Workshop on Learning Design with Prof. Gráinne Conole

Beautiful morning here in Limerick for @gconole learning design workshop at @MICLimerick. ##LDConole pic.twitter.com/Cp15oqWeNp

— Kate Molloy (@hey_km) June 20, 2017

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Mary Immaculate College for the first time.  David Maloney from the Blended Learning Unit had organised a workshop on Learning Design with Professor Gráinne Conole, who is currently Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Digital Learning (NIDL) at Dublin City University.

The half day workshop aimed to empower participants to prepare courses for online and mobile environments.  The premise for the workshop, and the design process, stems from Conole's 7 Cs of Learning Design framework:

• Conceptualise
• Capture
• Create
• Communicate
• Collaborate
• Combine
• Consolidate

Before the crowded room got to any actual design, we were asked to discuss topics such as the challenges posed by technology and how to ruin a course.  It was useful to hear the different angles with which users approached these somewhat loaded topics. I was seated with an educational developer and an academic, which proved to be quite the useful triad.  The educational developer and I, as a learning technologist, were able to work with the academic's course content to complete the exercise like we might do in one of our own training sessions or workshops. Many of the academic staff spoke extensively about how students affect teaching and learning, while so much of the work we do from the support side focuses on how the teacher affects teaching and learning,  

Next on the agenda was a pedagogical features sorting exercise that utilised materials from the Open University Learning Design Initiative (JISC-OULDI) project. Groups were tasked with analysing a course and determining which features were very important, somewhat important or not important. The cards were categorised as:

• Orange = Guidance and Support
• Blue = Content and Experience
• Green = Communication and Collaboration
• Purple = Reflection and Demonstration.

Participants were soon to realise that everything couldn't be labelled as 'very important'!

@gconole #ldconole everyone having a difficult time keeping the 'very important' column from spilling over 😀 @CTLMIC https://t.co/GpZ2G9X7Th

— Seona Stapleton (@seonastapleton) June 20, 2017

That's a bit tidier! #LDConole pic.twitter.com/uGjOBX6Cfx

— Kate Molloy (@hey_km) June 20, 2017

It soon became clear to participants that there was a necessity to balancing the categories and choosing pedagogical features carefully in terms of the learning outcomes, course content, platform, and assessment.

In the next exercise, participants were asked to design a typical student that might be taking the course:

After our lunch break we're back to designing personas in our learning design workshop with @gconole at @MICLimerick #LDConole. pic.twitter.com/rIrHYqnLAg

— Kate Molloy (@hey_km) June 20, 2017

Resources for this exercise can be found here.  Overall, the personas were quite specific to the variety of courses on which we were working.  In our case, we created a mature student working in early childhood education undertaking a blended learning course to advance their professional goals.  We assessed our students' technical skills and motivations before moving on to the final portion of the afternoon, creating our course map.

Mapping courses now at #LDConole - focusing on the tools/resources and the corresponding responsibilities/relationships. pic.twitter.com/ma4PfQOWNO

— Kate Molloy (@hey_km) June 20, 2017

In this exercise, we used the four colours/categories to decide which tools we would use, and what roles/responsibilities correspond to the use of each tool.  I found this part of the day to be useful, as we had to triangulate the roles of teacher, learner and tool.  A recurring theme in our group was modelling of tools by the instructor, both technically and in terms of best use.  We found that communication tools such as discussion boards can often fall flat in terms of student engagement. This can occur as a result of a lack of exemplar content, rubrics, or modelling by the instructor.  We decided that students needed to see for themselves how the tool could help them learn, and not just earn easy points for participation.

While this might have been a whirlwind session, there was much to take away in terms of the relationship between the course, pedagogy, learner, and tools.  Events like this remind us to be cognizant of the many facets of learning design.  We must think about processes, relationships, skills, and attitudes.  Thank you again to David and his colleagues at Mary Immaculate College for hosting, and thank you to Prof. Conole for providing us with resources to use in the future.

PebblePad Irish Users’ Group Meeting Notes

Overview

The first PebblePad Irish User Group meeting took place in the RCSI on Wednesday 10 February. It was hosted by John Couperthwaite and Debbie Holmes from PebblePad, and featured colleagues from TCD, DCU, UCC, GMIT, WIT, and NUIG; some of which are currently using PebblePad alongside others looking to keep a watching brief on ePortfolio developments and uses in higher education.

NUI Galway Context

Following the cessation of the Learning Objects suite of tools in NUIG, a number of professional-based functions (e.g. Nursing and Midwifery, Engineering, Adult Education) have spoken to me about their interest in pan-programme ePorfolio solutions; and specifically those with post-graduate access options. We do not have access to BB-native portfolios as this requires the Community System which comes with a considerable price tag. I attended this session to gauge the current state of play from PebblePad and the wider user group and found it extremely useful.

Key Features of PebblePad

• This ePortfolio solution is branded as an ‘Award-winning ePortfolio, assessment and metering technology’
• It is being widely used in the UK and is gaining some traction in Ireland (see below)
• PebblePad is utilised primarily with:
  Applied curricula such as Medicine, Nursing and Midwifery, Teacher Education (i.e. those with work placement requirements);
  Competency-based domains (i.e. those with professional body dual accreditation requirements such as Accountancy and  Pharmacology); and
  For wider institutional functions such as careers, alumni and disability services
• It is a cloud-based service and can be used as a stand-alone system or integrated through VLEs via a building block (e.g. BB, Moodle, Canvas etc)
• The building block allows institutions to nominate the specific modules where the ePorfolio can be deployed. This means that it is possible to arrange a licensing model for 100 users which can be administered locally. 
• The building block facilitates single sign-on via VLE
• In line with other learning technologies (e.g. Blackboard Collaborate) PebblePad is moving away from Flash and Java-based infrastructure(V3 of PebblePad) towards HTML5-based technology (V5 of PebblePad) which will facilitate an improved use experience on a range of devices.
• USABILITY:  it is easy to populate ePortfolios through drag and drop and it looks very professional (different themes etc)
• PRIVACY: students manage their own assets and permissions (which allows them to invite/disseminate their ePortfolios - full or partial - to specific internal or external audiences)
• CONTINUOUS/POST-GRADUATE ACCESS:
  (1) PebblePad access across an entire programme cycle allows students and instructors continuous access to all students’ work, thereby circumventing VLE annual roll-over restrictions.
  (2) Graduate students have lifelong access to their assets (e.g. workbooks,ePortfolios)
• MOBILE: Pebblepad has an app for IoS and Android devices  
• SUPPORT: Individual users commented on the high quality of PebblePad initial training and suppo

User Group Presentations

NOREEN HENRY GMIT CASTLEBAR

Programme Coordinator and Lecturer
Noreen described how GMIT were using PebblePad with a group of BSc Digital Media and Society students. The first rollout of the BSc was in 2013 with the final 4th year being delivered in 2016-17.
The use of PebblePad has developed over the first three years from digital asset creation/management, towards submission of portfolios for academic assessment (using templates with pre-populated questions), and now onto student industry placement. The year 4 emphasis will be towards developing projects that can be showcased to multiple audiences during both the programme schedule and following graduation from the BSc programme.

EILEEN O’LEARY UCC

Lecturer in Organic and Pharmaceutical Chemistry
UCC, UL, TCD, UCD,  IT Tralee and NUIG are part of the ePrePP consortium, an eLearning Platform in Preparation for Professional Practice. This initiative is partly funded by the National Forum.
The focus of Eileen’s presentation was how UCC used PebblePad to mimic the 147 professional competencies required by the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland Core competencies framework IIoP. The competencies had to be mimicked due to copyright restrictions of the actual framework.  They used PebblePad as a CPD tracking system by exposing all students to the same resources (i.e. they had better control via the PebblePad rather than through a range of modules in Blackboard).
Eileen and her team were drawn to PebblePad due to (1) the inbuilt tracking  (i.e. student activity is date/time stamped therefore UCC can track activity hours and run learning analytics);  and (2) the reporting outputs that they could use for professional accreditation/certification. They use workbooks (customised for assessment/placement etc) which are employed as a competency self assessment tool.

KIERAN LEWIS, TCD

Occupational Therapist, TCD Disability Services
Kieran works on the TCD Career Pathways Project (transition to employment project for students with disabilities) as part of their Student Ambassador Programme.
This project is run directly with PebblePad, rather via the VLE. Disability services work closely with the 74 students to develop their portfolios towards career progression and have created a wide range of ‘template’-type activities for students to complete.

Further Information

There are a number of National Forum seminars looking at ePorfolios in Feb-March. See: http://www.teachingandlearning.ie/events/

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Learning from Failure at #durbbu

Earlier this month I made my annual pilgrimmage to Durham to attend the 16th Durham Blackboard Users' Conference. I've been attending this event every January for the last number of years and can honestly say that it's a highlight in my calendar. Even better that it's at the very, very start of the year, meaning I'm not missing too much activity at work, and I can focus my mind completely on the theme of the conference.

Moreover, the annual Durham event is one of the best organised, consistently enjoyable and useful, and the friendliest Ed Tech conference. If Carlsberg did conferences! This is mostly down to the amazing team behind it all, including Malcolm Murray, Julie Mulvey and the Learning Technologies Team at Durham University.

If you are a Blackboard customer in the UK or Ireland (or considering becoming one), you should not miss this annual event. Because it's a Users' conference, it does not have the corporate feel of, say, the Blackboard Teaching and Learning conference. Instead you have the opportunity to hear about and share the real-life experience of fellow Blackboard customers, warts and all. There is also a good representation of staff from Blackboard, giving you great access to raise issues, ask questions and find out about new developments.

Learning from Failure

This year's conference theme was Learning from Failure. It was an excellent theme because this is how most of us learn. It's normal for our efforts to go wrong, but the important thing is to learn from that failure and try again. Even better if we can learn from others' failure, and avoid making the same mistakes ourselves.

We don't often talk about our failures, so I felt privileged to hear about how other people have overcome problems to achieve goals in the use of technologies for teaching and learning.

#durbbu Failure should be our teacher pic.twitter.com/zCWKv04TIo

— Sharon Flynn (@sharonlflynn) January 7, 2016

My notes from the conference extend to several pages. Here I just describe some of the more relevant learnings for me. I did also create a storify from all the tweets from the event, using hastag #durbbu. Some other attendees have written excellent blog posts from the event, which I list at the end of this post.

 

Bb Student app

I was particularly interested in the launch, in the UK and Ireland, of the new Bb Student mobile app. This is because we've had some particular problems with the current Blackboard Learn mobile app, related to a current (major) project concerning release of grades. The new app, which I write about here, is slicker and more student focused, but unfortunately doesn't solve our problems. This was good for me to learn, if not entirely satisfying.

Collaborate Ultra

We've been hearing about the new Collaborate Ultra product, which will eventually replace the current Collaborate, with the dreaded java download. We have done some testing at NUI Galway, but haven't made the switch, due to limitations in functionality.

However, I was very lucky to hear from Kelly Hall of Edinburgh University about Stepping into the unknown with Collaborate Ultra. Kelly gave a very engaging and informative presentation where she described how 3 groups at Edinburgh have piloted the new system. She was able to identify exactly the limitations and difficulties experienced, but concluded that the groups were overall very happy with Collab Ultra. The main loss of functionality is the ability to create break-out groups, but Blackboard is working on this.

#durbbu Feedback on Ultra pilot pic.twitter.com/uHlphtYlcv

— Sharon Flynn (@sharonlflynn) January 7, 2016

Based on the experience of the pilot, Edinburgh is looking to rollout to Ultra during the summer of 2016. She suggested that case studies, based on the pilot groups, are being compiled and may be made available to those interested.

Enterprise Surveys

I've never really considered Blackboard Enterprise Surveys functionality, because I was under the impression that it was only available as part of the Community System licence. It turns out - I was wrong! After putting the question to twitter, I soon got the response that it is available in the basic, vanilla Learn licence - though clearly turned off in ours.

A presentation from Chris Slack and Adam Tuncay described how they have deployed module quality surveys using different approaches: OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) forms, Blackboard tests, and finally Enterprise Surveys. While there are clearly a lot of challenges in using the Enterprise Survey tool (59 known issues, 3 critical issues) the increase in response rates and the reduction in labour costs were particularly impressive.

Moving to enterprise survey has saved Leeds £8752 and 443 hours of staff time each year. #durbbu

— Graeme Boxwell (@GraemeBoxwell) January 7, 2016

Hearing about this project (and its many set-backs) has encouraged me to take a look at Enterprise Surveys on our own environment, some day in the future when I have a bit of time!

Blackboard Updates

The Durham conference always includes a keynote from Blackboard itself, where we can learn something about the current direction and future roadmap for the company. This year, Alan Masson (Head of International Customer Success) gave an engaging keynote reflecting on our shared journey (Blackboard + customers) and what has been learned along the way.

Just two days before the conference, Blackboard had announced that Bill Ballhaus was to succeed Jay Bhatt as CEO.With a new CEO, the focus of the company is likely to shift, so Alan couldn't really say anything about current direction. However, he did speak about some upcoming Roadmap Webinars for the International market. These webinars are a good opportunity to find out more about product strategy, developments and releases.

Alan also pointed us to a new Technology Adoption Guide - 6 Characteristics To Increase Technology Adoption.

#durbbu If these are in place - successful implementation pic.twitter.com/tho2pYTZm2

— Sharon Flynn (@sharonlflynn) January 8, 2016

Grades Journey Tool

We are currently, at NUI Galway, in the middle of a major institutional project which involves the use of Blackboard's new Grades Journey tool. At the time of the conference, we were on the cusp of rolling out, using a big-bang approach, new grade centre columns to all modules, in all Schools and Colleges, across the University. So, I was particularly interested to hear from Jim Emery from Glasgow Caledonian about his experience of the Grades Journey tool.

Glasgow Caledonian's context is slightly different from ours, albeit with similar goals ultimately. Perhaps very sensibly, GCU is about to commence a pilot of the system, rather than our all-or-nothing approach. His description of the endeavour as a "series of small battles rather than a long war" rang true for me, although I currently feel like I'm involved in a very long war!

Jim's presentation was very honest, as he described his learnings from the project so far. We also spent some time comparing notes on our experiences, which was extremely valuable for me. Jim has written about  Marks Integration, framing it in the context of the Digital University.

Digital Badges

I enjoyed Graham Redshaw-Boxwell's talk about digital badges at Newcastle University and beyond. I think there are plenty of links with the All Aboard project in Ireland, especially the digital badges component of this.

Conclusion

I realise that I'm writing this post three weeks after the conference took place, and I've focused only on those talks that made the most impression on me, in terms of my own learning. I also very much enjoyed Eric Stoller's keynote, about academics and social media.

Why Educators Can’t Live Without Social Media - my keynote slides from @Durham_Uni #DURBBU https://t.co/ASSmhxBlFj pic.twitter.com/ynttSqoN2p

— Eric Stoller (@EricStoller) January 7, 2016

Unusually for a conference, any of the talks I went to were of high quality, and I learned something new in each one.

Other blog posts about this event include (apologies if I missed any - let me know in the comments):

Learning from Failure – The 16th Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference- Rosie Hare
Reflections on Day 2 of the Blackboard Users’ Conference- Richard Walker

Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference 2016: A Few Reflections - Danny Ball
Learning from Failure…- Maria Tannant
Durbbu - multiple posts by Matt Cornock

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#celt15: Getting Real about Virtual Learning

Last Friday (19th June) was our CELT Symposium on the topic Getting Real about Virtual Learning. It was a fantastic day (despite the weather) with about 200 participants and plenty of learning.

Twitter at #celt15

Thanks to the twitter team (@gramcgrath, @marloft, @allaboardHE, @catherinecronin, @rosenidhubhda, @TELtales) and all the lovely tweeps at the conference, there were almost 1200 #celt15 tweets on Friday alone, and we trended in Ireland for most of the day!

The quality of the backchannel was quite amazing. I've created a semi-structured archive of all the comments and pictures using storify, which gives a sense of the day.

A beautiful TAGSExplorer visualisation of all the tweets for the hashtag was created by Martin Hawsey's Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS). From here you can find the top tweeter from the conference (@iainmacl) and the top conversationalists (@worried_teacher and @sharonlflynn). TAGS also produces a searchable archive of the conference tweets.

Keynotes at #celt15

Both Sian Bayne and Doug Belshaw gave very exciting and thought-provoking talks at #celt15. These have been recorded and we should be able to make them available soon.

In the meantime, Doug has already made his presentation available on Slideshare:

Identifying, scaffolding, and credentialing skills in an ever-changing digital environment from Doug Belshaw

And Sian Bayne's paper Teacherbot: Interventions in Automated Teaching is also available online.

Presentations from the event

At least one presenter has shared his presentation using Slideshare. If anybody else has shared their presentation, please let me know and I'll add it here:
 

Blended Learning: Feared or Misunderstood? (CELT15) from Tony Burke

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The growth in video in teaching and learning at NUI Galway

The Kaltura Connect Education Virtual Summit will take place on 28th May this year (you can pre-register here) and I was absolutely delighted to be invited to give a talk, based on our experiences at NUI Galway. The talk was recorded last month in New York City, against the backdrop of Central Park.

The recording "studio". Photograph taken by Anna Dutton.

All sounds a bit crazy? Well, yes, it was. Especially since this has happened before. But I did get to New York last month, where I recorded my talk in front of two video cameras, to two cameramen, a sound engineer and a couple of other people. I also attended the Kaltura Education Customer Advisory Board, and caught up with new developments in video technology for education.

When the invitation came in, I spent a bit of time thinking about what I could talk about. NUI Galway has been a Kaltura customer for almost 4 years, so I thought I'd take a closer look at the analytics available to us. I focused on the calendar years 2012 to 2014, for which we have full data.


The Big Picture

To give some context, we integrated Kaltura into our Blackboard environment at the very beginning of 2012, keeping it in "pilot mode" for the second semester of that academic year by only telling a few video champions about its existence. A small number of other academic staff stumbled across its functionality and also started using it.

By the Summer of 2012, once we'd ironed out any issues, and learned about it more as a team, we began to promote the tools more actively. In particular, we offered workshops and demonstration sessions.

The number of contributors (staff and students) who uploaded at least one video to Kaltura via Blackboard increased from 58 in the first year to 156 in 2013 and to 319 last year. I think that this increase is down to two things:

• The promotion and training offered by the Learning Technologies team to support staff in their use of the tools, and
• The ease of use of the tools themselves. Most staff are very pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to created a webcam recording or record themselves talking over a powerpoint.

The number of uploads in the first year was 287, compared to a total number of uploads of 962 in 2014. The number of media entries played in each of the three years speaks for itself.

The Analytics within the Kaltura Management Console allow admins to dig deeper into these numbers. For example the most played video in the last year is Examinations Advice  which was made available to students at the appropriate time of the year as part of a Blackboard System Announcement.

Breakdown per month

By extracting some of the data from Kaltura Analytics, I was able to take a look at the content contributions and views per month over the three years.

 

The graph for contributions has been adjusted slightly. It had been skewed by the fact that a single contributor uploaded 181 videos alone in January 2014. By removing that figure, the graph is definitely more readable. It's clear that very little activity is taking place during the summer months, outside of the teaching periods. There is a very definite increase in August, in preparation for the new academic year, with a lot of activity taking place in October and November, and a decline again as teaching ends in December.

Targeted training events took place in August 2013, December 2013, August 2014 and October 2014 - the effect of which is quite visible in the graph above.

The graph of content views per month mirrors that of contributions, but on a much bigger scale. Again it's clear that most of the activity takes place during the teaching period, with reduced viewing activity from May to August.

How is it being used?

The numbers and graphs are interesting, and certainly useful when you need to argue a case. But more interesting are the stories behind the numbers. For example, the contributors are not just academic staff - there is also an increase in video assignments, where the students create a video and upload through the Kaltura tool on Blackboard.

In my recorded presentation for the Kaltura Connect Education Virtual Summit, to be shown as the opening talk on 28th May, I give some examples of the uses of video in teaching and learning at NUI Galway. I had quite a lot to choose from.

A final thought

There's no doubt that video offers a lot of opportunity in teaching, learning and assessment, for teachers and learners alike. The Kaltura tools make things very simple for users - there's no fiddling around with file formats and post-production can be minimal. But just having the tools and making them available doesn't mean that staff and students will use them, or indeed use them in an effective and productive way for teaching and learning. Support and guidance is crucial. That's where the Learning Technologies Team comes in at NUIG. We can help with the technical stuff, but we're also ready to advise with best practice and a wealth of experience.


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Marvellous Mapping: Reflecting on online identities and practises using Visitors and Residents Mapping

Last month CELT hosted a workshop, "Marvellous Mapping: Reflecting on online identities and practices using Visitors and Residents Mapping".

The workshop facilitators, David White and Donna Lanclos, took the time while they were here to sit down with Catherine Cronin for a short chat and here it is...

Spring Lunchtime Lecture Series 2015

Last year I was asked by Elizabeth FitzPatrick, to assist with recording a seminar series for the School of Geography and Archaeology. The seminar series was organised to mark and celebrate the anniversary of 90 years of Archaeology at NUI Galway. 

It was a lunchtime lecture series, organised by staff in the School, in collaboration with the Galway City Musuem. The venue for the talks was the Education Room at the Galway City Museum. The talks were free and open to all. 

The lecture series was a huge success and drew large numbers each week. The video podcasts from these seminars are available to view at My Own Galway.

 The recorded seminar series is now being used by staff and students of the School of Geography and Archaeology as a learning resource. Such was the popularity of the seminar series that the School decided to run it again this year and the final lecture will be held tomorrow, March 27th, The speaker will be Conor Newman and his lecture is titled, The Sword in the Stone: the Galway Connection.

The seminar series has been a really fantastic example of the University successfully engaging with public and community. 

The 2015 series will be available online soon...

Editathon on Vicipéid and Wikipedia

An Editathon on Vicipéid (the Irish-language wikipedia) and Wikipedia is being organised on Friday, November 7 from 09:00 to 13:00 in the computer lab in the S Block, NUI Galway. This collaboration was initally proposed by members of the Wikimedia Ireland Community and three of their members (Shannon Eichelberger, Eugene Eichelberger and Oliver Moran) have kindly offered to supervise the training and support of participants.

The aim is to highlight the value of An Vicipéid/Wikipedia as a learning resource and to improve its quality by encouraging Irish traslation students to participate in the event. The event’s theme is The National Monuments of Ireland. This was chosen on account of the Wikimedia Ireland Community’s previous collaboration with the international photography competition Wiki Loves Monuments.

Members of staff from Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge will also be present during the event both to support students and participate themselves. Training and support will be provided throughout the morning and certificates recognising their participation will be presented to all students. Refreshments will be available during the event.

There are 20 workstations in the lab and therefore 20 official places at the event. 8 places are being reserved for MA students taking Irish translation modules. The remaining 12 places are available to other students or interested members of staff.

Schedule:
09:00 – 09:15 Welcoming Address from Dónall Ó Braonáin, Príomhfheidhmeannach an Acadaimh
09:15 – 10:15 Initial Training
10:15 – 10:30 Tea/Coffee in Room 106, Áras na Gaeilge
10:30 – 13:00 Editing your choice of page on the theme of The National Monuments of Ireland
Please note: If you have appointments/classes during the morning, please call in for any part of the Editathon - even if you miss the training (support will be available throughout the morning)

Preparation
1.    To assist in the smooth running of the Editathon, you are asked to reserve a place by ordering a ticket (Ticéad MA for MA students or Ticéad Mac Léinn/Ball Foirne for all other participants)

Please note: As places are limited, you are encouraged to bring your own laptop and connect via WiFi. In this case, there is no need to order a ticket – please just show up when you can.

2.    You are also asked to create a Vicipéid/Wikipedia account in advance at http://ga.wikipedia.org and if possible, choose a national monument that you wish to work on and register your interest at
o    here  (Gaeilge)
o    or here  (English)

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