Surveys

CLT Survey 2011

We had 165 responses to our call to take the annual CLT Staff Survey and while we always appreciate the the praise, the gratitude, the pure love, we usually concentrate on the constructive criticism to make sure we improve accordingly! Staff continue to use Moodle and are starting to make it change the ways they teach. That’s a positive result. However, the big lesson we take away from this year’s survey is that need to communicate more effectively with our academic staff and students, especially with regards to who we are and what we do. We revel in the comment that said “you guys are fantastic! Best part of IT at LSE.” The sentiment is great, but CLT aren’t actually part of IT Services, though we work closely with them. CLT support staff in the use of technologies to enhance teaching and learning. We aim to promote the integration and use of technology in teaching through staff development, advice and guidance, research, collaboration and networking. As several more respondents complained about technical hiccups in the past academic year, we realise we must make clear who we are in our next survey. Of course we will pass on these comments to the relevant departments.  What does fall into our remit is Moodle – technical support, training to use it, and advising on best practice. Since one respondent suggested they would like to be able to have blog feeds appear on Moodle, we have great news! Moodle is indeed flexible enough to do this and if you follow this link it tells you how to: http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/RSS_feeds_block! For more help with Moodle or how to use technologies to support your teaching, get in touch with us – clt-support@lse.ac.uk. To find out a bit more about what we do, who we are and which technologies we support and advise on, why not visit our webpages: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/ . We’re here over the summer and the doors are always open, so why don’t you send us an email or just pop in if you have any queries we can help you with.

plasticine models of CLT team on elephant

We are CLT

August 10th, 2011|Surveys|Comments Off on CLT Survey 2011|

Ask the audience – again and again

Asking students (or any audience) questions breaks up the monotony of unidirectional lecturing/ presenting, keeps minds from wandering, turns them into active, reciprocal participants, engages them beyond listening.

At large or online events, which lack the intimacy of small seminars, there are a variety of online tools or classroom technologies that can be used to help enable this.

At LSE we use TurningPoint as our PRS (Personal Response System) or EVS (electronic voting system) – a software/ hardware combination that allows lots of participants (500+) to respond. Questions are created in PowerPoint (the software works as a plugin, and question slides are created as easily as PowerPoint slides), and students vote with little remote controls (officially called “response cards”, but everyone refers to them as clickers.) The LSE100 course uses this system extensively, and students are asked to borrow a clicker for the year from the library to bring to all their LSE100 lectures.

CLT staff survey 2009-10

If you’re a member of LSE staff, a Moodle editor or a GTA we’d be grateful if you could complete a short survey about your experience of our services this year. The survey only takes about 5 minutes to complete and can be found here:

https://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/lsewebsite/cltstaff2010/

Many thanks
CLT

July 1st, 2010|Announcements|Comments Off on CLT staff survey 2009-10|

Our survey says….

….95.7% of LSE students are very satisfied (45.3%) or fairly satisfied (50.4%) with Moodle.

By Brockvicki

By Brockvicki licensed under Creative Commons

The results from our survey carried out in June 2009 are finally revealed. We found in terms of whether they were satisfied with Moodle, there was no significant difference between postgraduates or undergraduates or with students whose first language was English.

Most students used Moodle either weekly (49%) or daily (43%) and 90% were encouraged to use it by their teachers. 84% of students said they would like to see more of their courses on Moodle. As with previous surveys, reading lists with links to full text material were one of the most popular features of Moodle. Many students now submit their assignments online using Moodle, and a growing number have some form of multimedia (recorded lectures or digitised audio /video) in their course.

December 18th, 2009|Announcements|Comments Off on Our survey says….|

Staff Survey – lecture capture

Every year we send out a survey to staff to gauge the effect of various technologies, such as Moodle and it’s many components, online readings and lecture capture on their teaching. This year 138 people completed the survey. I was particularly interested to see the feedback on the automatic lecture capture system and this proved to rouse the strongest comments. We wanted to get a general sense of who was using lecture capture and what they thought about it, but more specifically, we wanted to hear from lecturers who might use it in their teaching.

Breaking down the stats and looking at solely the responses from lecturers (59) it was interesting to see a very distinct divide between those who had used the system and those who had never used it. By looking at the stats in this way it was clear that the majority of lecturers who have doubts or fears about the technology have never used the system and those that value lecture capture and think it is a benefit to students are already using it. There were one or two instances where people had used the automatic system in the past and were put off by technical problems etc.

Whatever the case, it seems that lecture capture is polarising opinion and that a number of fears about the technology are adding to this. One of the biggest fears about lecture capture is that it will affect student attendance and although there’s no evidence to back this, there’s little evidence to quash it either! Perhaps we need to do some focus groups with lecturers who have been using the system for a few years to gauge the feeling about class attendance. However, if some courses find that attendance has gone down and others don’t, what then? And is lecture attendance really an issue if you’re giving students the choice? There is also a fear that lecture capture will replace live lectures altogether and that somehow lecture capture is taking the emphasis away from face to face contact via lectures, seminars and office hours. Lecture capture is designed to be a revision tool, a way to help students recap and further understand a lecture, fill out any missing notes from lectures and to help those for whom English is not their first language. These benefits are what students list when they say they like the system. Lecture capture can be recorded and released for a short period of time, such as revision period, and yet there are still fears about students skipping lectures, declining note taking skills and lethargy from students. So, how do we respond to all of these comments? We’re very much aware that a survey can only give a slice of staff opinion, especially as only 138 people responded. Would it help to have a wider debate about this issue?

August 5th, 2009|Announcements, Images, Audio & Video, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off on Staff Survey – lecture capture|

Symposium at York University: lecture capture, content production & Second Life

York Minster by chez_worldwideJane and I participated in a one day in-house symposium at the University of York this week. The audience were made up of both academic and support staff interested in learning from other universities about lecture capture, audio and video content production and Second Life. We were asked to talk about audio and video content production and so showcased some of the video & audio that’s produced here. We focused on lecture capture momentarily as although it is the most prolific output of media at the LSE, with 909 lectures having been captured in just one term this year, two other universities: Birmingham and Newcastle had already given extensive presentations on this subject. Instead, we wanted to highlight the idea of audio and video as a part of teaching, not just as a means to capture the teaching that’s already going on. We played examples of interviews & discussions, role playing scenes, groupwork, screencasts, video and audio podcasts as well as highlighting some of the Wimba tools and audio feedback. We also talked about the issue of scaling up to meet increased interest in media, professionally produced video vs the DIY approach and touched on the copyright issues involved.

It was an interesting day with good discussions both formally and over coffee/lunch and it was really nice to meet people in similar roles. The most lively debate came from the lecture capture sessions. It seems that across the board, the majority of students really value lecture capture (no real surprises) and staff are cautious about the educational benefits and fears about attendance. There were certainly many parallels between the student and staff surveys at both Birmingham Medical School and Newcastle university and the LSE. Rob Jones’ findings from Birmingham were particularly interesting because they compared the relationship between usage stats and grades. The findings look promising where the mean rose from 51% to 55% and the failure rate dropped to 2/69. The quality of answers also improved with students indicating a greater breadth of knowledge and looking at a wider set of resources.

The Second Life talks in the afternoon reminded me that Second Life is good for simulation and specifically designed educational activities but that perhaps we should be looking at other virtual worlds for better communication, movement, role play etc. Sheila Webber from Sheffield and Steve Warburton from King’s College agreed that Second life is probably not sophisticated enough for a young gaming audience; the average age of SL users is apparently 33. Steve flagged up MetaPlace, OpenSim (open source) and Blue Mars as potential Virtual World’s to explore, so perhaps another pilot project is due. Read Jane’s Social Software, Libraries and E-learning blog for more information on the lecture capture and Second Life presentations.

July 10th, 2009|Conferences, Images, Audio & Video|Comments Off on Symposium at York University: lecture capture, content production & Second Life|

CLT Staff Survey 2008

The CLT staff survey was conducted using Bristol Online Surveys between 30 May and 4 July 2008. There were 86 respondents, recruited from members of the clt-announce mailing list and from the readers of this blog.

Report

The following summary highlights the key results.

  • The vast majority of respondents thought that their course had benefitted from the introduction of a VLE. However, several commented on the high initial workload required to get a course online.
  • Respondents identified the following changes that they had made to their teaching since starting to use a VLE. Some respondents, however, commented that they felt they were not yet making the most of Moodle’s potential.
    • Enabled blog-type comments on course readings
    • Measured students’ extent of use of online resources
    • Used quizzes to monitor student progress
    • Provided online support outside office hours
    • Followed up issues online after seminars
  • There was an overwhelmingly positive view of the e-packs service, with personal commendations for the work of Mei Pang and Jane Secker. There were also, however, some comments that the process was rather time-consuming.
  • All agreed that the Moodle Training run by CLT provided the skills needed to get started developing a Moodle course.
  • More generally, there was almost complete satisfaction with the support and training offered by CLT, with several complimentary comments.
  • Areas that respondents wanted to see CLT cover in future workshops included the following. We shall be reconsidering our training programme in light of these requests:
    • Demonstrations of exemplar courses, to provide inspiration and directions for good practice. This was repeatedly requested.
    • Use of screen capture
    • Use of quizzes
    • Turnitin (plagiarism detection service)
    • Special workshops focussed on particular departments
    • Audio / Podcasting
    • Virtual Worlds (such as Second Life)
    • Techniques to motivate students
  • The question “Would you be willing to have your lectures video- or audio-recorded and made available to students?” produced a 3-way split between “Yes”, “No” and “Maybe”. Amongst the Noes and Maybes, some of the reasons given were as follows:
    • It discourages students from attending lectures. This was the most widely-cited reason.
    • Worries about intellectual property – about how long recordings will be kept, and to whom they will be distributed. This was also a common concern.
    • Discomfort about being recorded
  • Other requests and suggestions included:
    • Requests for an ‘Advanced Moodle’ course. (Note our “Moodle Next Steps” course is now available.)
    • Use of Personal Response Systems

One final comment we particularly liked:

“CLT has done a magnificent job over the past year and there are no suggestions for improvement.”

Given that, and the fact that it’s 6pm on Friday, I’m going home.

August 8th, 2008|Announcements, Reports & Papers|Comments Off on CLT Staff Survey 2008|

CLT staff survey

If you’re a member of LSE staff, we’d be grateful if you could complete a short survey about your experience of our services this year.

The survey only takes about 5 minutes to complete and can be found here:

https://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/lsewebsite/clt2008

May 30th, 2008|Announcements|Comments Off on CLT staff survey|

Survey of UK university/college staff and students

JISC is conducting a review of the role of a national Internet search and training service for UK universities and colleges.

Please help us to ensure that views from the Higher and Further Education community are taken into account by filling in this short online survey:

http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/intute/survey/

PRIZE DRAW: A £50 Amazon Voucher will be awarded each week whilst the survey runs.

DEADLINE is 25th October 2006

October 4th, 2006|Research Skills|Comments Off on Survey of UK university/college staff and students|

WebCT student survey 2006

The results of the 2005/2006 WebCT student survey are now available. The complete report is here, and a summary follows.

A total of 1356 responses were received.

Overall, the results reflect well on the state of WebCT courses at LSE. The student satisfaction level is high, and students say that they feel encouraged to use WebCT, that they think it is well-integrated with the course teaching, that it is a valuable supplement to traditional modes of teaching, and that they would like to see it used on more of their courses.

The WebCT features deemed most useful by students are those that we would consider fairly basic: lecture contents, reading lists, e-packs, and external links. The assignments tool is also well appreciated. However, discussions, which are used by 80% of respondents, are seen as more non-useful than they are useful.

The most requested WebCT feature is “example essays”, and there is also some desire to see the use of TV/Radio programmes, audio/video lectures, quizzes, student presentations and past exam papers.

Only a small proportion of students take advantage of WebCT training. When asked what they think training should include, there are very few concrete suggestions. It is possible that there is a publicity problem with regard to training, but it might well be the case that most students simply do not require training.

Finally, the results also reveal some problems with the survey itself, and certain questions may need to be redesigned for next time.

August 24th, 2006|Announcements|Comments Off on WebCT student survey 2006|