Technology Enabled Learning & Teaching

TELT related resources, news, events and debates

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Adaptive eLearning and ASB upcoming events on assessment

Posted by xinni on June 9th, 2011 · UNFED

UNFED notes, May 2011

Dr. Dror Ben-Naim from School of Computer Science and Engineering gave us a presentation on Adaptive eLearning.  Adaptive eLearning is Intelligent Tutoring Technology: computer-based educational environment that can intelligently adapt to students’ level of knowledge, providing students with the unique feedback that they need, when they need it. Dror also briefed us about different adaptive eLearning projects at UNSW. After the presentation, meeting attendees had the opportunity to have a hands-on experience using the Adaptive eLearning Platform. We trialed the student role in virtual lab and trialed the instructor role in designing adaptive questions.

For more details, please download the presentation slide -  Adaptive eLearning – UNFED workshop – 25-05-2011

Danny briefed us about upcoming events in ASB, which will focus on disseminating good practices of using technologies in assessment practices. For more information including dates and topics of the events, please download the flyer – ASB technology month.

If you would like to suggest any topics for future UNFED meetings, please feel free to contact Xinni (xinni.du@unsw.edu.au).

 

Assessment as learning Forum and LMS discussion

Posted by xinni on May 10th, 2011 · UNFED

The UNFED meeting in April was right after the Easter long weekend. As a result, many people were still on leave on that day. We did not have any pre-arranged presentations nor topics for the meeting. Instead, we have had free discussions within the attendees, mainly from the Learning and Teaching unit and the Library.

Ann, as the organiser of May forum, briefed us about the Assessment as learning Forum on 5th May. Tim and Roman, education designers from LTU, led the discussion on current learning management systems.

If you would like to suggest any topics for future UNFED meetings, please feel free to contact Xinni (xinni.du@unsw.edu.au).

ReView and Group Management in Moodle

Posted by xinni on April 14th, 2011 · Learning & teaching, TELT news, UNFED

The meeting invitation of this UNFED session was extended to L&T fellows and faculties. We have a very good turnout and engaged discussions for the session.

ReView

Dr Gigi Foster (academic Economics) and Danny Carroll (Educational Designer) of the Australian School of Business have presented on the trial of ReView in Courses and for accreditation at the ASB.

Began with the design philosophies behind the tool, Danny introduced ReView as the software promotes a criteria based assessment focus and efficiencies in the marking and feedback given to students. Danny reported that user feedback collected from ASB academics has been very positive and the trial has been expanded in 2011. ASB is also interested in using the tool to demonstrate the level of achievement of Program Learning Goals.

Gigi gave us a guided tour in ReView by demonstrating student, tutor and lecturer views from a real course. Gigi has found it contributes to

  • quality assurance through standardisation of marking approaches
  • improve efficiencies on marking,
  • improve efficiencies on providing and distributing feedback
  • facilitate the process of self-assessment among students

Version 2.0 Review is currently under development. The new version will have an improved user-interface, enhanced mapping functions that enable courses mapping learning outcomes to program learning goals with the focus of Assurance of Learning.

Click to download presentation slides (in PDF format)

Group Management in Moodle

John Paul Posada (Education Technologist in Engineering) gave us a presentation on ENGG1000 group management in Moodle 1.9.

John-Paul explained the complexities of course requirements on group managements:

  • over 1000 students
  • multiple projects designed for group works
  • different project-related information being released to different groups
  • flexibilities on group sign-up options
  • instructors’ requirements on forming groups based on certain criteria

To meet the requirement, Engineering team developed its own Moodle plug-in, called Team Build, which enables instructors set criteria in the format of multiple choice questions and form groups based on students’ responses.

Moodle 2.0 pilot

Niki Fardouly and Karsten Sommer (Learning and Teaching Unit) briefed us about Moodle 2.0 pilot.  Those who would like to use Moodle 2.0 in smester 2 are encouraged to lodge Express Of Interest form via http://telt.unsw.edu.au/PilotEOI.cfm.  Information on Moodle profession development courses will be circulated soon.

Next UNFED meeting will be on 27th Apr,  2011. Don’t forget to let us know of any topics of interest, and to let your colleagues know about UNFED – contact Xinni for information.

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TELT Pilots and ASCILITE 2010

Posted by xinni on March 7th, 2011 · Connections & collaboration, TELT news, UNFED

This is the first meeting for 2011. We have a lot of people attended including Fiona Thurn, new education technologist from the Learning and Teaching unit.

Karsten and Fiona answered questions regarding TELT pilots

Moodle pilot

Learning and Teaching is currently running Moodle pilots on both version 1.9 (semester one) and version 2.0 (semester one and two). Pilot courses that are already developed / running on 1.9 will be rolled over by NetSpot.  NetSpot has also provided Moodle 2.0 trainings to pilot participants.

Engineering expressed their concerns on whether university migration will be able to accommodate current customizations that have been done on Engineering Moodle.

Note: For semester one, Turnitin will only be integrated with Moodle 1.9 pilot course.

Wimba Classroom

Wimba classroom is a web conferencing tool with provides virtual classroom environment. It is on open pilot stage.  Wimba classroom has been integrated with Learning Management System, Blackboard and Moodle.

Notes: Australian School of Taxation and Business Law (Atax)  is using Elluminate, an alternative online collaboration tool, for this year.

Omnium

Learning and Teaching, COFA and NetSpot are working together on integrating Omnium with Moodle.  It is expected to be delivered in semester 2, 2011 in Moodle 2.0. However, it may start with a link inside a Moodle instance instead of a full scaled integration.

GradeMark and PeerMark

GradeMark was in use within Blackboard Turnitin last year. Roman briefly reported that it has been incorporated into marking and providing feedback process in some courses despite of a couple of technical issues. PeerMark is the new feature provided by Turnitin, which is expected to be used in peer review process. More user feedback on PeerMark are welcomed.

Mahara

Fiona looks after Mahara pliot this year. Mahara is an ePortfolio tool that offers students the ability to collect and display their work in one place. UNSW instance of Mahara will be integrated with Moodle 2.0. The university offers 1000 student spaces in the pilot

For those who would like to participate on TELT pilots, please apply via

TELT Pilot Expression of Interest form on http://telt.unsw.edu.au/PilotEOI.cfm

For those who would like to find out more information on TELT pilots, please go to TELT wiki on http://telt.unsw.wikispaces.net/

ASCILITE Conference (2010) and CoCo Conference

Belinda has presented to the group on her

-       2010 ASCILITE Conference paper which is about disseminating good practice in blended learning in Science, and

-       presentation given on coco conference in University of Sydney, which was about designing curriculum with creativity, building learning environment that fosters creativity and assessing creativity as graduate attribute.

Please see her Belinda_ascilite_coco presentation (in pdf format) for details.

Next UNFED meeting will be on 30th March  2011. Don’t forget to let us know of any topics of interest, and to let your colleagues know about UNFED – contact Xinni for information.

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Blackboard, Moodle, UNSW-TV and more

Posted by belindaallen on December 3rd, 2010 · Connections & collaboration, Learning & teaching, TELT news, UNFED

UNFED meeting notes – November 24 2010

cardboard box figure

My Figure by Noelas - Flickr CC image

The last meeting for 2010, and we had plenty of participants keen for news on the Blackboard upgrade and Moodle 2.0 pilot. The current status of UNSW-TV was also covered -  Niki’s notes on the discussion are below.

Only a little time was left for conference reports. Andrew Chambers told us about the IODL Conference on Open and Distance Learning that he attended, hosted at Anadolu university in Turkey, which has 1 million+ students. Most of the attending universities were ‘mega universities’, that is those with more than 100,000 enrolments, and some advanced distance learning models were presented. Distance education is relevant to several UNSW faculties, and discussion will be continued at our next meeting in February.

Also at the next meeting we will continue with conference news: Educause, Sydney Uni Learning Technology Research Fest 2010, ascilite 2010 and more – so please bring your reports of summer conferences.

Blackboard, Moodle and UNSWTV Updates

The group discussed the recent Blackboard upgrade and UNSWTV outages and asked questions about the issues affecting these services. Niki Fardouly, Robyn Jay and Tom Cavdarovski provided the following answers.

Date chosen for the upgrade

Currently there is no date available in the calendar that will guarantee that there is no impact on learning and teaching activity somewhere in the University. Unless the academic calendar is rearranged to accommodate essential maintenance work, learning and teaching activities will continue to be adversely impacted. The date was chosen so that it would not conflict with either exams or summer semester teaching, i.e. to minimise impact on students. We were also advised, wrongly as it turns out, that marking would have been completed by that date.

Timing of outages

To enable more frequent maintenance to be done to the TELT systems will require a regular time to be set aside for this work. This could be a short weekly outage window with a longer outage once a month. Discussion of the best times in the week to have this outage raised issues of impact on learning and teaching activities, if conducted during business hours, and impact on part-time students who can only study on weekends if conducted on Saturdays.

Reason for the long outage

IT have avoided applying system patches at regular intervals throughout the year in order to avoid outages that would impact on learning and teaching activities. All the patches were saved for this one upgrade. The 9.0 patches had to be applied before the 9.1 software upgrade could be installed. The patches ran into problems on our system that required troubleshooting by Blackboard Support. Apart from the errors, the patches also took a much longer time to install than had been anticipated.

IT are conducting a Post Incident Review to identify other contributing factors that can be managed differently in future, as well as talking to Blackboard about why the software updates ran into problems on our system.

Current problems affecting Bb 9.1.2

IT are investigating why the NSS data feed to Blackboard has broken and what can be done to fix it. In the meantime course creation, student enrolments, and staff role assignments are being done manually. The WSSO looping issue is also being investigated. For other issues see Blackboard 9.1.2 Known Issues List (Resolved and Unresolved).

Moodle project

Funding has been provided to expand the Moodle pilot in 2011, with the Faculty of Engineering moving to the externally hosted UNSW Moodle instance. Moodle interface themes and a set of pedagogically designed templates will be developed for deployment in second semester 2011. Technical training and support materials and pedagogically focused professional development resources and programs will also be developed for deployment in the second half of the year, in preparation for a wider expansion of Moodle use in 2012. Register your interest on the TELT website.

UNSW TV issues

The UNSW TV service has been suffering frequent outages and storage issues since it was moved from external servers to on campus servers. This has made the service too unreliable for critical learning and teaching activities at present. The problems should be alleviated by early 2011. If videos don’t need to be kept secure they can be uploaded to the UNSW YouTube channel.  Another option is to use the My Media service.

UPDATE Tom Cavdarovski advises that My Media is an option for staff only and those staff need to be able to make streaming files (contact Tom for advice). This system is not suitable for student uploads as it has no security system to protect the university from possible legal issues. Students do have the Youtube option – they can use/create their own Youtube account and can ‘relate’ their videos to other videos with the same name (ideally it would be a course code).

Next UNFED meeting will be February 2011, so best wishes to all for a happy and safe summer break. Don’t forget to let us know of any topics of interest, and to let your colleagues know about UNFED – contact Belinda for information.

EduFeedr: free and unfettered

Posted by robynjay on November 17th, 2010 · Issues, Learning & teaching, Networked learning, Tools & applications

One of the biggest challenges for academics seeking to engage students via open, independent, student-managed spaces particularly blogs, is how to aggregate and manage contributions for feedback and assessment purposes.

Mike Bogle and I have been following the progress of David Jones’ BIM ; an activity module for Moodle (v1.9 – BIM will be ported to Moodle 2.0 be early 2011 at the latest) that provides the functionality required to allow:

  • Students to register feeds.
    Be they RSS, ATOM etc and from whatever source – usually a public blog.
  • Students to use that feed to respond to questions set by teaching staff.
  • Teaching staff to track progress and, if so desired, mark and comment on student contributions.
  • Coordinating staff to track and moderate marking by other staff.
  • “Import” the marking into the Moodle gradebook.

There is a video of a presentation that gives an overview of BIM, including showing how it works for staff and students.

In a blog post today David points to a similar service that can operate independently from Moodle.

EduFeedr is ‘a feed reader for online courses where each participant is using his/her personal blog to publish thoughts on course readings, answers to assignments and other course related posts.’ Although still in beta it looks like it will have potential for those seeking to operate free of an LMS.

A good overview with links and slides is available on Hans Poljoda’s blog.

CC FlickR image by Aranda\Lasch

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Gartner’s top 10

Posted by robynjay on November 16th, 2010 · Tools & applications, Trends

Following on from the previous post, Gartner’s top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for organizations in 2011 may also be of interest.
‘Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years.   As such, these technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.’
The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 include:

  • Cloud Computing
  • Mobile Applications and Media Tablets
  • Social Communications and Collaboration
  • Video
  • Next Generation Analytics
  • Social Analytics
  • Context-Aware Computing
  • Storage Class Memory
  • Ubiquitous Computing
  • Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers
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2010 ANZ Horizon Report

Posted by robynjay on November 16th, 2010 · Tools & applications, Trends

The Horizon Report: 2010 Australia-New Zealand Edition is now available online.

The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project is an ongoing research project that aims to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry within higher education around the globe over a five-year time period.  The Horizon Report: 2010 Australia-New Zealand Edition, is the third in the ANZ series, and focuses on emerging technologies as they appear in and affect higher education in Australia and New Zealand particularly.

The report follows a specific format to describe six areas of emerging technology that will impact higher education in Australia and New Zealand within three adoption horizons over the next five years. Each topic opens with an overview describing the technology at hand, followed by a discussion of its relevance to teaching, learning, or creative inquiry. Examples of how the technology is currently employed, or how it could be applied to education, illustrate its potential. Finally, an annotated list of materials for further reading is provided for those who wish to explore a topic in greater depth.

Focusing on six topics, the project draws on conversation among leaders in the fields of business, industry, and education informed by a review of published resources, by current research and practice, and by the expertise of educational technology communities in Australia, New Zealand, and around the world. The report is guided by the Horizon Project’s Australia-New Zealand Advisory Board which engages in a discussion framed by a set of research questions that are intended to uncover significant trends and challenges and to identify a broad field of potential technologies for the report.

The process by which the Advisory Board arrives at consensus about the final six topics presented in the Horizon Report is detailed in the methodology section of the project wiki.

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Blackboard 9.1 Upgrade Plan

Posted by Niki Fardouly on November 4th, 2010 · Announcements, Bb staff announcements, bbstaff, staffannouncements, TELT news

The UNSW Blackboard Learn server will be upgraded to Release 9.1, Service Pack 2 on Thursday 18th November 2010. To find out how it will affect you please read the attached documents.

Upgrade plan for Blackboard 9.1

Whats New in Bb 9.1

Bb 9.1 Course Roll-Over

Using mobile learning devices for class polling and live marking

Posted by belindaallen on November 1st, 2010 · Connections & collaboration, Events, Learning & teaching, UNFED

UNFED notes 27.10.10

John Paul Posada from Engineering showed some of the things they’ve been doing with iPod touch in classrooms:

Live polling using Polleverywhere – this app runs from the web, so no software needs to be installed. It is free to use for small classes, and costs $700/year for large classes. Responders can use any internet or SMS enabled device. By asking users to input an identifier (eg student id) the responses can be tracked, and a widget is available for feeding the data to Powerpoint so poll results can be included in class presentations.

Issues of equity re use of mobile devices came up – Engineering has purchased 100 iPods, but have sometimes asked students to use their own devices. The cost of these is coming down, and there is very wide student ownership.

An alternative to Polleverywhere is Polldaddy – unfortunately this app does not yet allow input from multiple concurrent devices.

Engineering is also developing an iPod Touch Marking app (iUNSW Rubric?). This has been used to replace paper-based review processes in competitive marking scenarios in Mech Eng for Thesis Presenters, and for HDR Poster presentations faculty wide. The results feed directly to a server and can be extracted as a text file. In future it is hoped that results could be published from the server to the internet. Contact John Paul if you’d like more information.

The news on the upcoming Blackboard upgrade was mixed – the upgrade will be happening, probably the week beginning November 15, depending on results from user-testing that has identified some server configuration issues. The upgrade has some welcome improvement in functionality – including a more useful Learning module format, and much better Content collection integration, however some issues that have been identified by UNSW users as problematic have not yet been addressed – eg timed quiz and group management issues. Niki will be informing users via Faculty contacts of any final decision on the timing of the upgrade.

Time for only a brief chat about current reading. Belinda recommended The Art of Changing the Brain by James Zull, who uses ideas from Biochemistry and Neuroscience to explain why experiential learning is intrinsic to how our brain functions, and how learning happens neurologically. Related readings mentioned are Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains), Norman Doidge (The Brain that Changes Itself) and Janet Zadina, who speaks on Brain Research and Instruction and has published a workbook called “Six Weeks to a Brain-Compatible Classroom”.

Last meeting for 2010 will be Wednesday November 24. Don’t forget to add your ideas to the UNFED wiki, and please let your interested colleagues know about UNFED – contact Belinda for information.

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