TEL me About… Workshops for 2017-18

Throughout the coming academic year, the TEL team will be delivering a series of lunchtime workshops. These sessions will cover a range of tools and technologies available at the institution for enhancing teaching, learning and assessment. This year we will be running each of the workshops twice, once in each semester. So if you have a spare hour at lunchtime – bring your lunch and join us!

Tracking Student Engagement and Progress

Thursday, 28 September 2017 (13:00 to 14:00) | Monday, 29 January 2018 (13:00 to 14:00)

Moodle offers a variety of options for enhancing student engagement & tracking progress, including Grades, Conditional Activities, Activity Completion, Course Completion, Open Badges, Course Reports, and Progress Bar & Engagement Analytics plugins. This workshop will look at some of the ways these can be implemented in Moodle.

“Access, retention, attainment and progression in and beyond education are all components of student success. Success in each of these areas depends on the extent to which students are engaged, and their belonging is fostered within their programme and wider institution, across the whole student lifecycle.” (HEA, 2016)

The gradebook collects items that have been graded from the various parts of Moodle that are assessed, and allows you to view and change them as well as sort them out into categories and calculate totals in various ways. Conditional Activities enable tutors to restrict the availability of any activity or even a course section according to certain conditions such as dates, grade obtained, or activity completion. Activity Completion allows the tutor to set completion criteria in a specific activity’s settings. A check (tick)  appears against the activity when the student meets this criterion, which might be viewing, receiving a certain score or a student marking it as complete. Course Completion shows if a course has been completed. It can show the progress a student is making towards finishing the course according to specific criteria. Open Badges are a good way of celebrating achievement and showing progress. Moodle contains four standard Course Reports: Logs, Activity Report, Participation Report and Statistics. The Progress Bar is a time-management tool for you and your students. It shows progress in activities/resources and is colour coded. An overview page shows tutors the progress of all students and combined progress. The Engagement Analytics block provides information about student progress against a range of indicators.

Creating Interactive Moodle Content with H5P

Tuesday, 3 October 2017 (12:00 to 13:00) | Monday, 19 February 2018 (13:00 to 14:00)

Learn how to create and add rich content to your Moodle Course using the new H5P plugin (HTML 5 Package). Some examples of what you can create with H5P are interactive videos, quizzes (question sets), timelines and flashcards.

The Interactive Video allows you to add quizzes and in-depth information into a video meaning students get a more engaging video experience. It’s easy to add interactive tasks and no technical skills are required, you only need a browser. By adding extra explanations that students may choose to see in the videos you create differentiated learning. Question Sets are good for evaluating students and self-tests. Tutors can create a sequence of various quiz types such as multiple choice, drag and drop and fill in the blanks. All the question types will allow the student to check their answer, try again or see the solution. Question creators may also add feedback that is displayed depending on what answers the student gave. The Timeline allows you to place a sequence of events in a chronological order. For each event you may add images and texts. You may also include assets from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps and SoundCloud. Flashcards are useful for instance in learning new words and expressions. In language learning, flashcards can be used to display an image and the user is encouraged to type in the corresponding piece of text.

Digital Capability and Employability

Wednesday, 11 October 2017 (13:00 to 14:00) | Thursday, 8 March 2018 (12:00 to 13:00)

Digital Capabilities can be defined as the skills and/or competencies required for living, learning and working in a digital society (Jisc, 2015).

The Jisc Digital Capability Framework provides a structure to help individuals understand what skills are needed and supports the development of staff & students. Following extensive sector-wide consultation, and an evidence-informed approach to development, Jisc have produced an initial model of the framework which describes digital capability as six overlapping elements: ICT Proficiency; Information, Data & Media Literacies; Digital Creation Innovation & Scholarship; Communication, Collaboration & Participation; Digital Learning & Self Development; and Digital Identity & Wellbeing.

“Effective use of digital technology by university and college staff is vital in providing a compelling student experience and in realising a good return on investment in digital technology.” (Jisc, 2015)

Even today’s students need support with some areas of digital capability, particularly in an academic context, so it’s important to make sure that these needs are met. In addition to the general definition provided above, Jisc have also created four example Digital Capability profiles for students, academics, researchers and leaders, and we’ll explore each of these in more detail in this interactive workshop.

SmartEvidence in Mahara

Monday, 16 October 2017 (12:00 to 13:00) | Tuesday, 13 March 2018 (13:00 to 14:00)

SmartEvidence allows you to work with competency frameworks in Mahara and associate them automatically with an evidence map for a visualisation of the competencies already gained, in progress, and not yet started. SmartEvidence can be used for multiple purposes including competency-based assessment, graduate attributes, skills accomplishment and many more.

Audio & Video for Assessment & Feedback and Teaching & Learning

Wednesday, 1 November 2017 (13:00 to 14:00) | Thursday, 19 April 2018 (12:00 to 13:00)

The use of video, audio & multimedia has become a lot more mainstream in HE teaching, learning and assessment in recent times, mainly due to the accessibility and ease of use of equipment and software, but also due to the growing realisation of the pedagogic benefits of video content.

This workshop will introduce you to methods and tools for using video and audio for enhancing teaching, learning and assessment. You will have the opportunity to see some of the tools available at YSJ and hear about how they are being used to create learning materials, provide feedback and improve students’ digital skills by using video and audio assessment methods. Find out about Screencast-o-matic Pro, features of which include: no watermark when publishing, unlimited recording time, publish to MP4, AVI, FLV, YouTube, Drive, Dropbox or Vimeo, editing tools, scripts tool, screenshot tool, webcam only recording, and draw & zoom while recording.

Effective Feedback with Turnitin

Wednesday, 8 November 2017 (13:00 to 14:00) | Monday, 30 April 2018 (12:00 to 13:00)

This workshop will look at methods for providing clear and consistent feedback. Turnitin has released a major product upgrade, the new version of the service, called Turnitin Feedback Studio, offers all the functionalities of Turnitin, but with a simplified, more intuitive interface designed for the modern classroom. We will focus on how the features of Turnitin’s Feedback Studio can be effectively used to facilitate and enhance feedback for students.

Blogging for Teaching, Learning & Assesment and Building an Online Community

Thursday, 30 November 2017 (13:00 to 14:00) | Tuesday, 15 May 2018 (12:00 to 13:00)

WordPress is an online platform that allows you (individually or collaboratively) create websites and blogs. Staff and students have access to WordPress here at York St John University and they are using it to create collaborative class websites, to create placement journals, to disseminate and support research projects and to create online portfolios and journals. Why not come along to this ‘TEL’ Me About session to find out how you can use WordPress in your Teaching and Learning or for your own professional development.

Open Badges and Graduate Attributes

Wednesday, 6 December 2017 (12:00 to 13:00) | Monday, 21 May 2018 (12:00 to 13:00)

The Open Badges Infrastructure is a new online standard to recognise and verify learning. Alongside assessed summative work, degree programmes at York St John offer lots of opportunities for students to develop professional skills that will benefit them once they enter professional life. Open Badges can be used to digitally accredit these skills and students can display their badges on various online platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. This workshop will give an overview of Open Badges and how they work and will feature guest speakers from YSJ who have already implemented Open Badges into their programmes.