Webinar week 1

Studying at home today... seriously slow broadband service :-( I can't wait for the high speed installation to happen.

Finally the Webinar recording plays (hooray!)


Teachers Talking about TEL. Liz Masterman. 17th April 2013

Activity- In the discussion that will follow Liz’s presentation, participants will be encouraged to reflect on the relevance of each theme to their own practice.

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ocTEL week 1 webinar

Five questions

1. Is there a tension what students want and what might be more beneficial to their learning?
2. ‘Good use of technology builds on all the education theory.’ Do you agree? 
3. What are the trade-offs and compromises in using (open) educational resources created by others?
4. Where is the locus of ‘cool TEL’ in your university/college and what is its relationship to institutional support?
5. What information will best help you decide whether to try out a TEL innovation (quantitative and/or qualitative)?

TEL

• Drivers
• Enablers
• Constraints

Think points!
Digital literacy and the desire/need to equip students for the workplace.
Staff adoption of technology driven by student request for its use.
Inconsistent use within the institution, students need consistent use of technology enhanced learning across the institution.
Student preferences and student numbers can 'constrain' Sometime we can only use what we have available in the time.
"Are students conservative"? concern that "over privileging students" with provision of online/digital resources has in some situations led to students turning away from the 'hard copy' resource.

"Is there sometimes a tension what students (say they) want and what might be more beneficial to their learning?"

Q1 - I have experienced tension where students talk about how much 'better' a colleagues teaching is from another's and when I have unpicked it the comments have often related to the technology used, the proficiency of its use, the use of or and range of media used. The 'better' has rarely focussed on the subject content. I think it is important to personally and institutionally acknowledge that the range and pace of emerging technologies is faster that 'we' can individually respond to so we should not attempt to adopt everything 'new' but be discerning and adopt and use 'well' that which is seen as the most suitable.

Q2 - I certainly do. We should design the assessment and learning activity before we select the technology. The technology should enable and enhance the learning experience. Bad, and/or unnecessary use of technology can have a negative influence on educational theory.

Theory-informed TEL - Theories of learning V theories of teaching.

Q3 - The trade off I have encountered is there is a balance between the expensive slick resource for large scale long term reuse and the cheaper less polished resource which may be for small scale local/discipline specific reuse.
On occasion an OER is too 'generic' sometimes people appear to struggle with words/phrases they are not familiar with or organisational branding which is not their own. I have also encountered really slick looking resources where they refer to legislation which is relevant in a specific country or contain information which is out of date. This has lead to recreating the resource in a 'cheaper' format locally.
On occasion sourcing and previewing the OER has been considerably time consuming, leaving me and colleagues thinking we could have pulled something suitable together in less time.
OER enable us to 'reuse' learning resources within our teaching wider that we may have done previously. In my teaching I have generally sought out existing resources which I can re-use re-purpose. I have regularly been delivering 'team teaching' and have developed and delivered 'shared' teaching content, this has brought challenges in applying your 'own voice' to the content during delivery. It is essential to be familiar with the material in advance so you can provide relevant enhancements and not be surprised by the content. However when developing these 'team teaching' resources there was reluctance to openly share, many team members took the 'shared' resources and tweaked them for delivery to their seminar/tutorial group which lead to student voicing dissatisfactions because they were getting something different.

At my previous institution we created a repository for these shared learning/teaching resources RADAR .
I have freely shared my resources for others to use, these have primarily been contained with Power Point presentations and distributed within a VLE. However my resources were never granular enough for the shared repository.

Where I am now working, I am beginning to venture into video and audio resources with the intention for use by others in my own institution. I am also exploring the creation of an institution level repository for video/audio of examples of learning and teaching activities which we can used to support the development of academic staff.


Q4 - We have an individual locus for many years and more recently there has been a central response. We have a number of Innovators and 'early adopters' and are delivering a strategy to support and enhance TEL across the institution - Digital Vision  My role is to support staff to develop confidence and competence using technology in their teaching. My 'students' are faculty members.

Q5 - What convinces me/ staff to use new technology. Personally a combination of own exploration, peer feedback and published research evidence. In my institution we have interviewed staff about this and there are a range of factors, certainly peer use and how they rate their experience is a significant factor as is the research evidence, there was also mention of student expectations having influence. The greatest constraint indicated is lack of time to explore, learn, evaluate TEL.