A good week for the assesment team at UH

Four members of the team; Jon Altree, Julie Vuolo, Janet Weber and Francesca Entwistle attended the JISC Learning and Teaching Practice Experts Group Meeting in Birmingham. It was great to put names to faces, network and feel part of a motivated team driving forward learning within further and higher education. Sarah Knight welcomed us all to a buoyant and active environment where twitter feeds gave the room a feel of communication both within the room and with the wider e-learning community. Lisa Gray gave us an overview of the projects which enabled us to conceptualise the bigger picture, she was then able to spend some time with us as a new team over lunch, welcoming us to the programme which was much appreciated. We enjoyed the workshops and learning about the Strand B projects; for example; the University of Glamorgan show cased excellent ideas for student engagement in their assessment process, which relates back to our own principles of learning teaching and assessment, this gave us food for thought for the future and initiated discussion within the team around the importance of assessment principals that engage students in assessment, personalised to their own needs.  Our own evaluation project of the Electronic Voting System was commended by the after diner speaker Richard Noss –Director of the TLRP-TEL Programme. A great day and looking forward to an in house Learning and Teaching conference next week and the JISC International Blended Learning conference 13^th -14^th  June.  

'Aha' moments?

Very productive team meeting yesterday, we now have these weekly which provides a good opportunity to share where we are each at with our work and how the project is progressing overall. In addition to planning for Peter's visit next week, we spent a lot of time talking about the University's assessment principles (Mark Russell's ESCAPE principles, developed at UH in a previous JISC project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/curriculumdelivery/escape.aspx) and making sure the newer team members really understand how the thinking behind the principles informs the ITEAM project. A discussion with Lisa Gray at the JISC L&TE meeting earlier this week made us reflect as to whether our interim report had made explicit the importance of these principles in driving the institutional changes around the project. Certainly, the ITEAM project follows on naturally from  the ESCAPE project in relation to taking assessment forward in the organisation. Ongoing attention to the principles are evidenced in a variety of ways for example discussion of assessment principles forms the starting point of the EVS workshops that have been run since the early days of the project. Aha! Not sure we said this 'out loud' in the report.

One of the ideas we were asked to explore at the Experts meeting (which fell out of the interim reports) was whether institutional paperwork lags behind teaching practice. In many cases the answer is probably yes but am pleased to say our assessment principles are firmly embedded into the programme validation process through the validation documentation which requires demonstration of mapping the assessment strategy to the principles (Link for reference here:
http://www.studynet1.herts.ac.uk/ptl/common/aqo.nsf/page/71C8926821248227802573280057A6B9x)
this and the presence of a Learning and Teaching Institute member at every programme validation (a new policy for UH) will further embed good learning and teaching practice across the institution.

On a different note...something else that we discussed yesterday was the idea of High Impact Actions (HIA)in learning and teaching.  HIA is a phrase used in healthcare and refers to interventions that can have a significant impact (consequence) http://www.institute.nhs.uk/building_capability/general/aims/  These actions are targeted at areas of care where the impact maybe multifold. For example, improve a patients nutrition and they will be able to fight infection, be more resistant to skin breakdown, have more energy for recovery etc. In the NHS nurses and midwives were asked to give examples of areas where they felt a big difference could be made relatively easily. The question is can this same idea be used in education to identify relatively simple actions we can all take which will have a signifcant benefit to the students?
Aha! An interesting idea, possible one to come back to...

Good news!

Some good news to share!
Karen and Liz have had an oral paper accepted at the 2012 Edulearn conference 'An Institution-wide project using an electronic voting system for assessment: the story so far.'

Edulearn Conference 2012, Barcelona
http://uv-net.uio.no/wpmu/hedda/2012/01/13/conference-edulearn-2012/

Where we are now

Listened to the recorded webinar on the interim reports synthesis this morning and found it useful to hear what the other project team's thoughts on it were. The discussion points will also help us to think about our priorities for the next 6 month period. As mentioned last entry we had discussed the report earlier this week and it had already prompted us to think about putting some more detail on the evaluation strategy particularly around seeking the learner perspective.

In the meantime, we have an eye on maintaining an ongoing engagement with our stakeholders. A meeting with our Disability Officer this week will keep this moving forward, as will a meeting with the academic student union representative (a meeting in the making).

Next week three of the team (Jon, the project director, Francesca and myself) are off to Birmingham to a JISC meeting where we are also meeting Lisa Grey for the first time (well first time for Francesca and myself). It will be nice to put a face to the name, feels like I have had many new names, places and projects to get used to since joining the iTEAM project.

Karen and Liz have been meeting with all the Schools about their progress with EVS and to ask what kind of support they feel they need at this stage. As a result of these discussions a workshop for 'Getting Started with EVS' will be developed as will one for designing MCQs which many teachers have also asked for.  The team has agreed that wherever possible work will be carried out jointly with Schools to ensure shared owenership and to capture local experiences and expertise.

Finally, a meeting about the Dashboard pilot with some of the interested schools and our own QMP training both planned for May will see us moving into the next phase of work which is good timing as the new team start to bed-in. It will also be a good time for Peter, our critical friend, to meet the whole team. His next visit is planned for early May, a welcome opportunity for us to share where we are and to get some objective and expert comment on our progress and plans.

Looking forward to our team meeting on Wednesday, first time for whole team around the table, big agenda!

Julie

Just read this (About Eric Kandel's contribution to our understanding of memory and learning) http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Kandel and it struck me as linking directly to our ideas about using EVS to build knowledge accumatively across a module/programme.

Here's a snippet:
'Now that we have strong physiological, cellular and molecular evidence for the difference between short and long term memory, we can apply technology to enhancing learning through spaced practice. At a very basic level, recording all lectures for repeated access to the content by students is just one of many changes one could implement in education. Improving attention, feedback and reinforcement to improve the move from short to long term memory by avoiding cognitive overload, with better elaboration and deeper processing is surely what technology promises to deliver'.

Seeing the bigger picture

Following on from previous entry (13th April), have had some discussions with Jon and Francesca  about 'The Twitter' (as a non-teaching colleague referred to it in conversation the other day), need to talk with rest of the team but certainly a view emerging that whilst the blog can serve the project well daily tweeting may be less useful at this stage. What Twitter can do is put ideas 'out there', initiate conversations (sometimes with the most surprising and useful people) and signpost to the blog. So perhaps a shift in emphasis rather than change of direction. We'll see what the rest of the team think.

Has been good this week to spend time discussing the interim reports which each of the 4 project teams produced against the JISC template and which JISC have now synthesised into one document bringing together the key findings, points of discussion and challenges to date. The report has prompted us to think about the evaluative stage of the project in some more detail. Our evaluation strategy as outlined at the project commencement was fairly report focussed but we can explore opportunties to add a bit more  'depth and colour' to the data (we got talking about Professor Gilly Salmon's work and rich pictures for example, see below). We could also do more to seek the student perspective/input at the evaluation stage.

Rich pictures were a new one for me. Certainly, good to be open minded about different ways of sharing evaluation data. We will put some more thought to this and 'The Twitter' issue amongst other things next week in preparation for Peter's visit (our critical friend) on the 2nd May.

Tweet, Tweeting, Twittering?

Been thinking about the daily tweets, which Mark Russell set up. I think Twitter could play a role in keeping the project visible and in showing our (hopefully) forward momentum; it also provides a constant checkpoint to the Tweeterer(?) to be thinking about the project, its goals and ambitions. From the project manager's point of view this last in particular could be very useful. Twitter constantly surprises me with the people I make  links with and the things I learn about the world I work in and the interests that drive me. The downside may be that when momentum slows (as is perhaps inevitable at times of intense on the ground activity like the EVS workshops) it becomes hard to know what to Tweet that will remain of value to the project and those interested parties we are trying to communicate with 'out there'.

Another issue is that my own Twitter identity is already established and the ITEAM project will likely appeal to a difference audience to the one I (in a limited way) already have. For this reason it may be better to set up a special ITEAM account so that I and the rest of the team can all Tweet on it and so that the project identity is kept 'crisp' and 'uncluttered'.

Some things for discussion with the rest of the team next week :)