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Earlier this year, we had the good fortune of catching up with Dr. Bryan McCabe, a lecturer in Civil Engineering at NUI Galway. Bryan has been re-configuring his pedagogic approach, by giving students exposure to lecture materials out of class through lecture videos and quizzes. He then uses lecture time to problem-solve, discuss and debate. More popularly known as "the flipped classroom", this learning model has been growing in popularity in recent times, due to its emphasis on active student engagement (Chen, Wang, Kinshuk & Chen, 2014). In this short video with Bryan, he discusses his approach, and the feedback he has received from students on allowing them to take more responsibility for their learning, and engage collaboratively in the practice of engineering.   Further Reading: Chen, Y., Wang, Y., Kinshuk & Chen, N.S. (2014). Is FLIP enough? Or should we use the FLIPPED model instead? Computers & Education, 79, 16-27.   Straw S., Quinlan, O., Harland, J. ...

Image by andyp uk on flickr  A couple of weeks ago, as part of an informal lunchtime conversation session on the topic of Academic Blogging , Simon Warren ( @worried_teacher ) invited me to speak, along with John Danaher ( @JohnDanaher ), on my blogging experiences. This forced me to take some time and reflect on my own practice as a blogger, what I blog about and why. So, thank you Simon for giving me the purpose to reflect. John blogs at philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.ie and is a prolific blogger. He admits to spending between 10 to 15 hours per week on his blog, writing an average of 2 lengthy posts each week. His writing is habitual and he starts most days writing at least 1000 words. He writes for research purposes and much of what he writes is repurposed for papers and articles.  Clearly I am not nearly in the same league as John Danaher, but listening to him speak, I realised that some of our reasons for blogging are similar.    The LearnTechGalway blog...

This article first appeared in the December issue of the Media and Learning Newsletter , published by the Media and Learning Association. Sign up for regular issues online. The Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) at the National University of Ireland, Galway is a staff-facing central unit which has the broad aim to enhance the quality of teaching and learning at the University. The centre is responsible for various types of activities, grounded in the promotion of good pedagogy, including the support of learning technologies and media production. In the last 5 years, we have seen an increase in the use of video in online, blended and on-campus courses, including the flipped classroom approach. With a small complement of staff (just 4 members in the learning technologies team) to support an institution with about 17,000 students and 2,500 staff across 5 Colleges, we have to be selective in how we allocate our resources. We have a small recording studio, for video and ...