from the blog of Niall Sclater, Director of Learning Innovation at the Open University.

An interesting (and amusingly tongue-in-cheek) insight into how developments at the OU are being promoted to students: includes use of iPad and mobile apps, Google Apps etc.

Thanks to Ian Gardner http://twitter.com/#!/iangardnergb for drawing this to my attention.

PP3 will be released around Spring/Summer 2012 for us (with any luck) – so a little way off yet.

However, PebblePad themselves now like to call it ‘A personal learning system’ – because it’s much more than a portfolio tool. PebblePad 3 builds on this mantra with the slogan ‘The personal learning system’ instead of ‘not just an eportfolio’. Also they are probably going to lose the term webfolio and simply use ‘Portfolio’.

PP3 the interface has been brought upto date with a much slicker more professional look, but still has lots of customisability such as changing the background image etc.

It still runs in Flash but Shane said there is also going to be a HTML simplified version with almost as much functionality. It will require Flash player 10.2 which will give many advantages on video handling etc etc. I have no problem with Flash apart from you can’t right-click on links to documents and choose ‘save as’.

PP say PP3 is going to be extremely accessible and accessibility is their priority and PP3 will work with most screen readers.

The asset store which I think is quite limited on information at the moment has a major revamp allowing ordering by date created or date modified, assets can be categorised (by me, for me…), an archive folder for archiving assets, and collections of assets (collected by tag). It also will allow accounts to be linked together so assets can be listed from more than one PebblePad account at a time eg. If you had a University account and a Reflect account.

Shane asked if folders would be useful, most agreed (after a while) that tags  do the same job but better and the collection tool will give folder type functionality. It will also be easier and quicker to tag asset in the new asset store.

The forms and profiles builders will be replaced by a single Flash Template Builder (not HTML anymore) which allows forms to be created quicker and easier by dragging in form fields from a toolbar.  Formating of text can be done using a pop-up inbuilt simple Flash WYSIWYG formatter.

The Gateway has been revamped to add much more flexibility of grading with a grade management system to store second marker grade, and different types of grades will be supported etc. the Gateway looks much more user-friendly broken down into about, resources, published, blog, etc. Rather than lots of Gateways there will be just a top-level of gateway i.e. for each faculty which will then be broken into sections.

The new Dashboard which, will be on the homepage, looks really good. It brings all the parts together with a calendar, links to twitter and other blog feeds, course reading lists and other resources, latest assets created/modified etc etc., links to the gateways.

Shane said they would prefer everyone to be hosted by PebblePad (i.e. software as a service in The Cloud) this will allow a better PebblePad experience, supposedly, as they will have a media server for video streaming etc. He also mentioned ‘PebbleWorld‘ which will allow sharing of assets easily between institutions and eventually to employers.

All in all, to me it all looks very good for the long-term with some very good ideas building an already good idea. Once you understand what you can do with PebblePad and have the time to benefit from it, it has some excellent tools for reflection, learning, PDP, development etc etc and it can be seen that these tools have really have been thought about. PP3 I hope will make it easier to understand what  you can do with it.

http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_01/

HEFCE established the Task Force in mid-2009, with the  remit of addressing  “how UK higher education (HE) might maintain and extend its position as a world leader in online learning. It was also invited to consider international opportunities, ways to encourage flexibility in UK provision, online pedagogy, how  to support institutions to take full advantage of rapidly developing technology and rich sources of content, and to ensure quality provision to meet rapidly changing student demands”.

This report,  published in late January 2011, presents the conclusions reached, notably that

“online learning – however blended with on- or off-campus interactions, whether delivered in the UK or overseas – provides real opportunity for UK  institutions to develop responsive, engaging and interactive provision which, if offered at scale, can deliver quality and cost-effectiveness and meet student demands for flexible learning”.

These conclusions have become even more pertinent in the present financial climate , and with the proposed changes in HE funding.

Collaboration is seen as key to success – collaboration between HE institutions, between  universities and the private  sector, and within institutions, between academics and learning technologists. Collaboration could include the cooperative development and sharing of learning resources, or at an administrative level – for instance Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE), where several institutions share a single VLE, although distinctly branded for the learners at each partner institution.

The report foresees a growth in online learning, including courses delivered fully online (online  distance learning), but also as a component of blended programmes with a more traditional attendance pattern. It cites the case of BPP – now BPP University College, the UK’s first private for-profit University – where the same online materials are available to all students, regardless of whether they are learning at a distance or attending lectures on campus.

Summary of recommendations

What follows is a slightly précis-ed and paraphrased version of the report’s recommendations…

1  Technology needs to enhance student choice and meet or exceed learners’ expectations

• Online programmes need to be of a comparable quality and standard to other programmes.
• Students need greater support to ensure their study and academic literacy skills are fit for the digital age.
• Information about online programmes is lacking and often difficult to find, both for distance courses and for the online learning elements in blended programmes. This has a significant impact on student choice, domestically and internationally.

2 Investment is needed to facilitate the development and building of consortia to achieve scale and brand in online learning

• Quality online learning is not a cheap option.
• Through collaboration, institutions can achieve significant economies of scale and more rapid development and adoption of technologies, for example in the development of learning resources or in sharing the risk of developing new forms of provision.
• The report calls for collaboration between HE institutions, but also across the public-private sector divide. It also calls for government funding to promote effective collaboration.

3 More and better market intelligence about international demand and competition is required

• The sector needs to work together to collect and share market intelligence and, in particular, make better use of what  is already produced… . Providers around the world are embracing, developing and embedding online learning, and may well attract students away from UK institutions, so there is clearly an imperative to improve the situation. Institutions in the UK may well be competing with each other for students, but they all share a responsibility for promoting UK HE as high quality, responsive and globally competitive.

4 Institutions need to take a strategic approach to realign structures and processes in order to embed online learning

• The need to address student expectations and remain competitive should help drive developments in online learning and ensure its development and use are aligned with institutional mission. Institutions and organisations need to invest in learning, and leadership and vision at the highest level is required to bring a step-change. .. Online learning is a strategic  issue, not a simple, bolt-on option. Institutions need to ensure staff understand the range of challenges and opportunities provided by online learning, and ensure what they do is cost-effective and high quality. A strategic approach across the whole institution will enable staff to overcome barriers to adoption.

5 Training and development should be realigned to enable the academic community to play a leading role in online learning

• Staff may be willing to engage with technology to meet the expectations of students, or require encouragement and training to so do, but in both cases they need support to be effective. There needs to be a stronger understanding of the potential of web-enabled learning and the use of social media, greater prioritisation of teaching partnerships between technologists, learning support specialists and academics, and an end to the ‘not invented here’ syndrome.
• Mixed teams working together on the pedagogic and technological elements of online learning enable institutions to offer innovative, up-to–date, high-quality provision.
• Good practice must also be shared.

6 Investment is needed for the development and exploitation of open educational resources to enhance efficiency and quality

• There is no point duplicating effort to create content that is already available and has been proven to work.

Like the publication itself, the workshop focused on the nature of effective assessment, then looking at the role of digital technologies in supporting and improving assessment practices. There’s not a hint of trying to shoehorn technology into the assessment process, and in this digital age few could argue with this statement from the Introduction

“It is proposed that technology, if used appropriately, can add value to any of the activities associated with assessment: from establishing a culture of good practice to the processes involved in submission, marking and return of assessed assignments; from the delivery of assessment to the generation of feedback by practitioners or peers.”

All of this is very timely, as a TVU e-assessment working group has just been set up to look at how technology is currently used in the University’s assessment processes, and to recommend ways in which the use of technology can be successfully extended.

One exercise at the workshop involved thinking about what you would do if you wanted your students to fail. Identifying what not to do – e.g. set unrealistic criteria, provide insufficient or unclear information on what the assessment will involve, fail to provide constructive feedback – proved to be a useful way of defining what one should do. In fact principles of good assessment have been articulated by the REAP project – see www.reap.ac.uk/reap/resourcesPrinciples.html – and are included in the JISC publication. These stress the importance of effective formative feedback.

The E-Reflect software, developed as part of the Making Assessment Count at the University of Westminster, aims to make learners reflect on their assessment, and provide them with constructive feedback based on their reflections. Although mechanistic (the software provides a standard passage of text depending on the learner’s choices – themselves drawn from a limited range of options) the response from students has been largely positive. And as open source software, the system lends itself to being made more sophisticated – this would depend as much on input from academics as from technologists.

Materials used at the workshop – including video and PowerPoint presentations, and resources such as the “challenge to change” cards which could be used in workshops within the University – can be found here.

After the conference I stayed with some friends, one of whom is an Engineering lecturer at Durham University. As we started discussing Blackboard, it soon became apparent that we were talking at cross-purposes. “We do still have a couple of  rooms with blackboards”, he said, “but mainly we use whiteboards”; as for any software called Blackboard, it meant nothing to him.

Suddenly I realised where I was going wrong: “You probably know it as duo“.
To which the reply was “oh, duo – yes we use it all the time!”

I was impressed that Durham had so successfully re-branded their VLE that users didn’t even realise they were using Blackboard. Here, although we’ve been using the name “TVU Online” for some time, most staff and students still refer to the VLE as “Blackboard”. The University’s own impending name-change provides an opportunity for us to try again – any suggestions for suitably catchy names gratefully accepted!

"Kathedra", Durham

This is my second report on the 11th Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference.  My previous post dealt with the keynote presentations; now I’ll deal with the break-out sessions and workshops.

Two presentations dealt with the use of Blackboard to induct and orientate new students.

First up was Nichola Hayes from the University of Leicester, with Three Steps to Success: Building the Right Foundation – A taster, induction and first module reconfiguration course design for students studying at a distance.

This looked at Leicester’s use of Blackboard to improve the way Distance Learning students are introduced to their programmes – and given an opportunity to check that this way of learning will suit them. The central team has developed a 3 step programme, which is then tailored and deployed by course teams. This approach is being used only on certain courses. There is a checklist which course leaders need to go through to ensure that their course is suitable – e.g. the course involves heavy use of Blackboard / TEL. Also, the approach is only deemed suitable for courses which already have strong course design.

The three steps are

1. Blackboard Taster

This uses an open access Blackboard course introducing potential learners to the technologies / learning methods which will be used on their course. Details are sent out to all applicants for DL courses, at the point of application. Because the course is open to guest users, no login credentials are required (N.B. Leicester still use Blackboard 7? When they move to version 9 they may need to rethink some of the technical details of this, as Blackboard has tightened up on guest access to the system – this is something we discovered when looking at opening out access to study skills courses and communities in Blackboard). At this stage the information provided is fairly general e.g. learners see screenshots of discussion boards rather than actually being able to contribute to forums.

1. Orientation Course

This runs 2 weeks  before  the start of their studies, when students do have a Blackboard login, and takes things further . The idea is to avoid students having to learn how to use the technology later on,  when they should be concentrating on subject content. The orientation course gets them to explore and understand key processes outlined in the Student Handbook (e.g. around assignment submission). This helps the learners, and avoids course administrators having to answer the same questions over and over later on.

The key aim is to make sure students feel they are ready to embark on their chosen programme of study before it starts.

1. Module One

Once their course proper has begun, students complete a centrally-devised long thin module (covering library skills, key skills etc.)

The University is developing a Distance Learning Backpack – a virtual student handbook bringing together everything DL learners need to know through their course, with information from a variety of central departments as well as the Faculty.

Nothing here is rocket science – certainly not in terms of the technologies involved. But the new funding arrangements seem certain to accelerate the provision of distance learning courses across the HE sector, and we would do well at TVU to take note of this model to ensure that distance learners are not disadvantaged in comparison with those with a more traditional attendance pattern.

Of course, it’s not just distance learners who need support in making the transition to higher education. Simon Davis from the University of York presented Delivering transition support through the VLE looking at learner orientation onto full-time taught  courses. York also set up courses inside Blackboard to induct new students. York’s term for the induction sites is “Transition sites”, although some teaching departments refer to them as “Welcome sites”.

The sites have been set up for specific individual courses, and are made available to students once they have been accepted on the course – i.e. before they arrive (N.B. this whole process relies on these students having a University IT account which is at least a partially-enabled)

How are the transition sites created? Course teams use a variety of approaches

1. site creation led by current students
2. created with participation of current students
3. created by academics
4. administrator-led

Who took the greatest role in producing the site did affect the focus of the site’s content, but in almost every case feedback from new students was extremely positive.

Another recurring workshop theme which tied in well with our current interests at TVU was feedback. Guy Pursey & Karsten Lundqvist from the University of Reading are leading DEVELOP, a JISC project one part of which involves the use of video feedback. This is being used for generic, whole class feedback, rather than feedback for individual students. They’ve found that it works best when the academics accept fairly low production values. One department tried to produce professional standard high resolution video, but this was unsustainable (as well as eating up far too much storage space).  In the trial, students overwhelmingly liked video feedback. They thought they were getting more feedback than usual, even though lecturers said they delivered the same amount – students seemed to realise they were getting feedback when delivered as a discrete video, rather than in the classroom.

The project team looked at using a dedicated platform to deliver the videos, but students didn’t want it on a separate system – they wanted it in Blackboard. So Karsten is developing a building block for lecturers to upload their video to the dedicated storage area, but to do this – and make it available to their students – via Blackboard.

Alex Spiers, from Liverpool John Moores University, also looked at video feedback, using tools available as part of the Wimba suite (now Blackboard Collaborate). This is something which we will be following up at TVU.

Mike Cameron, now at Newcastle University, reported on a project he was involved in when at Durham, in collaboration with City University.

The survey showed that the majority of students who responded do have mobile devices and use them to access email/VLE etc. And are keen to be able to use their mobiles to access information/content e.g.  timetables, VLE, feedback/grades. Less keen to use mobile devices  for interactive activities e.g. voting systems. But do they know the benefits of, say mobile voting systems, if they’ve not experienced these in practice?

Some comments from others attending the session:

• small number of respondents – probably most likely to be those who did have / use suitable devices.
• even if 60% of an institution’s students have suitable devices, while it may be worth providing services for those users, these will have to be additional provision – institutions can’t disadvantage those learners who do not own smartphones etc.

Also there seemed to be some confusion in what was being classed as a mobile device – not just smartphones, iPads etc. but possibly netbooks and laptops. This highlighted the need to be very careful when formulating questions for a student survey: we are planning a TEL survey which will include questions on students’ mobile capability, and will have to try to avoid any ambiguity in the questions asked.

A second session from Mike Cameron was entitled Sharing good teaching practice through collaborative, multimedia slide shows. This looked at  a project at Durham which attempted to find a more interesting way (than text-based reports) of presenting case studies of lecturers’ use of TEL. The project used cheap video equipment e.g. flip cameras to record video clips of lecturers talking about and demonstrating what they had done. These videos were then uploaded to http://voicethread.com – and lecturers and students encouraged to add comments. The content on voicethread is visible to anyone, but only registered users can add comments (I’ve noted that 50 user accounts cost approx $100 p.a. – having now looked at the site, this would appear to be the Higher Ed Single Instructor licence).

This conference is all about users’ experiences, so the representatives from Blackboard Inc. are invariably limited to an hour or so on the Friday morning of the conference. The general feeling seemed to be that this was the best (for which read most honest?) presentation from Blackboard for a long time.

Some key points for TVU:  9.1 Service Packs 3 and 4 (released either side of Christmas) address the current Content Collection issues, but we must wait for SP5 for a full fix. This is due late March / early April 2011 – so we can hope to have it tested and deployed by the time lecturers are looking at preparing their Blackboard courses for the 2011-12 academic year. If all works as promised, we can also start to plan and deploy the “Move to Course Files” tool  in a more coordinated and determined way. This tool – which Blackboard currently suggest is not used because of its unreliability – moves all files uploaded to a Blackboard course pre-version 9 into the Course Files area, where they can be much more easily viewed and managed by lecturers. Once this tool is working properly we may well recommend that all course materials should be stored in the relevant course template, rather than being duplicated onto each course instance.

SP6 (due mid-year i.e. June-ish) should include an improved Rubrics feature which will allow instructors to provide feedback to students on each criterion in the marking scheme, and automatically assign grades based on the student’s performance against that criterion – then modify the automatically assigned mark if required. At first sight this looks more sophisticated than what is currently available in Turnitin – although we were looking at a video mock-up of a tool which clearly won’t be finalised for some months, and which – Blackboard would be the first to point out – may not look like this when released. SP6 will also include an upgraded SCORM player, which may not affect many of our courses, but is good news for those which do make use of SCORM-compliant materials, whether produced in-house or sourced from elsewhere.

I was also reminded by this presentation to check out Bboogle –an open source  project to integrate Blackboard with Google Apps. It strikes me that this could be a particularly useful tool if the university should ever decide to go down the Google route for provision of student email and storage space.

Of the exhibitors, I was rather taken by the potential of Kaltura, an open source video-hosting platform, which appears to offer the simplicity of YouTube with the benefits of greater control over who can access your content, and which will  integrate with Blackboard. This is another product to follow up.

For other people’s takes on the Durham Blackboard Conference, see

Matt Cornock, University of York
http://www.mattcornock.co.uk/reports/durham-blackboard-users-conference-2011

Alex Spiers, Liverpool John Moores University
http://alextronic.posterous.com/blackboard-users-conference-in-durham-2011

Julie Usher, University of Northampton
http://notesbyjules.blogspot.com/2011/01/thoughts-on-2011-blackboard-usergroup.html

Julian Beckton, University of Lincoln
http://julian.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/tag/durham-blackboard-users-conference/

CLIPP Board,  Aston University
http://clipp.blogs.aston.ac.uk/tag/durham-bb-conf-2011/

The Kitchen, Teeside University
http://eat.scm.tees.ac.uk/blog/2011/01/11/durham-blackboard-and-non-blackboard-users-conference/

His most recent post, Finding images without breaking copyright, covers Compfight and Creative Commons Search once more, but also the recently-developed Xpert tool from Nottingham University – www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert

This doesn’t just let you locate images which you can legitimately use for educational purposes, but provides a suite of tools to help you incorporate the images in web pages, Powerpoint slides etc. with proper attribution.

Here’s two examples

1) Selecting Get image with attribution (Xerte On-line Toolkits size)

2) Using the embed code

Taken from http://farm5.static.flickr.com/5046/5338030871_860d4b93a3_b.jpg on 2011-1-14
Original URL – http://www.flickr.com/48860201@N02/5338030871/ created on 2011-01-08 14:06:03
Ralph MoorhouseCC BY-NC-SA 2.0

What’s more, you can use Xpert to locate not just images, but audio and video resources as well – it’s a really useful tool.

This was my third visit in four years and the conference lived up to its usual high standards in terms of content, organisation, and the opportunity to network with other Blackboard users.

This year the conference theme was Location, Location, Location – exploring the challenges of location: a barrier, an irrelevance or added value?

full conference programme (PDF)

Here’s the first of two or three reports from the Conference.

The keynote presentation on Thursday 6^th January was from Carl Smith of the Learning Technology Research Institute at London Metropolitan University.

He gave examples of work with which he’s been involved using digital technologies to enhance our understanding of historical and archaeological sites. For instance

• using a mixture of digital models and live action video to recreate historical scenes, to enhance the understanding of visitors to a museum of industrial archaeology.
• creating digital models of ruined mediaeval abbeys such as Rievaulx in order to recreate a 3D digital image of how the building would have looked when complete.

In the latter case he contrasted the digital approach to the traditional approach used by scholars, who might publish detailed 2D images of the components of gothic  architecture in an article or book. 3D digital models allow scholars to reuse and manipulate the information in a variety of ways – focusing on individual components, or  combining components in new ways – thus increasing their understanding of the form.

Whilst looking at high-tech examples of augmented reality, he also looked at much more accessible cases using the location-aware capabilities of modern phones. For example apps which overlay text and multimedia data on Google Maps , so that learners can walk around a site and pick up site-specific information on their portable device, as their location changes. This enables the learner to access information on site which previously they would only have been able to access in the classroom or from a PC.

One of Carl’s current research projects involves him working with a neuroscientist to see how different parts of the brain can be used to control sounds. Given that we already have consumer products like the X-box Kinect where the user controls the game using only their body, can it be too long before the user can control on-screen actions through thought alone?

Friday’s keynote was from John Traxler Professor of Mobile Learning (as the programme noted, probably the world’s first) and Director of the Learning Lab at the University of Wolverhampton.

He looked at the use of mobile devices

• in widening participation in the UK (learners make use of their own familiar devices when entering  the unfamiliar environment of Higher Education); to aid learners in developing countries where mobile phones are widely available but internet-enabled PCs may not be; allowing learners to make use of “dead time” (e.g. at bus stops, on the train) to access short chunks of learning.
• to enable learning “on location” – e.g. field trips (in the past geography students might have to record their observations in the rain using pen and paper then type them up at the end of the day,  now they can enter the data directly on screen as they go along);  work placements (nursing and medical students are an obvious example).
• mashing up geographical location and data provided by the institution or elsewhere e.g. Mobile Oxford or similar services from Ombiel – see http://www.campusm.com/case-studies
• enhancing the visitor experience e.g. in museums (similar to the Google Maps app shown by Carl Smith)

He then considered the use of mobile devices  in the real world and the resultant changes  to how people live their lives

• Ordinary people are able to generate content (e.g. photos taken on phones then uploaded to the web). This content may be re-used by the professional news media, or may challenge the established media and/or authority.
• there are communities in cyberspace (social networks, but also networks of gamers e.g. World of Warcraft devotees) – these may not have a geographical basis but in practice can be considered as locations.Malcolm Murray’s introductory remarks on Thursday had mentioned the ideas of geographer Torsten Hägerstrand mapping location against time (see http://geolabs.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/hagerstrand-timespacecube/ for an example). In the digital age Hägerstrand’s map would need a new axis – location in cyberspace, showing individuals’ digital connections – although this would complicate the map to the extent that it became unusable.
• changes in the division between public and private space
  e.g. use of iPods in public (you can shut yourself off from where you are)
  use of mobiles in public areas (other people can hear your conversation, and are having to develop the ability not to listen – or at least pretend not to)
  individuals making private information available on the web – and effectively losing control over who can access and reuse the information
  using devices (including laptops) in lectures – are they paying attention to the lecture? 

  an aside: if location doesn’t matter any more, why do people still say “I’m on the train”?

• changes in our perception of time
  “slipperiness of time” – previously time would be measured in fairly large chunks, and meetings would have a fixed time. But if you’re in mobile contact, you can make vague plans then firm then up as you get nearer to the event.

Concluding, he said that the car is one of the great icons of 20^th century mobility. But car ownership doesn’t entirely  free the user – need to top up fuel, pay congestion charge, plan route etc.

Same with mobile devices. They can be liberating, but users worry – will there be coverage, will I run out of battery, can I sync my data?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/catching-the-copycat/9567.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/08/bitly-libya

An unexpected potential threat to the bit.ly service commonly used by twitter users to shorten website URLs. Other URL-shortening services are of course available e.g. http://goo.gl