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Call for Applications: LTI Grants – SPARK! & IGNITE!

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS!  Do you have a great project in mind to enhance your students’ learning with technology? Then why not get funding with one of our grants!

Learning Technology and Innovation (LTI) is currently accepting applications for projects that will take place in the academic year 2019/20 through its SPARK! & IGNITE! grants’ scheme, with an aim to support digital pedagogies and innovative uses of technology for the benefit of students’ learning.

There are two types of grants: SPARK!, which offers funding up to £3,000 for small-scale projects and IGNITE!, which offers funding up to £10,000 for large-scale projects (with the potential to have a substantial and lasting impact on teaching, learning and assessment at programme level). These grants are open to all academic staff at the School, as well as to programme or course teams (or whole departments).

 

The DEADLINE for applications is Friday 8 March 2019 (however we do encourage academics to discuss their project ideas and submit a draft application before the deadline). For more information, visit our website: http://lti.lse.ac.uk/lti-grants/.

Do you want some inspiration for your future project idea? Check the SPARK! or IGNITE! winners of previous years on our website.

 

January 15th, 2019|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Call for Applications: LTI Grants – SPARK! & IGNITE!|

We have moved!

Our new offices are in 20 Kingsway – fourth floor, room KSW4.01 and KSW4.02.

As well as physcially moving we have moved departments from IMT to APD and will be working closely with our colleagues in the Teaching and Learning Centre.

Our email address is staying the same so if you have any queries please contact us via lti.support@lse.ac.uk

August 8th, 2018|Announcements, Teaching & Learning, Uncategorized|Comments Off on We have moved!|

Going digital

Geraldine Foley, Assistant Learning Technologist and Athina Chatzigavriil, Senior Learning Technologist share their thoughts on Learning from Digital Examinations – 26th April 2018 conference.

Learning from Digital Examinations, a one day conference organized by Brunel University brought together practitioners form different universities across the country and from abroad. It was a great opportunity to share best practices, lessons learnt and provided detailed examples of the complexities involved with digital examinations as well as some of the potential benefits.

Students are used to typing their work electronically and the majority have their own devices, yet when it comes to exams at LSE and elsewhere in the UK the standard expectation is to hand-write responses for final examinations. This is due to multiple reasons including; infrastructure, regulations, spaces and facilities. However, some universities have started to shift to electronic examinations and so we went along to find out more and to present on the pilot projects we have done here at LSE (more details below).

Brunel University commenced research of digital examinations in 2015. They used WISEflow, a platform provided by the Danish based company UNIWise. They used students’ own devices Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and implemented 1 exam (115 students) in 2016. Following a successful proof of concept with this one exam they moved to a pilot with 1300 students in 2016/17. Since then the university moved to a staged implementation of the assessment platform in September 2017. WISEflow was the highlight platform for digital examinations but also Electronic Management of Assessment (EMA) of the conference.

There were quite a few institutions at the conference that have already moved wholesale to typed examinations while others are still starting out. Moreover there seems to be a greater interest among institutions to move towards EMA approaches to assessment and not only typed instead of handwritten examination. Line Palle Andersen described how staff at University College Copenhagen, Denmark use WISEflow to support flows of other forms of assessment (such as oral, MCQs etc.) and how their staff are involved in marking and feedback provision taking advantage of the extensive feedback features available.

The full conference programme and the presentation slides can be viewed online but some general themes and questions over the day are discussed here.

  • Bring your own device (BYOD)

    Space and facilities tend to be limited in HE so the majority of institutions appear to be adopting the BYOD approach. In Norway and Denmark where the move to typed exams was a nation-wide project it is mandatory for all students to have a device for their studies. UK universities using the BYOD approach provide support for those that do not have their own devices such as loans and grants with a small number of devices for those that experience problems on the day of exams.

  • Student training and support are essential… and students can help!

    Students need chances to test out and get used to any new system or approach. Unsurprisingly those students that didn’t go to support sessions tended to be the ones that needed more support. Brunel University employed students as assistant learning technologists to run drop in support sessions leading up to the examinations so students could install and test out the software on their devices and they also worked with invigilators to offer technical support during the exams. This model has been used successfully in Demark and Norway too. Dr Liz Masterman from the University of Oxford presented on the literature review that looked at studies from 2000 onwards on typed exams to assess the equivalence on the psychological and academic aspects of moving from handwritten to typed examinations. The various studies surveyed yielded inconsistent results; nevertheless, the findings prompt a number of questions for consideration when moving essay-based examinations to typed ones.

  • Change requires strong project management

    Assessment processes involve multiple stakeholders and facilitators; professional support staff, admin staff, estates, IT, academic staff, students, and invigilators all need to be involved, informed and on-board in order to move successfully to digital assessment. Learning technology and Educational development staff have a critical role in working with academics to ensure that they engage with the process and don’t just replicate existing practice. Moving online should present an opportunity to design assessment that is in-line with the course learning outcomes, with clear links between the formative and summative assessments and is balanced across the course.

  • Electronic assessment may lead to more inclusive assessment

    Dr Torben K Jensen on his keynote talking about the reason for which universities should digitise examinations raised the ‘generation argument’ in terms of fairness; handwritten exams are far from students’ every day activities. Making spell checkers, screen readers, remote assessment and other assistive technology available to everyone can reduce the need for individual adjustments. More work is needed to find out the impact of moving to electronic assessment, but Brunel University reported that they received no appeals with regards to moving to electronic exams. As mentioned above changing assessment can provide an opportunity to rethink assessment and even move away from examinations. Many institutions demonstrated digital assessment in various forms, including oral presentations, video submissions, multiple choice questions, simulations and group projects.

  • Feedback can be electronic too!

    Feedback on work in HE has been similarly slow to move to electronic form and yet handwritten comments are often hard to read and slow to produce and distribute compared to typed comments. Many institutions moving to electronic assessments are shifting the entire process online. Professor Denise Whitelock from the Open University presented the final keynote on the various ways that technology can be used to train and support teachers to give useful and supportive feedback. She has been involved in creating several automated feedback tools for students and highlighted the importance feedback can have on students’ learning.

Pilot e-exams at LSE

Our presentation focused on three past LSE pilots that took place in order to:

  • Explore students’ perceptions of typing versus handwriting exams.
  • Test out online examination software
  • Evaluate the requirements for online examinations including: security, regulations, facilities, training and support.

All three pilots were for formative assignments which provided feedback for final examinations. In each case various software were compared and the departments made the final selection for the platforms used in-line with their individual requirements.

Two of the pilots were in the Law department for take home mock examinations using the software Examsoft which allowed students to access examination questions and type 1 essay response from a choice of 3 within 2 hours.  Students were given 5 working days to access the questions and it was up to them to find a suitable space to type their response (see full report here).

The third pilot was with the Government department for a mock on campus invigilated examination using the software Exam4 (see full report here). Students brought their own devices to type 4 essays questions (from a choice of 16) within 3 hours. Exam questions were given in hard copy format with extra information provided to invigilators. In both cases students were given opportunities to test out the software in advance.  Both pilots were evaluated with questionnaires and focus groups with students and feedback from staff.

Overall students welcomed the typed examinations and many appreciated producing a typed script which was more legible for examiners to read some students, but some had concerns about the expectations of examiners who might assume typed answers required better quality answers even though they were produced under exam conditions. Several students found editing their examination answers was easier when typing, but others felt penalized by their slow typing skills. Some students believed the cognitive process of typing an exam answer differed to handwriting one and that grammar and spelling errors were less easy to spot when typing. The identified institutional implications for scaling up typed examinations, include substantial overhaul of the regulations, provision in case students cannot use their own device and adequate student support and training.  The full evaluation reports of the pilots can be found on LSE Research online.

Next steps

The conference gave lots of detailed examples of the complexities involved with digital assessment as well as some of the potential benefits. Going forward at LSE, the Assessment Service Change Project (ASCP), led by Cheryl Edwardes, Deputy Head of Student Services, is collaborating with staff and students to design enhanced assessment processes and systems which incorporate best practice and expert knowledge from across the School community and wider HE sector. If you wish to learn more and/or share your views you can sign up to attend any of the Validation Workshops. Moreover, the Assessment Working Group, led by Dr Claire Gordon, Head of Teaching and Learning Centre are taking forward work on the following areas: i) assessment principles, ii) good practice in assessment design, iii) inclusive practice in assessment, and iv) quality assurance and regulatory arrangements in assessment. Also, the Law department are currently trialing a small-scale proof of concept exam using DigiExam with ipads and keyboards – providing devices for students.

LTI is involved in all the above initiatives and support courses and programmes in the use of electronic assessment and are working with several departments to move their processes online.  Please contact LTI.Support@lse.ac.uk if you would like to discuss this further with us.

Lecture Recording – How did we do?

Most of you will be aware that the Lecture Recording service went through some major changes this year. We moved from an on-premises installation to one hosted in the cloud, re-wrote our integration with the timetable to make scheduling more accurate, and introduced more rigorous governance procedures to ensure your rights were respected.

 

So amidst all this change how did we do?

Before we get into the stats, lets just make a few things clear – these numbers describe teaching classified as ‘Lectures’ in our timetable, and do not include seminars, workshops or classes. Some sessions that were classified as “seminars” were recorded, but these are excluded from the stats below.

Now, lets begin. At the start of the year, we set ourselves a target of successfully recording 99.5% of lectures, which is about 20% higher than last year. We managed to achieve 99.4%. Although 0.1% lower than our target, we are very pleased with this. Such a high success rate would not have been possible without IMT AV’s involvement and the help from student Media Assistants that worked for us; editing recordings to improve audio quality, and uploading slides when they were not successfully captured, and reporting issues so they could be rectified in time for the next teaching day. A big thank you to all of them.

Although we managed to record 99.4% of lectures that we were asked to record, it doesn’t paint the whole picture. We still seem to have a problem with the number of courses that opt in for lecture recording. Unfortunately, this percentage stayed the same as last year – 42% of 1309 timetabled courses.

This highlights our focus for the next academic year – we’ve achieved a great success rating but lets see if we can get more courses to record! Even though the LSE, currently, only has 43 lecture recording capable rooms (LRCRs) – these rooms are nowhere near capacity. The LSE had 13170 timetabled lectures in 17/18 of which 11612 were in LRCRs and just over 60% (~7222 lectures) were recorded. This indicates that even without expanding the service to more rooms, there is room for improvement.

I don’t want this post to come across as negative but rather as motivational, a bit of tough love, if you will. We managed to record over 740,430 minutes of lectures this year but we know this can be higher by around 40% – Shall we see if we can hit the 1,000,000 minutes mark next year?

Let’s get more courses opting in and lets help our students do the best they can.

May 21st, 2018|Lecture recording, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Lecture Recording – How did we do?|

Playful and Creative Learning in HE

Next Tuesday LTI will be hosting a presentation by Chrissi Nerantzi (Principal Lecturer in Academic CPD, expert in creative, innovative learning, teaching and assessment from Manchester Metropolitan University) on Playful and Creative Learning. A good opportunity to reflect on what playfulness and creativity mean in an educational context and explore ways in which we can promote it in our practice.

Definition: What is playful learning?

 In a blog post by JISC titled Learning to play, playing to learn: the rise of playful learning in higher education, Chrissi gives an explanation of what playful leraning means to her:

“Playful learning is using play activities to immerse ourselves and learn, either on our own or with others in a space we feel safe.  In playful learning it’s ok to make mistakes when experimenting with new ideas, when challenging ourselves and others and doing things we normally wouldn’t do – which can lead us to surprising discoveries.

Playful learning can happen anywhere.”

Play and Its Connection to Creativity

The “Creativity for Learning in Higher Education” open course, based on the Manchester Metropolitan University’s PgCert and MA in Higher Education in which Chrissi is involved, offers colleagues with an interest in creative teaching and learning to explore three areas that foster more creativity in their practice and their students’ learning experience. One of which is play and games.

As Resnick (2017) puts it,

“Creativity doesn’t come from laughter and fun: It comes from experimenting, taking risks, and testing the boundaries.”

When it comes to experimenting, games are a very powerful learning tool. Games are by definition a space where the rule of the real world do not apply, thus providing a safe space to take risks and experiment with various choices, strategies and outcomes.

Moseley and Whitton (2015) define games as“a safe space in which participants have freedom to make mistakes, learn from failure, play with fantasy and identity, have control over decisions and outcomes”

Interested in finding out more?

Check out Chrissi’s various projects around playful and creative learning:

At LSE

References

Resnick, M. (2017). Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passions, Peers, and Play. MIT Press.

Moseley, A. and Whitton, N. (2015). Using Games to Enhance the Student Experience. Higher Education Academy

January 30th, 2018|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI), games, innovation, LTI Grants, Teaching & Learning, TEL Trends, Tools & Technologies, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Playful and Creative Learning in HE|

Active lectures

So as per last week’s blog post, recording your lectures is beneficial to students and should not negatively impact on lecture attendance but what will help increase lecture attendance?

Between MT 2015 and LT 2017, academic developers from the Teaching and Learning Centre co-convened and reported on a series of focus groups with students in 8 departments across the School to learn more about students’ experiences. These focus groups found that LSE students value:

Lectures that are inspiring and motivating

‘…I’m listening to him and he’s showing his enthusiasm for the topic and his research, and I’m sitting there thinking this is stimulating me and I want to know more about this’.


Lectures that are well structured

‘A good lecture is structured and I see the structure from the start.’


Lectures in which students understanding is checked

‘every lecturer that I have, they just talk at you, and there is no chance to make sure that you know what you need to know, or that you understand stuff.’

‘…  Because sometimes a lecturer is in flow and you don’t want to just disrupt it … But when he just pauses and asks ‘This is good time now to ask your question’ – I think that’s very valuable.’

‘…  something he does that I really like is that when he’s concluding a bit of material he’s trying to get through, he does say ‘Do you have any questions on this?’ and nearly every time there isn’t anything, but you know it gives me an opportunity to think ‘Actually have I understood that properly?’ and ‘This would be an appropriate time.’  


Lectures that are interactive and not too long

‘You go there and you sit: it’s a very passive process. I think lectures need to be more active. Not in the sense of asking questions but in the sense of doing … I’m fed up with being talked to for hours.’

Rethinking the lecture  

As many institutions shift towards opt out lecture recording (see post from last week) there also appears to be a move away from the standard model of lecturing and a move towards an active blended learning approach.


Technology can often help facilitate this for example:

This interactive model will present some issues that institutions need to consider including:

  • Gaining consent from students to be recorded or ways to edit or stop and start recordings easily.
  • Rethinking learning spaces

LTI have been working with Estates, AV and TLC to renovate learning spaces and have been working on various projects to evaluate the type of learning spaces (furniture, technology and layout) best suited for collaborative or flexible teaching approaches.  We have also been working with estates to create signage to inform staff and students that recording is taking place and will be working with AV to investigate more agile recording systems that allow lecturers to stop and start recording in the room.

If you would like some advice and support on how to use technology in your teaching contact LTI.  Calls are currently open for LTI grant projects including those that have themes of innovative use of space and transforming your teaching with technology.  See the LTI website for more information.

References

Armellini, A (2018, Jan 11) ‘The large lecture theatre is dead’

retrieved from https://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/the-large-lecture-theatre-is-dead-11-jan-2018

Bates, S.P., Howie, K. & Murphy, A. St J. (2006) The use of electronic voting systems in large group lectures: challenges and opportunities. New Directions 2 (Dec) 1-8.

Cornish, A (2017, August 3) ‘Vermont Medical School Says Goodbye To Lectures’ 

retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/03/541411275/vermont-medical-school-says-goodbye-to-lectures

Huxham, M. (2005) Learning in lectures: do ‘interactive windows’ help? Active Learning in Higher Education 6 (1) 17-31.

Revell, A. & Wainwright, E (2009) What makes lectures ‘unmissable’? Insights into teaching excellence and active learning.
Journal of Geography in Higher Education 33 (2) 209-223.

Roger, K., Ney, S & Liote, L. (2016) Teaching spaces design and development at LSE: an evaluation of impact on teaching and learning. London: The London School of Economics and Political Science.

 

Impact and student use of lecture recording

Lecture recording is becoming more established in Higher Education with 71% of institutions reporting using it in 2016 (UCISA, 2016) and many moving towards an opt out system.

At LSE an increasing number of courses are using lecture recording to support students.  In 2016/17, 6445 lectures were recorded (a 12.7% rise in recordings from 2015/6) and with over 5000 recordings already completed this academic year we are on track to record an additional 25% more content for 2017/18.

Despite the expansion in the use of lecture recording there is still a concern amongst some academic staff that recording lectures will lead to a decrease in lecture attendance.  These Academics should be relieved to hear about the results of a recent study at the University of Aberdeen by Emily Nordmann, Colin Calder, Paul Bishop, Amy Irwin and Darren Comber, published in January 2018 the team found “no evidence for a negative effect of recording use, or that attendance and recording use were related”.   The study spanned four years of an Undergraduate programme in order to review the impact of attendance, lecture recording and student attainment.  They concluded that lecture recordings were the most beneficial for first year undergraduates, particularly non native speakers.  Weaker students gained from supplementary use of recordings but only the stronger students were able to use the recordings to overcome the impact of low attendance.  These differences were not present in the second year onwards as “attendance and recording use were positively correlated with, but no longer predictive of, achievement”.

Students’ use of lecture capture
These findings have been reinforced by recent analysis of LSE lecture recording statistics and interviews and surveys with LSE students for five core first year undergraduate courses.

The study carried out by student research assistants for LTI found that:

  • the majority of students watch the whole lecture once and then repeat and re-watch at points of difficulty with the number of views for this purpose being significantly higher for quantitative subjects
  • Very few students used lecture recordings as a replacement for attendance, preferring to use it as a revision tool or where they had valid reasons to miss the lecture (such as a clash). This complementary role for lecture recording came through very strongly in the quantitative data;

This [lecture recording] is still far more useful than merely having the lecture to depend on – I’ve literally watched certain parts of a lecture 6-8 times just to make sure I absolutely understand the content of the lecture. I usually watch each lecture at least twice as well”.

(Comment from EC102 student, EC102, is the most watched course in the School, with students watching each lecture on average seven times over the academic year.  The most watched lecture was Week 11 of EC210 which was watched just over 5000 times.)

This use of lecture recordings to supplement lecture attendance is not restricted to the Social Sciences.  In 2013 Peter Reed conducted a survey on lecture recording with 840 students at the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at the University of Liverpool.  He found 92% of respondents wanted to be able to access recordings to clarify aspects they didn’t understand in class, and 87% would use them to prepare for summative assessment. Accessing recordings instead of going to lectures was of interest to only a small proportion of students (7%).

Additionaly an LTI literature review in 2013 illustrated that students in most studies preferred access to live lectures, with most preferring a blended format incorporating lecture recordings, live lectures, course materials and additional classes.


Lecture recording at LSE

At LSE the Echo360 lecture recording system is currently installed in 43 rooms.  Teachers that are timetabled to lecture in a room with recording devices installed are able to schedule lecture recording on LSEForYou, if the teacher opts in the recordings are automatically recorded and can be made available to students on Moodle using the Echo360 Activity.

The recording displays the audio and video of the screen/visualiser in classrooms and the projector and presenter in larger lecture theatres.  See the LTI website for a list of room with lecture capture devices.


Next steps for lecture recording at LSE

LTI are working with AV and IMT to improve the quality of lecture recordings and are currently working on creating various resources to help lecturers to use lecture recording facilities.

IMT AV recently upgraded the hardware in Clements House lecture rooms in order to improve audio and video quality.  There are further development plans for lecture recording capable rooms starting with 32LIF which is due for an upgrade over the easter break.  Longer term the new LSE buildings should increase the capacity for lecture recording.

LTI are also working with various teams around the school such as timetables and LFY to solve the inability to automatically schedule seminars that are taught in a lecture style. We are hopeful to have this resolved for the next Michaelmas term.

Alongside making constant improvements to the system we are also looking to innovate lecture recording and encourage lecturers to think about how they could use recordings in different ways inclusing using personal capture to produce online resources to support face to face activities.  Part two of this post will look at how technology can be used to rethink your lectures and make them more engaging and interactive.

If you are interested in using lecture recording see our website for guides and FAQ’s and if you have any queries please email: IMT.Lecturerecording@lse.ac.uk

 

References

Bond, Steve and Grussendorf, Sonja (2013), Staff Attitudes to Lecture Capture. The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

Grummett, D and Appleby-Donald, E (2016, June 1) ‘Does lecture capture enhance learning?’

retrieved from University of Edinburgh http://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/?p=526

Karnad, Arun (2013) Student use of recorded lectures: a report reviewing recent research, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

Kuepper-Tetzel, C (2017, December 07) ‘Lecture attendance, lecture recordings and student performance; A complex, but noteworthy relationship’  [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2017/12/07-1

Nanfeldt, K (2017, September 7) ‘Lecture Recording: What does research say about its effect on attendance?’ [Blog post]. Retrieved from Teaching matters-blog, University of Edinburgh http://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/?p=1972

Nordmann, E., Calder, C., Bishop, P., Irwin, A., & Comber, D. (2017, November 10) ‘Turn up, tune in, don‘t drop out: The relationship between lecture attendance, use of lecture recordings, and achievement at different levels of study.’ Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/fd3yj

Rana, Y (2017) ‘All Edinburgh lectures to be recorded from September 2017’ (blog post) retrieved from https://thetab.com/uk/Edinburgh/2016/10/03/lectures-recorded-September-2017-26019

Reed, P ‘What do students want out of lecture capture?’ 2013, November 15) (blog post) retrieved from http://thereeddiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/what-do-students-want-out-of-lecture.html

Rios-Amaya, J.. Secker, J. and Morrison, C. (2016) Lecture recording in higher education: risky business or evolving open practice LSE / University of Kent.

Von Konsky, B.R., Ivins, J. and Gribble, S.J. (2009) Lecture attendance and web based lecture technologies: A comparison of student perceptions and usage patterns Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2009, 25(4), 581-595.

An evaluation of LSE’s new informal learning spaces

In the 2016-2017 academic year, staff at LTI undertook an evaluation of the use of new LSE informal learning spaces. The findings and lessons learnt can be found in our final report. Here are the highlights.

Background

As part of a School-wide objective to provide students with more informal learning spaces across campus, “forgotten” spaces were redeveloped and opened for the 2016-17 academic year. Staff at LTI led the design of 6 spaces – one at each landing of Clement House’s back stairwell- along with Estates, the Teaching and Learning Centre and AV services.

While each space was designed to fulfil a specific function, such as collaborative work or quiet study, they were also intended to be flexible so that students could own and shape them.

This work was also an opportunity for LTI to experiment with new configurations and technology to apply a variety of modular spaces for LSE’s future buildings. LTI’s report investigates the effective use made by students of the six spaces, and whether they match the design intentions. It also provided a context to understand how they fit into the overall experience of students with informal learning spaces at the School.

Click the picture for a description of the spaces

Findings

In spite of the fact that the effective use of the spaces did not always match the original design intentions, the spaces were welcomed by both students and staff and saw high levels of occupancy.

As far as use is concerned, students seemed to favour individual use of the spaces, even on those floors fitted with collaborative furniture. This was found to align with the most common approach to teaching and learning adopted at the School and also reflected in assessment, namely quiet study and individual working. It would be interesting to reassess the use of those and similar spaces once other modes of teaching and assessment are adopted as a result of the School-wide initiative to diversify assessment from next year.

With regards to the spaces themselves. students appreciated the calm and relaxed feel to the spaces and the range of equipment available to them.  Areas for improvement include noise levels (especially between classes) and a lack of work space (such as tables or chairs).

Report

More information about the spaces, findings and our analysis can be found in the full report: An Evaluation of Clement House Informal Learning Spaces.

LTI is currently working on the redevelopment of other informal spaces, as well as three rooms in various areas of the campus (more details to follow soon)

Findings from this evaluation and our previous new teaching spaces evaluation will inform the design of these spaces and the future ones.

We would love to hear your feedback, please use the comments below or email LTI to share your thoughts!

June 29th, 2017|Announcements, Ed-Tech news and issues, innovation, Learning Spaces, Projects, Reports & Papers, Teaching & Learning, TEL Trends, Uncategorized|Comments Off on An evaluation of LSE’s new informal learning spaces|

LTI’s Funding Opportunities: Results and New Call

Find out about the SPARK projects that were funded for the 2016-17 academic year and read about our new call for our large-scale IGNITE scheme, now open!

IGNITE funding call now open!

IGNITE! is one of LTI’s strand of funding offering support to large-scale, technology-informed initiatives at course or programme level.

Now in its second year, the 2017-18 call will focus on supporting applications that seek to engage with innovative approaches to assessment and feedback using technology.

Find out more about the scheme and how to apply on our funding web pages.

SPARK: the results are in!

This academic year 6 projects were awarded a SPARK! grant, LTI’s seed funding scheme that supports innovative teaching and learning projects.

Projects include students produced learning material and research, an initiative to improve assessment and feedback and data visualisation training.

 

Visit our dedicated pages for more information on each project. You will also find last year’s winners along with evaluation and other shared outcomes for those completed.

June 5th, 2017|Announcements, LTI Grant Winners, LTI Grants, Projects, Reports & Papers, Teaching & Learning, Uncategorized|Comments Off on LTI’s Funding Opportunities: Results and New Call|

Blogging as a Method of Assessment

The past couple of years an increasing number of LSE academics started integrating blogging in their courses. This took various forms, from using the blog feature on Moodle as an added activity to creating individual blogs for students as part of a course summative assessment. One thing that all these projects shared is the rationale for using blogs in an educational context: encouraging student engagement, making learning more student-centred and diversifying assessment with the view to making it more relevant to the course and developing students’ transferable skills.

A good example of such initiative is Anthropology’s Dr Walker AN300 student blogs project. Dr Walker applied for a SPARK Grant last year in order to support his project to “develop the use of student blogs as one component of the summative assessment for AN300 Advanced Theory of Social Anthropology”.

Below is a summary of the project and its outcomes, with quotes form Dr Walker’s application and project report, whose full version can be found on his project page.

What was done

AN300 is an intensive reading course focusing on full-length books rather than journal articles. There are three ‘cycles’ per term, each devoted to a different book […] Each student was required to produce his/her own blog. […]Students were expected to make one post each week for the first two weeks of each book cycle (12 posts for the course overall). Every third week was dedicated to commenting on the posts of others. The final mark consisted of the average of each student’s best eight posts.[…]The posts were assessed weekly by a GTA who was also in charge of providing feedback.

Students also attended a session on writing for blog run by LTI at the beginning of their course.

Rationale

Developing students’ academic and life skills

The aim of this project was to encourage students to develop their own original ideas and critical responses to key texts in social anthropology, as well as to cultivate their capacity to respond thoughtfully and diplomatically to the ideas of others. Making regular blog entries was also meant to encourage students to keep abreast of the required readings for each week, partly in order to positively impact the overall quality of class discussions. The project was also intended to cultivate students’ digital literacy, providing them with training in an increasingly widespread form of disseminating information.

Diversifying assessment

[The course format] is sometimes described as an advanced reading group. This makes it ill suited to exams as a mode of assessment. The blogs, by contrast, allowed students to develop their own ideas about the books they were reading as they went along.

Students appreciated the opportunity the blogs provided […] to work in a medium other than an essay or exam.

Evaluation

In general, the trial can be considered a success. […] The posts that resulted were often highly original and creative. Students appreciated the opportunity the blogs provided to be more experimental with their ideas and arguments, and less formal in their writing. […] Having to write a post prior to class gave students an opportunity to critically reflect on the readings, and to bring to the class ideas they had developed in their blogs

Lessons learnt

Clarity was identified as a key area for improvement in the project, as its absence seems to have caused some frustration among students. The main aspects that were identified as critical were clear guidance and expectations, grading criteria and feedback on the blog posts.

It is also worth noting that it was the first year blogs were tried in the department. The fact that students were not (yet) familiar with this type of activity made it even more important to provide them with extra guidance.

Outcomes

You can find a detailed evaluation report on the project’s dedicated web pages. The report includes guidance given to students at the start of term along with marking criteria, and examples of student posts and comments.

If you are interested in using blogging as a teaching tool, check out our and TLC’s resources or get in touch to discuss your ideas.

This project was funded by LTI’s SPARK Grant. More info on similar teaching innovation projects and how to apply on our website.