innovation

Announcing the IGNITE! Grant Winners!

Successful projects funded through the IGNITE scheme are now underway. We had over 20 project applications put to the committee and after much deliberation projects were chosen for their innovation, scalability and alignment to the School’s Education Strategy. Here are the winners:

Enhancing Your Moodle 

  • Jennifer Jackson-Preece, European Institute
    • (Re)designing  Moodle courses EU450, EU457 and Eu458 to maximise their pedagogical aims and deliver with a more distinct look and feel with clear links to Mahara for professional skills development.

Online Blended Learning

  • Lourdes Hernandez-Martin, Language Centre
    • A multilingual platform of audio and audio-visual materials to develop students’ interactive aural skills and increase their language exposure.
  • Nancy Holman, Geography and Environment
    • Developing professional skills the use of Participatory Action Research to deliver a practice-based learning project which provides engagement, consultation and Research in Urban Geography and Planning, especially when partnering with organisations such as a local authority.
Innovation, by Boegh on Flickr

Innovation, by Boegh on Flickr (CC)

 Feedback and Assessment with Technology 

  • Edgar Whitley, Management
    • Developing a scalable feedback system that integrates with Moodle and works effectively for the three constituencies affected by feedback: students, faculty and professional service staff.

Gamification 

  • Jose Javier Olivas and Jessica Templeton, LSE100
    • Experiencing the Dynamics and Limitations of Market and Regulation through Gaming by incorporating game design mechanics and techniques aimed at encouraging knowledge, skills development, collaboration and discussions in reference to the academic literature.
  • Andrea Pia, Anthropology
    • The Long Day of Young Peng is a point and click serious game exploring key themes in the study of contemporary China through the eyes of a young Chinese Migrant.

Edtech: The student view on educational technology

Given the limited amount of innovative tools used in their studies, it is hard for students to actually know how technology could better their education.

Having reviewed all the interviews from our Student Voice project, we created a video highlighting a few of our key findings.

As the video suggests, a majority of students stated that PowerPoints are the main “technology” used in the classroom. Many added that, given the limited amount of innovative tools used in their studies, it was hard for them to actually know how technology could better their education.

That being said, students believed that technology – if used correctly – could challenge the current “one to many [educative] system”. The expression “one-to-many” refers to lectures where teachers talk and students listen, often giving the impression of a unidirectional information flow. Students stated that technology could be implemented to make lectures and classes more interactive, to foster teacher-students and student-student collaboration.

The video also suggests that students expect an increase in online pedagogical content. This includes more online courses and online exercises but also online exams. Students suggested that, to prepare them for the use of technology in their future career, more tasks should be carried out on line.

All findings are currently being written up and the full report will be available shortly!

The previous post can be found here

Learning Technology Ideas Exchange

Cultivating Innovation

Click to sign up to the Learning Technology Idea Exchange

“Learning Technology Ideas Exchange” is an opportunity to get inspired, meet colleagues, exchange ideas and discover ways to improve teaching and learning with technology!

Run as informal café-style presentations, LSE colleagues will share insight into technologies used for teaching and learning and explain the educational rationale behind their work. You will have the opportunity to ask questions and discuss.

Posters from various LTI projects will be on display during lunch, which will be provided by LTI. Learning Technologists will be available to answer any questions throughout the event.

There will be a further opportunity to ask questions in a plenary before we wrap-up.

Sign up to the event via the training system (please note this is an event for LSE Staff only)

TimeProgramme Themes and presenters 
11.00 -11.10WelcomeTea and coffee provided
11.10 - 12.10Café 1Table 1 - e-assessment
* Sara Geneletti (Statistics)
* Elisabeth Grieger (Mathematics)
Table 2 - General Innovation
* Francesco Panizza, (Government)
* Kay Inckle (Sociology)
12.10 - 12.20LTI Update
12.20 - 13.00Lunch (provided)
13.00 - 14.00Café 2Table 1 - Students as Producers
* Jennifer Jackson-Preece (European Institute)
*Catherine Xiang (Language Centre)
Table 2 - e-assessment
* Edgar Whitley (Management)
* Lourdes Hernandez-Martin (Language Centre)
14.00 – 14.30PlenaryGroup discussion and questions
WhenMonday 23rd May
Time11am -3pm
LocationLower Ground of Parish Hall (PAR.LG.03)

Summer of Student Innovation 2016

SOSI-2016 (120x240 Vertical Banner) v1-final (girl)The Summer of Student Innovation (SoSI) project, run by Jisc, is a competition encouraging innovative education technology ideas from students. The initiative focuses on engaging with students to improve creative design, research, entrepreneurial and project management skills.

This year Jisc are running two competitions, a summary of both is below.

Student Ideas competition:

Jisc are seeking ideas for using technology that could improve research, learning or student life and have the potential for wide use across higher and further education.

Your idea might be a small tweak to how things work or a big solution for a whole college, university or other learning provider – but you will be required to show that it could have benefits beyond your own context.

The successful teams each gain an initial £2,000 plus mentoring through a design sprint, and a further £3,000 if we select their idea to be developed as a product.

Supporting tech startup projects:

The supporting technology startup projects competition is for small teams who would like to pilot their existing product within colleges, universities or skills providers.

A £20,000 startup grants will enable five successful teams to turn their working beta into a functioning product. Your product should be at least a working beta; we don’t expect that you will have an existing customer base but some evidence of pilots with learners would be beneficial.

Closing Date for submissions:

The deadline for submission of ideas is just under a month away on 23 May, 23:30h.

Further information on both competitions, how your students can submit their ideas and links to promotional material you can use are included on the Jisc website:

 

 

April 27th, 2016|Ed-Tech news and issues, Events & Workshops (LTI), innovation, Student projects, Tools & Technologies, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Summer of Student Innovation 2016|

Students’ Expectations for the Future of Technology in Education

Last term, Learning Technology and Innovation (LTI) started a project involving three days of interviewing all over campus. We asked 100 students questions designed to gather their insight about what teaching, learning and technology could look like at LSE in 2020. The three-minute interviews, whether filmed or just audio recorded, have helped us start a conversation from the grassroots up about the future of innovation and education at the school.

We are currently reviewing the hours of footage gathered to create a short video and a report relaying the students’ voices about the future of technology in education. In the meantime, we have designed the following teaser to give you some insight into the project. This teaser is a compilation of the answers given to a single question: if you could describe, in one word, what you would expect from technology in the future what would it be?

I would like to end this post by thanking all the students that accepted to be interviewed, your feedback is tremendously helpful. Stay tuned for more updates and videos!

SADL and Statistics: an interview with Professor Pauline Barrieu

Dr Jane Secker, Programme Manager for SADL caught up with Professor Pauline Barrieu, Deputy Head of Department in Statistics at LSE. Statistics students have always made up an important part of the student ambassador cohort and this year seven of the nine Senior Ambassadors, providing support for the programme, were from this department. Jane was interested to know why digital literacy might be so important to Statistics students, what this programme might also be offering the group and the impact it might have had on the department more widely.

Jane: Why do you think Statistics students are so engaged with SADL?

PaulineBarrieu

Professor Pauline Barrieu

Pauline: I think there are some clear reasons why the programme appeals to our students, many of whom are actually taking the Actuarial Science programme or the Business Mathematics and Statistics (BMS) programme. Understanding data and information is a fundamental part of statistics. Being about to manipulate data, to work with data is a really important skill, so I think digital literacy is something that our students also recognize as an important part of their curriculum. I also think our undergraduate students are very focused young people. They know what they want to do at 18 and they recognize the importance of issues such as data confidentiality. They know this is going to be very important in their future careers so I think they see the benefit of this programme.

Jane: Do you think your students from the Actuarial Science programme are different from other undergraduates at LSE then?

Pauline: This programme has fewer optional courses, the students are very focused, they have a clear idea of what they would like to do as a career, which I personally find very impressive for people of that age! During our ASC review last year, Paul Kelly mentioned how mature and articulated our students were – they seem to be very focused and know what they want.

Coming back to SADL, I think the flatter structure of the progamme, how they are taught as your peers also appeals to them as it’s different to what they experience in our classes. Some of the experiences they have, for example, acting as a Senior Ambassador and providing peer support to others helps to develop their confidence. It’s also great to give students experience of giving presentations and attending conferences with the SADL staff.

Jane: Do you think SADL has had a wider impact on your department?

Pauline: I know many of our lecturers are very keen to be more innovative in their teaching. Statistics do a lot of general courses open to students across LSE who need to learn about statistical analysis. Almost every social scientist needs to understand some form of stats, so we do a lot of teaching of students from a qualitative background where maths and stats is quite alien or difficult for them. It’s really important to try and engage those students and find creative ways of teaching them. One of our lecturers, Sara Geneletti recently applied for a Learning Technology grant from LTI to look to improve assessment on her course. Our in-coming Deputy Head of Department, Irini Moustaki is also very interested in innovations in teaching and working more closely with LTI to use technology effectively. And of course we have James Abdey in Statistics who has won a number of prizes for his teaching and was highlighted as an Innovator in your recent series. This is not an exhaustive list of people and innovation is something really important to lecturers in my department as a way of engaging students with the subject.

Jane: What more could LTI do to help support your department?

Pauline: I think every department across LSE is doing some fantastic things in terms of their teaching. However we don’t always know about these innovations so I think it’s important that LTI share these experiences across the school. One of the biggest problems that gets in the way of this is how busy we all are with so many emails, meetings, reviews, teaching and research. We need some really short guides to give us ideas of what others are doing. Your Innovators series looks great for doing this, to give us ideas for our own teaching in a short digestible form, ideally I would like a version I can read off line too though.

Jane: Is there anything else you can tell me about SADL, digital literacy or learning technologies?

Pauline: I’m interested in why you just focus on undergraduates? I think masters students also need to develop these skills, although of course they spend less time at LSE, so the peer support aspect would work less well. But I think PhD students in quantitative subjects need more help and support around digital literacy. I know the Library offer a course on how to do a literature review, but it would be great to focus a course for our students who publish their thesis by papers, so have quite a different experience. In addition some of our PhD students are sponsored by a private company so there are differences in issues such as ownership of the data in the thesis. We have a standard agreement with the sponsors, but it’s quite different to other departments.

Jane: That’s a really interesting point, and we do try to offer workshops and support for PhD students in LTI with colleagues in the library. But it sounds like we could do more?

Pauline: I also think it’s really important to teach PhD students about this because many of them work as Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), so teach our undergraduates. In Statistics we have developed a dedicated training for our GTAs, so we will certainly make sure they know about SADL, so they can encourage students to get involved in the programme. Overall, I’m really pleased with this programme, which I think is of great benefit to our undergraduate students, and I am proud so many of them have got involved in SADL.

Jane: It’s been great talking to you Pauline, good luck next year when you take over as Head of Department and I’d just like to thank your department and your wonderful students, who have been an inspiration to me and the SADL teaching team.

Original post taken from the SADL blog

April 21st, 2016|Digital Literacy, innovation, LSE Innovator, LTI Grants, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on SADL and Statistics: an interview with Professor Pauline Barrieu|

SADL Celebration: ending term on a digital high

SADL SeniorsLast week saw the official end of the SADL Programme for 2015/16 and students and staff got together in the Studio in the Saw Swee Hock to report on their group projects, be presented with their certificates and prizes for the best blog posts and generally let their hair down before the end of term.

The evening started with each of the three groups discussing the research project they had been working on together since Michaelmas Term. Each group was supervised by three of our Senior Ambassadors and the projects included:

  • how to improve learning spaces at LSE
  • how to improve assessment and feedback and
  • how to improve peer support.

The groups were given complete freedom in how they wanted to interpret the question and how to present their findings, however they were supported by the Seniors. The first group led by Djelila, Simran and Vikki were tackling the question of how to improve learning spaces at LSE. This is a really important question and the group highlighted some of the issues with the current learning spaces at LSE and how they felt they could be improved.

The next presentation was from Eugene, Katie and Chandra were investigating how to improve assessment and feedback at LSE. Again lots of issues were raised and the students had carried out a survey to gather the opinions from their peers about how improvements could be made.

Finally we heard from the group led by Geteesh, Chantel and Melissa who explored how peer support might be improved. The group talked about what peer support is and had lots of suggestions for how technology and face to face contact can build a peer network.

Rebecca, Djelila and Ella Throughout SADL we encouraged students to blog about their experiences rewarding them with Amazon vouchers for their blog posts. We also had a prize for the best blog post over the course of the year and two runners up. We were looking for a reflective piece of writing, that emphasised digital literacy and shared ideas with others. The blog posts were judged by Valerie Brese who was a SADL student last year, Sierra Williams from LSE’s Impact Blog and Heather Dawson from the Library.

We are delighted to announce the winner was Ella Sun for her blog post on OneNote or Evernote. The two runners up were Rebecca Quinn for her post on referencing, no longer a pain in academia and Djelila Delior who wrote about how SADL got me hired, who is also one of our Senior Ambassadors.

Congratulations to all the SADL students this year. They will all receive a statement on their PDAM record for their contribution to the programme and be eligible to apply to be a Senior Ambassador next year to help shape the programme.

Blog post written by Jane Secker (Digital Literacy and Copyright Advisor) and is taken from the SADL blog

Technology in Teaching and Learning: Newest Projects from LSE Staff

Games, revision podcasts and electronic feedback are the main themes of the latest projects funded by an LTI Grant. You can find more information about our funding schemes and other projects in our dedicated pages.

Strand 1: Innovation in Teaching and Learning

InteractivityGustav Meibauer and Andreas Aagaard Nohr, Department of International Relations – Development of PowerPoint-Based Simulation Games for Use in Undergraduate Teaching

“This project will design and implement three PowerPoint-based interactive simulations for use in introductory undergraduate classes. Currently available solutions are targeted at course-long activities, at a high cost of time and preparation effort for both teachers and students. Instead, this project explicitly aims at providing a low-cost, easily accessible and class-long interactive experience to students to encourage theoretical linkage with own in-class experience in such issue areas as foreign policy, diplomacy, or great power dynamics. “

Kay Inckle, Department of Sociology – The Game of ResearchGamification

“The Game of Research is designed for social science students undertaking a final-year qualitative primary research dissertation. In stage one it is a board game similar to Snakes and Ladders but adapted with additional features to make it research-focused and dependent on skill and discernment rather than luck. Through the game students learn the six essential components for a successful qualitative research project: research question, design/proposal, ethical approval, methods/fieldwork, analysis, writing and referencing. The second stage of the game mimics the board game, but takes place in a virtual platform using students’ actual research projects.”

ПечатьOlga Sobolev, Language Centre – Language Immersion in a Self-Study Mode: Revision e-Course

“A new self-study revision e-course, promoting students’ proficiency in spoken and aural Russian through autonomous learning […]  This is very much a student-centred initiative:

  • The course is geared specifically to the syllabus covered in the Russian Language and Society Course throughout the year.
  • It will offer a valuable alternative to teaching contact hours that are not available to students throughout the Easter break, to back up and enhance their revision/preparation for the exams in the ST.”

machine-writingTobias Pester, Department of International History – Sustainable Autorship with Academic Markdown

“I am proposing to develop, document, and teach a Workshop for Sustainable Authorship for students of the LSE that familiarizes and equips them with the writing environment of Academic Markdown. […] One, it provides the automatic generation of references and bibliographies. Two, it relies on the single most sustainable file format since the invention of computers: human-readable plain text. Three, it is platform independent: the most basic text editor available on any operating system will do. Four, it does not rely on proprietary software.”

Read Tobias’ post on his experience with Academic Markdown

DigitalArchiveSusan Scott, Department of Management – Using Digital Innovation to Curate a Living History of Uber and Uberisation

“This project will explore the usefulness of establishing and curating an open access digital ‘living’ archive to support problem-based learning about contemporary topics in global business management particularly (but not only) reconfiguring business models and service innovation. With help from LTI we will create an open access archive populated with a selection of material to date about the American international transportation network company Uber and the phenomenon known as “Uberization” ”

Strand 2: e-Assessment

Edgar Whitley, Department of Management – Using Mahara: Blogging, Peer Review and PeerReview
Feedback

“The aim of the project is to assess the suitability of the Mahara platform as a means of student assessment, feedback and peer review for courses within the School.”

Strand 3: Students as Producers 

Filming2Jennifer Jackson-Preece, European Institute – Narrating the Death (and Life?) of Multiculturalism

“EU 458 Identity, Community & the ‘Problem’ of Minorities ends with a student debate on the ‘Death of Multiculturalism’. Instead of group presentations, the initiative would ask students to work in small groups (3-4) over a 2-3 week period to produce a short (5 minute) film narrating their take on this theme. The films would be screened in LT week 11, and a general debate / discussion would follow on from them.”

February 22nd, 2016|Announcements, Assessment, Ed-Tech news and issues, innovation, LTI Grant Winners, LTI Grants, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Technology in Teaching and Learning: Newest Projects from LSE Staff|

‘Capturing the Student Voice’

For the last two weeks, Helen, Maik (our cameraman) and I have been interviewing students all over campus. We asked 70 students a couple of questions designed to gather their insight about what teaching, learning and technology could look like at LSE in 2020. The three-minute interviews, whether filmed or just audio recorded, will help us start a conversation from the grassroots up about the future of innovation and education at the school.Student Voice

We aim to create, out of the many hours of footage we gathered, a short film relaying the students’ insight about the future of education at LSE. The video will also be accompanied by a report summarizing all the quotes and opinions we collected during our interviews. Our findings – both film and report – will be circulated internally to the heads of the different professional services.

I would like to end this post by thanking all the students that accepted to be interviewed, your feedback is and will be tremendously helpful! We are planning on carrying 30 extra interviews next week so if you or anyone you know wants to share their insight about the future of LSE, get in touch at: lti.support@lse.ac.uk

– Laurent

Collaborative Long-distance Online Course: Reflections

Tony Spanakos

Tony Spanakos

Francisco Panizza

Francisco Panizza

Last Michaelmas Term, Dr Francisco Panizza from LSE’s Department of Government and Tony Spanakos, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University (US) co-taught a synchronous online course on BRICS  open to LSE and MSU students. The project was funded by an LTI Grant. Below are their reflections on the project.

The project

Francisco Panizza: There are many courses running at LSE each term, but this Michaelmas Term I was able to co-teach a course with a difference, alongside Professor Anthony Spanakos from Montclair State University in New Jersey. The course on the politics and policies of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) brought together around 30 students from both universities in a ‘virtual classroom’. The LSE students, second and third year undergraduates from the departments of Government and International Relations, were all volunteers. Whilst they didn’t gain any credits for joining the course, it was a really interesting experience and I think everyone who took part learned a lot.

Tony Spanakos: This was the third time a faculty member from the Political Science and Law department at MSU conducted what we call an eDiplomacy course. These courses use technology to allow to faculty members to lead a virtual classroom composed of students from two schools in different countries. […]

The goal of the eDiplomacy class is not simply to make students aware of other perspectives but to interact and to realize the challenges and opportunities that diplomacy presents. The students selected which of the five countries they wanted to ‘join’ and then each delegation selected officers (head of state/government, finance minister, defence minister, foreign affairs minister). Prior to our last meeting, each country and each office (defence ministers, finance ministers, etc) submitted documents representing their goals, interests, and concerns, and the entire class submitted a single Summit document. In class, they presented the achievements to the ‘Western Powers,’ Dr. Panizza, me, and Professor Jack Baldwin-LeClair, my department chair whose expertise in international law added richness to our discussion (and who was fundamental in getting the course off the ground on the MSU end).

LSE-virtual-classroom

Challenges

FP: Although we now live in a ‘global village’ and there are many commonalities between the US and British university systems, there were practical differences that needed to be ironed out. For instance, the US academic year runs on semesters and classes at Montclair State University started four weeks earlier than at LSE. As a result, the US students gained and extra holiday during LSE reading week and in exchange our students got a day off on the Friday after Thanksgiving Thursday, a de facto holiday in America.

On the technical side there were also challenges to overcome. The LSE does not currently have a dedicated classroom with the communications equipment we required for the course. This meant carrying the equipment from the Learning Teaching and Innovation (LTI) office in Aldwych to our classroom in Lincoln’s Inn Fields each week to set it up, with the help of two highly professional LTI Learning Technologists. Another lesson we learned was that all technology is only as good as its weakest link. The LTI grant funding enabled the course organiser to buy a high quality camera, but without professional lighting or high tech projectors images of both classrooms weren’t as clear as we would’ve liked and it was sometimes difficult to identify and listen to students sat at the back of the classroom (students seem to gravitate towards the back of any classroom, virtual or not)

TP: Although this was the third time a faculty member in the MSU Department of Political Science and Law taught such a course, it was my first time and there was quite a bit of learning to do. The greatest challenge that, I believe, we faced was getting our technology to enable our classrooms to be truly discussion spaces. Ironically, because we had a room with multiple microphones and speakers and a state of the art videoconferencing system, it was difficult to conduct a proper discussion between the two classrooms. Whenever Dr. Panizza or his students spoke, we needed to mute our microphones, and vice versa. This made back and forth discussion more difficult and forced us to speak for longer periods at a time and to collect a number of questions from each classroom before allowing someone on the other side of the pond to respond.

Another challenge was in establishing effective discussion boards outside of the classroom. Given the difference of time-zones and schedules, getting synchronous discussions was not likely. We thought that the students would be better identifying the app which would be most conducive for group discussions (between members of the same country, students with the same office) but we did not coordinate this enough and only found effective discussions once we required students to use canvas discussion pages that we set up.

Achievements and Potential

TS: The idea is to diversify and deepen the learning experience by allowing students the opportunity to hear and engage with multiple perspectives on a common theme. The course allowed us and our students a chance to discuss politics in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa in a far more diverse context than would have been possible otherwise. The participation of guest scholars from our and other universities, in the US, UK, Brazil, and South Africa further contributed to that experience.

After the summit, my students submitted written reflections on the summit which demonstrated a genuine awareness of the challenges, opportunities, work, and pleasure of diplomatic work.

Our students were very generous in giving feedback and helping us see where we could have improved the course and encouraging us by showing where the course was most effective. On balance, responses from our students, and us, were very positive and we look forward to being able to repeat the experimental course. We know diplomacy is not easy but is very necessary. We also know that it is on-going and we hope that we get a chance to repeat and improve on the 2015 MSU-LSE BRICS seminar.

FP: In spite of the inevitable teething problems, there were many, many, positives. Guest lectures from other universities were able to join the course. One of them was Professor Lucius Botes, from the University of the Free State in South Africa, which meant that our virtual classroom extended across three different continents and three different time zones. Perhaps the peak of the course was the last week, when students ran a ‘BRICS summit’, in which they assumed the representation of the different countries and drafted documents on foreign affairs, the economy, defence and a joint BRICS declaration. If only they ran the real summit, the world would be a better place.

Ultimately, I think we only scratched the surface of a teaching experience full of possibilities. Imagine being able to run a course together with the best specialists in the world, in a virtual classroom with images of HD quality! There is undoubtedly a need to develop new teaching methods and forms of student participation that take full advantage of new communication technologies. There are several new buildings being constructed at the LSE, and hopefully these should include state of the art technology and teaching spaces that will make ‘virtual classrooms’ a permanent fixture in University teaching.

Francisco’s comments were originally posted in his blog post on the Department of Government’s website

February 8th, 2016|innovation, LTI Grant Winners, LTI Grants, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Collaborative Long-distance Online Course: Reflections|