Business Global Media Pedia

When it comes to student learning, there is no activity with greater impact than how you design your course assessment. We all know that it works best when it facilitates meaningful and engaged learning by allowing students to participate in the process and gain timely and relevant feedback. It must be fair, accurate, and manageable for those undertaking it, and this is no easy task. There has been much written in recent times on innovations in assessment. Lecturers have long been striving for new ways to make it more valid, transparent and diverse (Race, 2007). Asking students to review and give feedback on each others work is one such approach. With the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), this practice of allowing students to assess and give feedback on each others work has grown in prevalence (Bali, 2014). Surely, it makes sense that students would benefit from understanding the criteria of an assignment so well that they could appraise the work of others for quality. But...

12 Days. 12 Apps. 10 minutes per day. I've just signed up (again) for the 12 apps of Christmas #12appsDIT offered by the Learning, Teaching and Technology Centre at DIT, and facilitated by Frances Boylan. This was launched last year (and I blogged about it at the time ) based on a similar initiative at Regent's University London. Each morning over 12 weekdays, starting Dec 1 st 2015, a page will be released that reviews a particular mobile app and explores it in terms of how it could help students personalise their learning. Like an advent calendar, every day you open a new door and see what's behind it. This year the DIT folk are focussing on personalisation of learning, and are inviting teaching staff and students to take part. Already more than 600 people have registered. Why not sign up too ? As well as #12appsDIT, Chris Rowell of Regent's University London, has launched Christmas 2.0 #RUL12AoC. Aimed at academic and academic support staff, this open course off...

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...

The Quad by Malbe554 Just over a week ago I had a workshop for academic staff (on the PG Diploma in Academic Practice module in Learning Technologies) where we discussed the use of wikis in teaching and learning. As well as demonstrating how Blackboard wikis work and might be used to support collaborative group work, I also tried out a Wikipedia familiarisation session, in the style of Martin Poulter . This was based mostly on the talk I gave at EdTech earlier this year, on Academic Writing and Wikipedia . The purpose of the Wikipedia familiarisation session is to highlight certain academic qualities of Wikimedia articles - the quality scale, citation guidelines, peer review, authorship, collaboration. I also talked about some of Wikipedia's sister projects, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, that can be used to enhance teaching and learning activities, such as Wikiversity , Wiktionary , Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons . To add a practical element, without a full-blown editing se...

 For the past six years, Bonnie Long, in the School of Education, has been pioneering a novel approach to encourage teachers to reflect on their professional practice, as part of their studies at NUI Galway. We caught up with her before the summer to ask her a little more about her approach of using digital storytelling as part of the formal curriculum. The result is a three minute long interview with Bonnie, that explains in more detail. Watch it here: https://www.kaltura.com/tiny/s18l2 Bonnie Long talks about digital storytelling in Higher Education Tweet

Earlier this week I became aware of #blimage - a challenge to write blog posts on learning, inspired by particular images. You can read more about the challenge from Steve Wheeler in his post Blimey, it's #blimage . Since then, there have been #blimage blogposts appearing all week, and I'm barely keeping up with them! Following David Hopkins ' post Desks of Doom , David challenged me to get involved. Take the challenge @sharonlflynn , here's my response to @timbuckteeth and challenge too: https://t.co/t9KNLdvyAp #blimage — David Hopkins (@hopkinsdavid) July 20, 2015 To be honest, my first reaction was "I haven't got time for this", but actually, David's challenge image aligns nicely with my current phase of work. So, I decided I'd use the opportunity to get something written. Birmingham Airport Departure Lounge (gate 14/15)  Image by David Hopkins on flickr I've been in plenty of departure lounges while travelling; sometimes for work and so...

The National Forum for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education has published 2 focused research reports today. One of these is the outcome of a project, led by Angelica Risquez at the University of Limerick, and involving a team of people from University of Limerick, Dublin Institute of Technology, Mary Immaculate College, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and National University of Ireland Galway, looking at the current state of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education in Ireland. This report provides a considered account of some of the key issues which influence the sharing of open educational resources. These include questions of awareness and understanding of open educational resources at individual as well as institutional level, and the value placed on openness as a positive incentive for academic engagement. Acknowledging the complex interplay between these factors, the study suggests important practical steps to take for...