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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 ...

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...