What a great way to kick off the new year with our online EduFest, discussing excellent digital practice and new innovations at Bath. It was great to see a jam-packed programme, which demonstrated to me how colleagues are actively embracing and pioneering in developing and supporting their students with their online delivery. This was reinforced by a warm opening from our Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education & Global), Professor Julian Chaudhuri who emphasised how our online teaching delivery is a core, strategic part of our offering to students.
Next, we were treated to a wonderful keynote from Chie Adachi, Dean for Digital Education, Queen Mary’s University College, who talked about her extensive work on ‘Building online community’. Chie discussed various facets of online learning, including emphasis of communities and how to foster good online engagement. This included discussion around it being ok to acknowledge your errors (including glitches with technology), as this can foster better relationships with students. So be up front with students – they will be more forgiving than you think.
Next up were two parallel sessions, on the one side some talks about online dissertations, creating online interactive activities with H5P and an online writing hub. On the other side were three presentations on how colleagues are engaging with AI. Victoria Willis from the School of Management showed how she is using AI to help generate teaching activities. Victoria fed in initial ideas and AI helped shape them, saving Victoria a lot of preparation time. Ed Mason highlighted a really useful tool in PowerPoint called ‘Rehearse with Coach’ that helps presenters practice presentations and provides helpful feedback on how to improve your presentation skills, such as speed of delivery and not overly reading from the slides.
After the lunch break we had another set of parallel sessions, on the one hand focussing on some short talks about different digital tools such as FeedbackFruits and opportunities for colleagues to discuss and take questions from the audience. In the other parallel session, Leah McCue from the Skills Centre discussed the use of Xerte to create powerful scenarios. This enables you to create different branches and journeys through content based on the student’s response to questions, helping them develop their own understanding based on how they respond to content. Teslim Bukoye from the School of Management also gave a great talk on his longitudinal study on the use of ‘nudges’, a way of prompting students to engage in their learning. Teslim is finding some really interesting results and stimulated a great debate in his session, such was the interest.
Our final session of the day showcased some proactive work being done by the TEL team to support colleagues in finding out about how to engage in digital teaching and learning, including showcasing their TEL bytes webinars on a range of topics. We were also treated to an overview of work by Steve Cayzer from Mechanical Engineering, who won a National Teaching Fellowship for his work on ‘Hybrid Teaching’. Again, this sparked a thought provoking discussion around the various opportunities hybrid teaching could offer.
Marie Salter, Head of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in the Centre for Learning and Teaching closed the day by thanking all the presenters for sharing their innovations and excellent teaching practices. Like me, I’m sure everyone went away inspired by what is happening and gave me lots of ideas on how to use technology more effectively in my work and to support a good student learning experience. Marie also thanked her colleagues in TEL for their work behind the scenes in making EduFest happen, with special thanks to Steph Kamffer in CLT, who was a key driver behind making the whole day run like clockwork.
We now look forward to our next EduFest, which will be held on campus on Tuesday 3rd June, so please put it in your diaries and we look forward to see you there.
Blog Post by: Dr Paul Chin, Head of Learning & Teaching, CLT
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