested staff” and also take the top two spots according to a measure of “well-structured courses”, with Cambridge just beating Oxford. Oxford is also voted the best for good personal relationships with teaching staff.”

Passionate advocates of flipped classrooms  require that the face to face activities in small groups also be technology enhanced. This year IT services worked closely with the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford to provide a technology enhanced environment and mobile WebLearn ipad interface. They seem happy enough.

What goes on in Oxford tutorials has long been a bit of a mystery. In an early fore-runner to the national student experience surveys of today, an observer wrote in 1922:

“the key to this mystery is found in the operations of the person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him, that the students learn all that they know: one and all are agreed on that. Yet it is a little odd to know just how he does it. “We go over to his rooms,” said one student, “and he just lights a pipe and talks to us.” “We sit round with him,” said another, “and he simply smokes and goes over our exercises with us.” From this and other evidence I gather that what an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of students together and smoke at them. Men who have been systematically smoked at for four years turn into ripe scholars.”

If you want to know what an Oxford tutorial is like these days we just happen to have filmed a couple for you. No smoking in these.

If you want to know about students  expectations of use of technology at Oxford, you can read about it in our DIGE report.

Posted in DIGE | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

there will be blogs

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Melissa Highton

My Oxford blog is now four years old. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.

In the four years that OUCS has been hosting blogs for our staff  more than 2500 posts have been posted, and not all of them by me*.

Today I learn that my blog will be archived by the British Library and the Bodleian.

The  Electronic Legal Deposit Group at Bod say:

“Out of little acorns, great oak trees grow.  Tomorrow, the first seed will be planted in a never-ending  webcrawl.  It will give rise to a huge and important archive,  which will be a national treasure and valuable resource for generations of researchers and scholars in the centuries to come.  We hope everyone shares with us feelings of trepidation and excitement on this momentous occasion, and recognition of the efforts of those from the Legal Deposit Libraries, the publishing industries and the DCMS, who have made it happen.”

Some of the IT services blog posts have caused a sensation, the OxCERT blog gets widely reported by infosec and covert ops enthusiasts all over the world; Adam’s WebLearn blog  is a regular delight for  WebLearn fans; and if you like ones and zeroes  you’ll love Networks’  The Wire.

Electronic Legal Deposit will come into effect this Saturday when  eLD materials will be available via SOLO on Bodleian reader and staff PCs.

*only 300

Posted in Learning Technologies Group | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

students will defend lectures “to the death”

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Melissa Highton

More hyberbole and hot air about OER has been generated at the recent #OER13 conference*.

This week’s Times Higher headline claims:  ‘Many students will “defend to the death” the need for traditional campus-based lectures, and will only delve into the world of free online educational resources if instructed to by their teachers, a conference has heard.’  Which is fine.

‘Free online educational resources’ are not the same as OER though.  So  quotes like “Students are actually quite conservative in their use of open educational resources (OERs)” are meaningless and “A number of the students involved in our research expressed a view that people not registered as students should not have access to educational resources. They felt that making educational resources available to the public was unfair,” shows that clearly the point has been missed.

It is true that for most students, learners, or any other individuals involved in personal use or study, the openness of the resources is not particualrly relevant;  for them it is  just online, available, and free. The openness of OER only kicks in when their teachers do embed them and use them ‘as part of their course‘.  Check the licence before you do that.

I look forward to reading the ‘findings from an NUS survey of 2,800 students, due to be published in June, assessing their attitude to online resources‘  because I’m interested in use of online resources.  I am also interested in research being done into how colleagues re-use OER.  We are doing more research on this  topic at Oxford right now.

I will join students in defending “to the death” campus-based lectures. A great lecture is a unique and inspiring learning experience. It can be gold standard.  In recognition of this,  we will continue to fight to hunt down, capture and release as many examples of traditional Oxford campus-based lectures  as free online open educational resources as we possibly can.

I hope other teachers will encourage their students to use them.

* I wasn’t there.

Posted in conferences, DIGE, Learning Technologies Group, OER, OpenOxford, Oxford on ItunesU, podcasts | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

chicken and egg

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Melissa Highton

Our research with students in the DIGE project discovered that students find the layout and organisation of sites they use at Oxford to be inconsistent.

Colleagues are free to use what ever tools they like in WebLearn and organise resources however they wish.

Where departments and teams have invested time and effort in developing consistent layouts, feedback from students was very positive.

In an effort to promote consistency,  the WebLearn team has produced  a collection of web page templates to make it easier for WebLearn users.  The benefit of creating a new site based on a template is that much of the planning and layout has been done for you and all you need to do is add your favourite flourishes.

Each template contains:

  •   Instructions on how to build the site,
  • Tools appropriate for the purpose of the site populated with sample material which can be modified.
  • Pop-up help pages providing links to further information
  • relevant step-by-step guides and video demonstrations of how to edit or customise the suggested course elements.

Contact the WebLearn team to find out more.
Visit WebLearn

Posted in DIGE, WebLearn | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

licetne Anglice loqui?

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Melissa Highton

Warning: this post include an above average number of three letter acronyms (TLA)

One of the best things about Oxford’s OER collections is that they are free to be reused in many different ways. One of the best things about Oxford University Press*  aka OUP is that they lead the world in support for English language teaching (ELT). One of the best things about doing learning technology research is that we can explore the new ways in which these areas over lap (LAP)

This year we have hosted an ELT researcher to include Oxford’s OER in her work as she travels the world to work with English language teachers to promote re-use of open materials.  The Oxford OER collections include Oxford-managed corpora; the British National Corpus (BNC) and the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE) and Oxford-created OER (podcast lectures and seminars in spoken English, images, essays, ebooks).

Alannah Fitzgerald is  an open education practitioner and researcher working in the area of technology-enhanced learning for English Language Teaching  working in the areas of in-service teacher training for Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and the development and dissemination of open corpus-based resources for Data Driven Learning (DDL).

She says:

“TOETOE looks at the projects, the players and the practices (PPP) that are iterating toward openness in English language teaching. It’s a new PPP for ELT that takes us beyond the norms of presentation, practice and production using exclusively copyrighted resources toward open educational practices using open resources.”

Alannah will present her work at #OER13 (26/27th March 2013, Nottingham) and be the subject of a Higher Education Academy (HEA) case study on internationalising OER. In the meantime she has blogged on how Oxford’s OER can be used in teaching all over the world.

Emancipatory English in India

Vietnam’s open university rising dragon

The English language skyline in South Korea

Confucian Dynamism in the Chinese ELT Context

Oh, what a BAWE!

Re-using Oxford OpenSpires content in podcast corpora

Her blog posts are evaluation narratives which will continue to inform the design of open source digital library software for developing flexible open English language learning and teaching collections with the FLAX project (Flexible Language Acquisition) at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Alannah has made training videos  to show our how research corpora  have been prised open and how Oxford open educational resources have been re-purposed for uses in English language learning and teaching.

* a department of the University. Yes, it is.

Posted in conferences, Learning Technologies Group | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

when facebook is not enough

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Melissa Highton

Although Facebook is a popular tool amongst students, most of the students who attended  our user research workshops agreed that it would be a good idea to have discussion forums in WebLearn for  activities which support academic activities such as a lecture topic, or FAQs with respect to practicals and tutorials.

WebLearn has powerful tools to ensure that discussion forums have secure privacy settings, unlike Facebook.

Since WebLearn includes all members of the University you can be sure that no-one will feel left out.

“I’d like to use forums more and chat rooms. It would be really helpful. Not all of the students are on Facebook, and there are always 1 or 2 that miss out on the discussion going on. So having a forum – with e-mail notifications would be a good solution”

“It would be like talking about group meetings on WebLearn and being able to arrange to meet up at the pub on Facebook”

“WebLearn is more organised in terms of your forum messages are all there and your folders are there, whereas when you do it on Facebook, the attachment does not always work… and if you’ve got a big group, people don’t tend to stick to the work because you’re gonna talk about social things as well … so things get lost. The difference is, WebLearn is so much more organised”

Students would prefer to have a WebLearn area in which to pose questions and answers about tutorials, essays and practicals.

“…might prefer to use forums instead of Facebook e.g. for more directed conversations about the essays, essays titles”

“On Facebook you can’t speak to any lecturers or tutors, so if we have a practical to write up, and we’re all stuck on the same question, and we’ll all go on Facebook and say ‘What did you write? I don’t know what to do.’ If we had a forum in WebLearn, maybe with a tutor or a lecturer who also has access to the page, if they could possibly give us a little bit of help outside the lectures or the practicals, that would be really, really good”

A tutor’s presence  online would be welcome, especially in a situation when students themselves are not able to solve a problem. The current practice is that students email their tutors, but the advantage of having a discussion forum would be that all students could see the answers and benefit from the interaction.

Students  like to be able to upload and share learning materials. They use external tools (mainly Dropbox or Facebook), to share files  unaware that tutors  can provide student access to a shared resources folder in WebLearn.

“I haven’t been able to upload files, and I would want to”

“I didn’t realise you had a chat room … and the shared resources. I didn’t even know you can do student upload, I always thought it was tutor to upload only, so we used Dropbox a lot for that reason”

Following the DIGE project the team have done more research with students to investigate their use of WebLearn.

Posted in Learning Technologies Group, WebLearn | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

how students use weblearn

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Melissa Highton

Following the DIGE project the team have done more research with students to investigate their use of WebLearn.  At peak times WebLearn gets 16,000 logins per day.

The majority of the students in the sample use WebLearn mainly for accessing lecture notes, slides, hand-outs and reading lists. They appreciate having on-demand access to these learning materials and feel that it facilitates their learning in various ways. Most of the students interviewed use lecture slides and notes to prepare for their lectures, to catch up with lectures they missed during the term, or for revision before exams:

“[Without WebLearn] I would struggle to catch up on work that I missed.  I’d have to email tutors. I’d have to read  books quite heavily by myself without having any prior knowledge.  It’d be lot of more difficult to catch up on work if I did not have WebLearn”

Students prefer the lecture notes/slides to be uploaded at least one day before the lecture takes place, so that they can familiarise themselves with the material, print it out and annotate it during the lecture:

“Upload lecture hand-outs the day before instead of hour before”

“I use WebLearn predominantly for accessing lecture slides. It would be useful if lecture slides were uploaded a greater time in advance of lecturers (for me, at least, this would not preclude attendance)”

In subjects where images, diagrams and photographs are a necessary part of the learning process, such as in Medical Sciences, students appreciate having electronic, colour copies of the images to study both before and after the lecture:

“Sometimes it’s more helpful to have them like as a big picture on screen to look at full screen.  When I look through the lecture materials after a lecture, I went on WebLearn to do that. I also want to get bigger diagrams that I want to use in essays.  I have used it more than once a week after term time for revision, a lot more. It is nice to see the photo in full colour. We usually get them before the lecture as a printed copy, but if you want to look over it, it is easier to do online”

Students highlighted the importance of consistency in lecturers uploading lecture notes and slides into WebLearn. They appreciate lecturers who upload materials regularly during the term, either shortly before or directly after each lecture, rather than all at once at the end of term:

“Some lecturers use it more often than others.  For example, they told us the reading materials are in WebLearn, which is more convenient than finding them ourselves. They also upload lecture PowerPoints/PDF.  Some lecturers did not use it at all” 

“I prefer if they do provide similar materials as well ‘cos you will get more backup with the notes, etc.  One lecturer’s course is really good: everything is up and ordered and organised. Some of them have not really put anything up”

“Another problem is not with WebLearn: it’s that the lecturers don’t always put the lectures up, so you can’t read them”

Posted in Learning Technologies Group, WebLearn | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

a pope, two proctors, and an assessor

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Melissa Highton

All in one day.

Last week smoke rising from the Sheldonian indicated  that this year’s triumvirate of Proctors and Assessor demitted and a new set were installed. The demitting Proctors deliver a jointly authored address which includes notes on their work this year.

At the Turnitin User group the previous day, a question had been asked as to how many cases of plagiariasm are dealt with each year at Oxford.  The number and nature which make it all the way to the Proctors were reported:

Academic misconduct (including plagiarism): 26 (18)
“6 cases were carried forward from the previous proctorial year. The Proctors referred 1 case concerning a former student to the Registrar. In 2 cases, the Proctors concluded their investigation without allegations being brought against the students concerned. In 1 case, the Student Disciplinary Panel directed that the Examiners should award a mark of zero to the particular (plagiarised) work. The panel imposed a marks penalty and permitted the candidate to resubmit under specified conditions. 2 cases are ongoing.

In 1 case a student who appeared before the Student Disciplinary Panel in the previousproctorial year subsequently applied forbut was refused leave to appeal against the decision of the Student Disciplinary Panel to expel him/her from the University. In 2 cases, the Student Disciplinary Panel directed that the Examiners should award marks of zero to the particular (plagiarised) work. The candidates were permitted to re-submit particular work under specified conditions.

In 2 cases, the Student Disciplinary Panel directed that the Examiners should award the (plagiarised) work marks of zero which resulted in the candidates failing their examination. Both candidates were permitted to re-enter the examination under specified conditions and with a marks penalty.

In 1 case, the Student Disciplinary Panel directed that the Examiners should fail the (plagiarised) work, with the effect that the candidate failed the examination.

In 1 case, the Student Disciplinary Panel directed that the candidate was permitted to re-enter the examination under specified conditions.

In 4 cases, where the Proctors were satisfied that candidates had not intentionally or recklessly breached the Proctors’ Disciplinary Regulations for University Examinations in respect of work which they submitted for examination, the Proctors decided that these cases could be dealt with more appropriately within the normal academic process.

In 2 cases, where the students had withdrawn from the University, the Proctors have closed the files without invoking disciplinary proceedings. 1 case has been referred to the Student Disciplinary Panel. In 1 case, the Proctors concluded the investigation without allegations being brought against the student concerned.

12 cases are ongoing.”

Other notes of interest in the address include:  A mention of the IT Services merger;

“it will take at least a year before the process of integrating these is fully achieved. We welcome this move, and wish the University’s Chief Information Officer every success. The scale of the task should not be underestimated, given the different cultures and working practices of the three departments. The University and colleges become ever more dependent on IT to support their work.”

A reminder that OUP are not just a cash cow;

“The University too needs to review its relationship with what is, after all, one of
its departments, albeit one which could grow to match or even exceed the size of the rest of the University. OUP is not simply an income-generating operation, but a part of the University’s academic enterprise with a global reach.”

And a  ‘there be dragons’ style  mention of MOOCs

“Just the latest to exercise those in the upper echelons of the University are MOOCs, which sound like some primeval megalosaurus whiffling though the tulgy wood, but are actually Massive Open Online Courses. The question, which I leave to wiser heads, is whether MOOCs are manxome foes to be sought out vorpal sword in hand, or opportunities to be embraced as a beamish boy.”

The whole thing can be read here Oration by the demitting Proctors and
Assessor

Posted in DIGE, Learning Technologies Group | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment