This post has been written jointly by Andrew Heath (Associate Dean, Learning & Teaching), and Rachel Applegate and Yvonne Moore (Faculty Learning Technologists)
The Faculty of Engineering and Design held its first Technology Enhanced Learning event in March. It was a great chance to hear examples of good practice from staff. We decided that a short (50 minute) session was the best for busy staff with a few very short presentations. A few key themes emerged:
- How to encourage and manage interactions with large cohorts of students
- Streamlining assessment practices and providing timely feedback for large cohorts was another key topic
- Helping students to engage with external publics such as professionals in industry was also of interest.
It became clear that these topics relate to the emerging strands in the forthcoming University Education Strategy, and within this context, the Faculty is considering how to increase and improve postgraduate provision.
The presentations from the event highlighted ways in which technology can be used to facilitate large group activities, enabling students to communicate and collaborate and be assessed.
The four presentations of learning and teaching activity were:
- Moodle – for online MCQ assessment
- Lino-it – for sharing views anonymously
- Audience Response System – for interactive question and answer sessions in class
- Re:View (Panopto) student presentations – for developing employability skills.
Find out more about each of the presentation topics in the event write-up (includes a recording of the event).
It was helpful that each presenter gave a realistic view of the activities in terms of perceived success as well as barriers they faced along the way and what could be done to overcome these in future. The discussion at the end of the session identified that others could benefit from the presenters’ experiences. This sharing of good practice is key to promoting excellence in learning and teaching. It also highlighted to the Faculty Learning Technologists that there are developments going on that are quietly happening without any support from them. This opens up questions about efficiency and sharing good practice that they hope to address in the future.
The event was well attended and positively received and we’re already in the process of planning the next one, focussing on assessment and feedback. A huge thanks to the presenters, Jos Darling, Marcelle McManus, Mirella Di Lorenzo and Aydin Nassehi. Further thanks to Jos Darling (Director of Teaching, Mechanical Engineering) who also organised the event, along with Rachel Applegate (FED Learning Technologist).
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