Launched in the summer of 2010, the E-Learning Production Service provides funding for members of Queen Mary staff embarking on e-learning activities that benefit students.  We appreciate that academic and other staff don’t always have the time or technical skills to bring good e-learning ideas to fruition and whilst we don’t have the resource to complete projects ourselves, we were keen to plug this apparent “production gap”.

The resource we provide is in the form of dedicated E-Learning Assistants.  These are Queen Mary students recruited for specific projects and given the necessary technical training.  Given that all students will graduate into an increasingly competitive employment market, we are delighted to provide an opportunity for them to develop their professional skills, work closely with academic staff and earn money.  We pay the students well, expect them to work to a high standard and support them throughout their work with a mentor from the E-Learning Unit.

Since its launch, the production service has funded seven projects in five departments – both academic and professional services – and there are more proposals due to start during 2011/12.  E-Learning Assistants were recruited from all three faculties and worked on a wide range of initiatives, including:

• supporting lecture capture on a distance learning programme in post-graduate medicine
• an online course to improve students’ awareness of what makes an effective job application
• a learning resource to support Medical students in their preparation for “Short-Answer-Question” (SAQ) exams
• audio recordings in the VLE to supplement teaching on a Czech History module

So far, staff and student response to the service has been overwhelmingly positive.  In 2010, Dr Hoda Wassif had been making significant enhancements to the way clinical skills are taught in Paediatric Dentistry.  We recruited PhD student Hanadi Lingawi as an e-learning assistant to work with her to develop electronic flash cards as part of this project.  Talking about the project, Dr Wassif says:

I had the idea to use a “Question Box” that included various points, questions and scenarios on index cards – students pick a card at random and we discuss its content.   With the e-learning assistant, we were able to have the resource available for students online. The format was the same; however, students were offered hints and key points at the end of each case… the aim is not to answer a simple question at the end of each case, rather think about the topic, the patient and the management in general…

Each project we fund enables a student to gain technical skills and enhance their employability as they are presented with the challenge of working with professionals in an area which is new to them.  Alice Middleton is a 4^th year dental student who worked as an e-learning assistant during the summer of 2011, developing a short online module on Clinical Governance.  She found the experience particularly rewarding, working with a subject she was due to study in her final year:

I’m really proud of the e learning tutorial we produced and learnt a lot whilst doing it.

I think the scheme is brilliant and I’m now going to try and convince another tutor at the dental school to apply for a project to help students understand oral pathology!

To find out more and to apply for resource for a project of your own, please see:

www.learninginstitute.qmul.ac.uk/elearning/service/production

Photo Credit

GrowWear on Flickr

Are you currently a student at Queen Mary? Are you interested in the use of technology in education? Are you confident with computers? Would you like to earn some money?

The E-Learning Unit is currently looking to employ students to fill two E-Learning Assistant vacancies. In each role, you would be helping staff to develop online learning materials for students in the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

For further details on these opportunities including details of what’s required, hours and pay, and how to apply, please see our pages on the E-Learning Production Scheme at:

http://www.learninginstitute.qmul.ac.uk/elearning/services/production/assistants/current-opportunities/

The deadline for applications for these vacancies are 5pm on Thursday 23 June 2011 and 5pm Friday 24 June 2011.

If this isn’t the right opportunity for you, keep an eye out for others during the year. If you’d like to register to be informed when opportunities arise, please go to http://www.learninginstitute.qmul.ac.uk/elearning/services/production/assistants/register/

Photo Credit

Eric Magnuson on Flickr

Here at the E-Learning Unit, we regularly talk to academic and support staff who are enthusiastic about the impact technology can have.  Sometimes it’s about introducing audience voting systems into large lectures… exploring the possibilities of shared notes and reading lists… designing online tests to improve academic writing.  All of these are great initial ideas that could have a real impact on teaching and learning here at Queen Mary.

However, not everyone has the time or the technical skills needed to turn bring these ideas to fruition.  As learning technologists, my colleagues and I are always happy to advise on technologies, or the direction a project might take, and can provide some training.  But to kick-start a new initiative takes time, and that’s where the E-Learning Production Service can help.

Through the scheme, we will recruit and train a Queen Mary student to work with you as an E-Learning Assistant.  All we ask is that on completion, you share your experiences of the project and its impact through either a case study or presentation.

To find out more and  to apply for funding, please see:
http://www.learninginstitute.qmul.ac.uk/elearning/services/production

Photo Credit

Russ Morris on Flickr

We apologise for the short notice given and also for the inconvenience caused.

If this down-time presents a serious problem for you, please email us on vle-support@qmul.ac.uk.

Best Wishes,
VLE Support

We are aware of the cause of the problem and are working on resolving it. Turnitin should be available again within 24 hours.

Apologies for the inconvenience this causes.

VLE Support

The conference was very much focussed on computer-delivered assessments which can be marked electronically.  In other words,  tests and exams that are predominantly based on Multiple-Choice questions (MCQs).  There was a little debate, floating just under the surface, on the extent to which exams based on MCQs are desirable, and on the skill it takes to write ‘good’ questions.  However, since this was a UCISA event, the primary focus was on the various technical solutions, and it presented an opportunity to learn something from exceptionally talented ‘systems people’ who know a great deal about hardware, software, network infrastructure, and of course, how you might best implement solutions in a complicated HE institution.

I guess at Queen Mary, our policy on e-assessment is in its infancy – we’re using the VLE and a homegrown restricted browser we call ‘Kiosk Mode’, andwe have a few successes each year.  In this context then, the two keynotes were particularly interesting and gave lots of food for thought:

First, David Walker from the University of Dundee, presented their approach to developing an institutional policy on e-assessment.  It was interesting to see how comprehensive Dundee have been in considering the guidelines needed for students, academics, registry, e-learning and so on… and how a policy of e-assessment is rightly in continuous flux.

Then, John Dermo from the University of Bradford gave us a tour of their new dedicated e-assessment lab.  It looks very neat – it’s a flexible space that works as an open-access lab outside of exam time, but is designed so that cheating is minimised.  Read more about it here.

The most notable parallel session I attended was run by Fiona Strawbridge from UCL, who facilitated a discussion on the role of the VLE in delivering e-assessment.  The main debate was whether anyone should really be using a live VLE for high-stakes assessment, or whether we should be using a dedicated e-assessment system.  The one favoured by everyone at the conference is QuestionMark Perception, which apparently is good, but has a steep learning curve.

As a learning technologist, I thought the big thing missing from the day was any discussion on the broader range of what I would still call e-assessment… assessing online communications, technology for revision, formative quizzes, peer-assessment etc.

If your students have been busy submitting their assignments online throughout the year, you will have a large number of submissions that you’ll need to keep for a number of years to come.  During the academic year, it is useful to keep these within Blackboard for both tutors and students to access.  Once the year comes to an end and the course isn’t active, it is no longer possible, or desirable to keep assignments on the VLE as an archive.

You will need to download all your students’ assignments and store them outside of the VLE for safe keeping.  This post explains why you can’t leave old assignments in Blackboard, and how to get them out…

Why can’t I just leave them in Blackboard indefinitely?

There are two main reasons why you can’t leave old submissions in Blackboard as an archive…

Disk space

Firstly, Blackboard is a live system with over 800 active courses and hundreds of users logging on each day.  A system with such heavy use inevitably needs closely monitoring and it is regularly serviced to ensure it remains secure and available.  We try to keep servicing to out of hours, but the more content there is the longer it takes to perform maintenance tasks, which means more downtime for users.

Also, if we keep lots of content in Blackboard, we risk clogging up space and slowing it down for the users logging in to access their course areas.

So, we try to keep Blackboard for active courses, and it is better to use your departmental network, or the college filestore for storing archive files.

Obsolete Course Areas

Secondly, we often find obsolete courses which haven’t been accessed in a long time, course which have no students enrolled on them, or orphaned courses which have no instructors or designers.  This happens easily when a staff member leaves the College, or has set up a course as an experiment and has forgotten about it.

These are the first courses we delete when we perform housekeeping of Blackboard.

If you keep a course simply to archive submissions, it is unlikely you will be accessing it regularly, and there will be no students enrolled on it.  If you leave QM, you may not remember that there is an archive of student work in a Blackboard area with no students or staff enrolled.  This leaves it vulnerable to becoming obsolete and it is much more secure to download them from the VLE and store them securely where other members of the department can access them.

Photo credit

Horrgakx (http://www.flickr.com/photos/horrgakx/2964291546)

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It was an opportune moment then, for me to attend the Blackboard European user conference earlier this month, which is a mixture of both corporate and client-led sessions. I avoided the corporate presentations as these are essentially advertising, and tended towards the client-led presentations which were more valuable for me to uncover good and interesting ideas for using a VLE, and lessons learned at similar institutions to QM.

Opening Keynote

The opening keynote speaker was Dirk Van Damme from the OECD’s centre for Educational Research and Innovation (www.oecd.org/edu). He delivered a message highlighting the importance of innovation in Higher Education during an economic downturn. Not surprising really, the ‘big picture’ suggested that those institutions that survive a recession and maintain a competitive position in the scramble for international students, will be those most able to respond to the changing HE student and take full advantage of the impact of new technologies. Essentially, technological innovation isn’t yet a driver for educational change, but he suggests that perhaps it should be…

Very inspiring stuff – especially to an audience of learning technologists. However, I was looking for tips and considerations at a different level. How might we use a VLE to best support teaching and learning at a module or programme level? Along these lines, particularly good presentations for me were:

Walking the Talk – Showcasing Best Practice Using Blackboard Community Engagement Tools
(University of York)

Richard Walker and Wayne Britcliffe of the University of York’s E-Learning Team gave a very good presentation on their online area to support academic staff in using the VLE (http://vlesupport.york.ac.uk). They have made heavy use of Blackboard’s ‘Community Engagement’ tools which we don’t have here at Queen Mary, but the concepts may be useful for us regardless.

York’s main driver in developing the online area is to provide adequate support for staff who cannot attend face-to-face workshops. In using Blackboard tools, they are also able to show, by example, how one might use the tools in the VLE. They have merged support guides, case-studies, FAQs and the VLE staff login into one site to improve engagement with their academic community. Indeed, hits to the site had increased, but they couldn’t say whether this was mostly to access the VLE login page.

Particularly impressive were their ‘Showcase’ course areas to provide inspiration for VLE users. These highlight exemplary course areas, with contextual information and an interview with the module leader. The community engagement tools allow users to explore these courses via an automatic guest login. An audience member noted that Leeds Metropolitan University are also about to develop ‘walk-throughs’ with a module leader using Camtasia to achieve the same objective. The idea being that the convenor can best explain what works well with their course, how they use it and provide valuable tips for people interested in using similar techniques.

Engaging the Google Generation: From Podcasting to Peer-Review
(University of Sheffield)

Christopher Stokes from the School of Dentistry at Sheffield has been using student-developed podcasts as an alternative to powerpoint presentations on a course that develops two things: students’ ability to critique peer-reviewed literature as well as their presentation skills.

Following the success of this, his recent work modifies the assessment on this course and now requires that students submit an electronic presentation in any format at all.

From the podcasting assignment, the students found that they worked better as a group than they did when preparing a powerpoint presentation, noting that they were less able to divide up work arbitrarily. When given a choice however, no-one opted for a simple sound file. They would always have sound over video or a slideshow, perhaps a result of the popularity of YouTube.

Planning for Tomorrow – Blackboard Learning System – Vista Enterprise License and Beyond
(City University London, Universities of Sheffield, Birmingham and Surrey)

The four institutions that presented together are all in a similar position to Queen Mary as initial WebCT customers as distinct from users of Blackboard proper. For us, the migration to Blackboard Learn 9 is a complicated process. The decision to migrate therefore, cannot be taken lightly and the presentation provided an opportunity to see how others are tackling the decision-making process.

Everyone, both on the stage and in the audience, had reached the conclusion (as we had also) that conducting a VLE evaluation is imperative before any decision is made. Faced with a difficult migration, it is time for everyone to ask themselves whether they need a VLE at all, and if so, what do they need from one.

The various approaches involved: inviting a shortlist of potential providers to interviews with members of the institution at various levels; establishing exactly how to evaluate future needs as well as current ones; setting up pilot studies of more than one product. From Birmingham, the interesting standpoint was articulated that innovation happens because we create an environment within which one has the flexibility to innovate, so their driver is to provide academics with the broadest range of e-learning tools to stimulate creativity in this area. At QM, we’ve found that in some areas we are reaching the limitation of what we can do with our current VLE and the way people are using it, so a broad range of tools is important for us too.

Enhancing Programme Delivery and Improving the Student Learning Experience with Blackboard Learn
(University of Reading)

Similar to the presentation from the University of York, Guy Pursey of the University of Reading also presented on their approach to staff development. They have an e-learning team at Reading that is the same size as ours and are at the stage of trying to move people on from using their VLE areas simply as a file repository.

Their attempts to weave into their technical support, some guidance on best practice, teaching and learning and using the VLE for effective blended learning, has resulted in the usual collection of resources (an A-Z of e-learning, technical guides, a t&l FAQ), along with case-studies that identify interesting ways of using specific tools.

A particularly interesting addition though, is their ‘Pathfinder Initiative’ which is linked to departments’ periodic reviews of their programmes. If they are considering ways to embed e-learning into modules, an e-learning member will go into the department, look at their VLE course areas and talk to instructors and students to get an idea of how they’ve used their areas, what has been successful and what may work for their department in general. On the basis of this, the team then plans the necessary bespoke courses for a department.

These 1-on-1 workshops are one hour long and offered to members of staff who run their own course area in CE6 – the College’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).  We will look at your course in advance of your session and give you advice on a range of issues, including:

• Improving the look and feel of your course area
• Using new tools
• Strengthening the link between your face to face teaching and CE6 area
• Ideas for new activities

There are a number of one-hour sessions available on weekdays between 10am and 6pm, starting from mid January 2009.  For more information and to book a convenient time, please visit www.esdcourses.org.uk and search for the course title CE6 Diagnostics.