Dr Simon Paul Atkinson (PFHEA)
Enhancing Institutional Outcomes
BPP colleague John Irving has taught me a great deal about reflection, self-coaching and self-observation since I joined BPP University College in the summer of 2011. John has a way of looking at educational context which is still alien to me but hugely challenging. I think we all want to work with people who stretch …
Continue reading “Reflective Practice: a non-negotiable requirement for an effective educator”
I’ve been surprised this week to find a sudden increase in my blog visitors. As these peeks happen occasionally I just put this down to some MOOC out there stumbling across my SOLE model and deciding it was worthy of sharing. Always pleasing in itself, but not surprising perhaps. This was a sudden and unexpected …
Continue reading “Reflected Glory: Sugata Mitra’s SOLE Toolkit”
[See Courses on Educational Taxonomies] Updated higher quality versions are now available here Since October 17th 2012 [see updates] when I shared the most recent work on visualising taxonomies in a circular form and aligning these active verb patterns to particular assessment forms, I have had some great feedback – for which thank you. As a consequence, …
Continue reading “Updated: Taxonomy Circles – Visualisations of Educational Domains”
NOTE: updated high-quality visualisations of these taxonomies are available here. I think being able to visualise things is important. Faculty and learning designers need to be able to see Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) take shape, and many find existing lists uninspiring. It’s not uncommon for faculty and instructional designers to grow weary of ILOs; they …
Continue reading “Visualising Outcomes: domains, taxonomies and verbs”
In my last posting I suggested that a module specification could usefully have four sections, clearly articulated, for Intended Learning Outcomes, so that a student could identify from their assessment evidence that they had met specific ILOs in a range of domains. In doing so they not only have a useful platform to identify future …
Continue reading “Learning Design becomes mission critical”
MOOCs, self generated OER based curricula, kite-marking schemes, and elaborate credit transfer schemes are a reality in increasingly complex higher education sector. Students often pursuing studies from within the world of work where physical mobility of employable precludes commitment to a single campus based programme over four years require well defined, constructively aligned, module designs. …
Continue reading “Intended Learning Outcomes matter”
An online discussion forum should be an effective way of engaging students in careful and considered reflection, yet often they represent time-consuming and frustrating experiences for faculty. Getting students to share thoughts and ideas, balancing contributions and knowing when to stimulate, moderate or step-back can be challenging. I’ve long found the advice to faculty, much …
Continue reading “Effective Discussion Forums – disrupting assumptions with VoiceThread”
We really need to know what we each believe about learning, our personal epistemologies, before we start learning and teaching. Do we really change the way we see, feel, and hear international voices, or do we just make structural adjustments around the edges of our programmes, curricula and induction processes. We build prayer rooms, but …
Continue reading “Sharing Perspectives on Internationalisation”
1% of the World’s Population has a College education? I’ve been looking recently at some of the policy declarations around millennium goals and development targets. It’s confusing and, at times, contradictory. I came across this rather nice, succinct, if unreferenced, account which struck me as worth contemplating (and verifying). “If we could shrink the earth’s …
Continue reading “1% of the World’s Population has a college education.”
The EdMediaShare site from JISC Digital Media is developing some serious traction to support useful and usable video content. I think it has proved itself as a ‘proof of concept’. The EdMedia Share site allows for the sharing of educationally useful content, provide opportunities for ‘finding’ content and allows for ‘critique’. The browsing by discipline …
Continue reading “EdMediaShare providing opportunities to share practice”
The education press fizzed this week, having caught up with an end of 2011 TED talk from former Snapfish CEO Ben Nelson in which he proclaimed a $25 million war chest and an ambitious two-year timetable to “transform higher education” by creating an elite global university online. Not the first, and certainly not the last, …
Continue reading “New Ivy-League: Nice idea, wrong model”
The Society for Research into Higher Education (www.srhe.ac.uk/) or SRHE, held the inaugural meeting if the new Digital University Network, convened by Dr Lesley Gourlay and Dr Kelly Coate, at its office in London on Friday 2nd March 2012. The network is a response to the changing technological landscape in which Universities now operate and …
Continue reading “Post human frontiers for educational technology”
Delighted to be joining the International Board of JIME – Journal of Interactive Media in Education http://jime.open.ac.uk in 2012. Looking forward very much to making a contribution. JIME was launched in September, 1996. It’s aims are: To foster a multidisciplinary and intellectually rigorous debate on the theoretical and practical aspects of interactive media in education. …
Continue reading “Journal of Interactive Media in Education in 2012”
There is something slightly disturbing about checking the web for uses of your work. One finds the odd undergraduate presentation that has ‘borrowed’ a graphic, or quoted your quotes as notes, and other lyrical misdemeanours. One even risks finding oneself renamed, although I have to say I find ‘Simorn’ a little too contemporary for my …
Continue reading “Ending the year as a non-Cartesian?”
Version 2.3 of the SOLE toolkit (August 2011) introduced a ‘dashboard’ allowing the course designer to see the distribution of student workload across all the weeks, or learning units. Version 2.4 (October 2011) sees the incorporation of a ‘Weekly Objectives’ view, drawing together the weekly objectives set against the module outcomes for the first time. Each iteration …
Continue reading “Version 2.4: Weekly Objectives”
The challenge faced by the Open Educational Resources University is not translation, context or learning styles, it is not a question of interoperability of learning environments or granularity of learning objects, SCORM compliance or IMS standards; it is perhaps rather a question of academic identity. We have a lot of identify work to do. I …
Continue reading “OER: the death of the solipsistic academic?”
“In search of the virtual class: education in an information society” published in 1995 by John Tiffin and Lalita Rajasingham begins with a description of a girl climbing into her sensor suit and shooting off to a virtual waterfall for a geography lesson. Digital Immersion was the future. The description of the learning envisaged a …
Continue reading “Which Universities will shape the learning spaces of the future?”
There is no such thing as blended-learning. Or rather there has never been anything except ‘blended’ learning. Of course we all know that, we’re just lazy with our language and as Orwell(1) said “…if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Maybe it’s worth thinking about the terminology we use. I have no problem …
Continue reading “There is no such thing as blended-learning.”