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Overview The first PebblePad Irish User Group meeting took place in the RCSI on Wednesday 10 February. It was hosted by John Couperthwaite and Debbie Holmes from PebblePad, and featured colleagues from TCD, DCU, UCC, GMIT, WIT, and NUIG; some of which are currently using PebblePad alongside others looking to keep a watching brief on ePortfolio developments and uses in higher education. NUI Galway Context Following the cessation of the Learning Objects suite of tools in NUIG, a number of professional-based functions (e.g. Nursing and Midwifery, Engineering, Adult Education) have spoken to me about their interest in pan-programme ePorfolio solutions; and specifically those with post-graduate access options. We do not have access to BB-native portfolios as this requires the Community System which comes with a considerable price tag. I attended this session to gauge the current state of play from PebblePad and the wider user group and found it extremely useful. Key Features of PebblePad Th...

Earlier this month I made my annual pilgrimmage to Durham to attend the 16th Durham Blackboard Users' Conference . I've been attending this event every January for the last number of years and can honestly say that it's a highlight in my calendar. Even better that it's at the very, very start of the year, meaning I'm not missing too much activity at work, and I can focus my mind completely on the theme of the conference. Moreover, the annual Durham event is one of the best organised, consistently enjoyable and useful, and the friendliest Ed Tech conference. If Carlsberg did conferences! This is mostly down to the amazing team behind it all, including Malcolm Murray, Julie Mulvey and the Learning Technologies Team at Durham University. If you are a Blackboard customer in the UK or Ireland (or considering becoming one), you should not miss this annual event. Because it's a Users' conference, it does not have the corporate feel of, say, the Blackboard Teaching ...

In December, a PhD student, Sally McHugh, called into my office to tell me that she had successfully received Explore funding for a project called Campus Create , with Dr. Tony Hall in Education. The idea was to promote and encourage creativity in all its forms, including within digital media. Sally and I had talked before about Digital Storytelling DS106 from the University of Mary Washington, and the work of Jim Groom , Alan Levine and colleagues. They had been working for many years, encouraging people to make art, to create, share and remix, in an open way, cognisant of copyright and domain ownership. Our heroes. http://campuscreate.eu / Before Christmas, Tony, Sally and I met to talk about how we might explore and enact these ideas at NUI Galway within the Campus Create project. We came up with the notion of having twelve weeks of themes, to correspond to the first twelve weeks of semester 2, and to post daily create challenges, similar to projects like the Daily Create , the Da...

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...