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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 ...

Last term we spoke with Mary Barrett, at NUI Galway, about her involvement in a project that created short screencasts within Blackboard for students. Along with her colleagues, she was looking for something to explain the technical nature of the subject, in additional to lectures and tutorials, for students. They arrived at a solution of working through problems on screen, narrating the process, and explaining steps involved. The resulting recordings allowed students to access these clarifying steps again, and again. Each screencast became a very valuable and engaging resource for learning. Behind the scenes is a technology called Kaltura Desktop Recorder , which enables you to quickly and easily recording your screen or lecture and upload online to share privately in Blackboard, or with a wider audience on MediaSpace or other public video channels. Watch Mary's video interview here . You can see some further examples of their results on http://www.nuigalway.ie/cairnes/leavingcer...

We've finally gotten around to uploading Doug Belshaw's keynote from last month's symposium...   Tweet

The Kaltura Connect Education Virtual Summit took place last week. All the sessions are now available to view on demand, so it you have a little bit of time, head on over to the VOD site to watch. My own talk User Engagement and Learning Outcomes: How NUI Galway is Changing the way Students Learn Inside and Outside the Classroom is available, though I have brought myself to watch it yet. Hopefully the technical guys worked their magic and I don't look as completely nervous as I actually felt at the time. The powerpoint slides from the talk are available on Slideshare and embedded here: User Engagement and Learning Outcomes: How NUI Galway is Changing the way Students Learn Inside and Outside the Classroom from Sharon Flynn Tweet

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 ...

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 S...

At the 6th International Integrity and Plagiarism conference last month there was an interesting juxtaposition of talks, some technology-related, but most not. In particular, the keynote sessions provided an array of ideas that I intend to follow up on. Teddi Fishman (left) in conversation with Samatha Grant On the last day of the conference, the programme opened with a keynote from Samantha Grant, a filmmaker based in San Francisco, who has made the feature length documentary A Fragile Trust , based on the serial plagiarist Jayson Blair, a journalist at the New York Times. The case, when it was discovered in 2003, was such a scandal that it brought down 2 NYT editors. The documentary features interviews with Blair, as well as with other journalists and editors who were caught up in the story. During her keynote, Samantha played a number of clips from the film, which gave a great insight into the approach she has taken, and raises plenty of questions about ethics in journalism. I now a...

Last Friday, June 6th, we held our annual CELT Symposium. This year's theme was "Discover, Explore, Create" and it really was a very interesting and eye-opening event. After our keynotes and parallel sessions we rounded off the day with a whistle stop tour of our campus which meant making our way around campus guided by a map, stopping off at organised locations and meeting with interesting and enthusiastic colleagues who filled us in on what is going on in their specific area. It is amazing how little we sometimes know about all the different and exciting things that are happening in our University. Our videos from the event will be available shortly but in the meantime here is a little photo montage of the day: Update: the videos from the day are now available and can be found on the CELT website . There is also a twitter archive from the day, based on the #celt14 hashtag, which can be found on storify . Tweet

Earlier this month we had our annual Galway Symposium on Higher Education, entitled "Thinking Differently" - New Curricula, New Skills in Higher Education. Although the conference theme itself is not technology-focused, we did make use of technology to support and enhance the conference experience. Twitter Back in March, we agreed the twitter hashtag for the conference and I used Martin Hawksey's excellent Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet to start archiving all tweets using the hashtag. About 2 weeks before the conference itself, I enlisted the help of a twitter team, targeting people that I knew would be at the conference and giving them advice on how to keep the backchannel going . This meant that we had an active twitter stream before, during and after the conference, with about 850 tweets currently in the archive. The Archive Tool produces a complete archive and TagsExplorer , which lets you explore the connections between the people who are tweeting.  From this...

I was very pleased to be asked to speak at the Faculty of Science and Engineering 4th annual Learning and Teaching Day, which took place at the University of Limerick last week. The focus of the event, organised by Hussain Mahdi and Michael English, was on Technology Enhanced Teaching and Learning. My own presentation, which had the title Trends in Technology Enhance Teaching and Learning , is embedded below. While developing it, I realised that 20 minutes was too short for me to cover a multitude of trends, so I decided to focus on video in teaching and learning, and the opportunities for video to play a part in content production, delivery, supporting of student learning and assessment. I mentioned a number of video initiatives by NUIG staff, including Conor O'Byrne, Oliver Ryan, Bryan McCabe, Ger Fleming, Susan Folan, John Breslin and John Murray, as well as Anne Wiseman from GMIT. What I enjoyed about the day, though, was the opportunity to hear from a group of practitioners a...

View of Empire State Building The last two weeks have been a bit surreal for me, and on Tuesday I spent a very pleasant day in Dakota Studio on 5th Avenue in New York City, recording a presentation for the Kaltura Education Video Summit . The summit will be a virtual event, taking place on 6th December, and you can register now for free. My presentation is on Supporting the use of video for teaching and learning (in the Blackboard LMS) and I am one of a long list of speakers , but the only one from outside the US, as far as I am aware. So, how did this strange situation come about? Being in New York, pre-recording a presentation for a virtual conference to take place next month? Well, just two weeks ago I got an email from Meytal Burstein, marketing manager with Kaltura , letting me know that my abstract had been accepted for the virtual Summit, and that I was invited to give a 30-35 minute presentation. I was very pleased, of course, and expected to deliver the presentation from my d...

Following on from last week's webinar, I'm very pleased to see the publication of a Blackboard/Kaltura case study on how we are using Kaltura at NUI Galway . I'd particularly like to acknowledge Oliver Ryan (Physics) and Susan Folan (Acadamh) for their contributions to the case study. Read the full case study to find out how Oliver and Susan have been using Kaltura to support their students' learning. We have also been featured recently on the Blackboard blog , in a nice write up by Katie Drossos. Tweet

Using video in your teaching can be a great way to get a message across and to enhance student engagement. There are some great videos available on YouTube , iTunesU or TED Talks , for example, that can be used to illustrate a concept or give additional information. In the last year, we've seen an increase in the number of academic staff who are creating their own videos for use in teaching. See, for example, the NUI Galway Microbiology channel on YouTube, Derek Molloy 's (DCU) award-winning channel on Digital Electronics, or setting up the oscilloscope in a Physics lab. Certainly, recording something on my mobile phone and uploading it to YouTube is surprisingly easy. But how easy is it to create something a little bit more professional and useful for teaching purposes? With these questions in mind, I went along to Irene McCormick's presentation at the EdTech conference in Maynooth in May. Irene is from IT Carlow and she is responsible for this NDLR-funded video, illust...

Tweet It's that time of the year again when we hold our Learning Technologies symposium. This is when the participants on our Learning Technologies module (cel263) come together and present their projects, developed as part of the assessment for the PG diploma module. During our workshop on video Participants are asked to identify and complete a project, based on the material covered in the module, to incorporate Learning Technologies into their teaching. They are given free scope in identifying a technology or technologies and what they want to achieve. From the team's perspective, we aim to move each person beyond his/her comfort zone and to try something new in a supported environment. This year, six people presented their work, using technologies such as social media, podcasting, screencasting, video and google earth. Maura spoke about her plans to use social media to keep MA students engaged while they are involved in a field based module and away from the on-campus, con...

On Monday afternoon, the European Day of Languages, we were invited along to the launch of PAISAGE, an Irish/Spanish project for the teaching and learning of both languages. PAISAGE stands for Portal Audiovisual Intercultural sobre el Aprendizaje de Gaélico y Espanol. It is a NAIRTL -funded project aimed at linking linguistic and cultural learning in Irish and Spanish, carried out by Dorothy Ní Uigín ( Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge ) and Pilar Aldarete ( Spanish ), both academic staff members at NUI Galway. Dorothy and Pilar have developed a range of resources including videos in both languages showing aspects of NUI Galway and its surrounds; interviews with Spanish students living in Ireland and Irish students living in Spain; interviews with professionals working in both languages and cultures; grammar explanations contrasting both languages; grammar exercises to accompany the videos. All resources are linked to the levels in the Common European Framework of Reference for Langua...