Category: Teaching Practice

Dyslexia: a Guide for Tutors (35’02”)

‘Dyslexia: a guide for tutors’ was originally developed in 2013 in the context of the UK. It’s a relatively long online lecture but it has some fairly simple message. Dyslexia is not a disease or a mental illness, it is a different way of seeing the world. This presentation invites colleagues to think about dyslexia, and its associated concerns, in the light of ‘multiple intelligences’ and look for the opportunity to meet the needs of dyslexic students by enhancing the way they do everything to support all learners. I am not a dyslexia expert, this presentation has no diagnostic function. It is simply one practitioner’s view of good practice in being inclusive.

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Peer Observation Online (9’33”)

As so many new faculty are being compelled to teach online for the first time, many heads of department, quality assurance colleagues and academic developers are unprepared for the support the needs of faculty. Developmental peer observation is a frequently used approach to provide a reflection on an individual’s practise. Most of us will be familiar with Peer Observation in a classroom context, here is documentation that supports the process in the online world.

This is a brief walkthrough of the documentation designed to provide supportive peer observation online. The documentation, available as an unrestricted Microsoft Word document (see below), can be amended to your context. It is designed for developmental, rather than managerial, observations but could be easily adapted to serve both purposes. It follows a three-stage process, pre-observation, observation, and post-observation templates are provided.

Word Document: Peer Observation Online

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

 

Pedagogy, Andragogy and Transformative Change (23’20”)

This online lecture, first delivered as part of a UK University PGCert for educators, reviews the concepts of pedagogy and andragogy before going on to examine the applicability of Mezirow’s transformative learning theory to professional education. It also identifies Paulo Friere and bell hooks as radical thinkers in education worthy of note. Please note that this lecture was originally intended to be supplemented with a synchronous webinar and additional readings.

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

 

Engaging and Intervening in Discussion Forums (5’43”)

Some quick tips on how to engage students and manage your interventions in online discussion forums. Faculty unfamiliar with supporting learners online sometimes create a huge workload for themselves by poorly structuring discussions. They may also perceive their role to answer each and every posting, which is impossible when teaching at scale. This short video is designed to at least guide you to set up your discussions appropriately.

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Designing Effective Teaching Materials (6’06”)

This six-minute screencast (6’06”) is a top-level set of guidelines for developing effective teaching materials. For some, it may feel like going over well-worn ground, for others it may provide pause for thought. Rationalising what constitutes learning materials seems superficially straight-forward but when one considers the different institutional interpretations of what represents ‘direct’ learning versus ‘delf-directed’ learning it soon becomes apparent that judgement is needed even here.

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teaching through Webinars (10’17”)

This ten-minute video (10’17”) is a series of screen captures from live synchronous webinars taught using Adobe Connect (2015). It is annotated to give you some sense of how to manage interactivity, manage your tone, reflect on the importance of personal presence and to make use of the visual nature of the webinar interface. These examples are taken from a postgraduate teaching qualification but the ‘content’ is irrelevant. While it is not intended to be a blow-by-blow explanation of how to construct your webinars, once you have access to a webinar room, Connect, Collaborate or other solution, this might give you some ideas as to how you could adapt your teaching practice for this form of synchronous distance teaching. #highered #teaching #webinars

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Foundations to e-moderating (2’52”)

Acutely aware that there are still colleagues with little, or no, experience of supporting students online I thought I would start sharing some elementary resources.

Here’s a share of a short (2’52”) screencast video that walks through the five steps in Gilly Salmon’s E-Moderating model. While it is not universally applicable and it may depend on the discipline, context and level of students, it’s a useful guide to make sure new online facilitators are familiar (broadly) with the difference between technical support and facilitation. The emphasis is on ‘socialising the student’. Many adult learners choose NOT to engage and good course design will not compel them to participate without just cause.

Salmon, G. (2000). E-moderating: The key to online teaching and learning. Kogan Page.
These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Learning & Teaching Activities (6/8-SLDF)

Designing Engaging Learning Opportunities

Workshop aligned to UKPSF A1-A2,  K1-K4, V1 

The third element in a constructively aligned course design and stage six of the 8-SLDF is the learning activities that allow students to prepare for the assessment of their learning outcomes. This is not about the content that we share with our students; it is about how we develop an appropriate strategy to do that. Some modules will require a good deal of knowledge to be acquired by novice learners and a set-text and discursive seminars may be the appropriate strategy. Could we use one-minute papers, ‘Pecha Kucha’, lightning talks, and other techniques to secure student engagement? Alternatively, we might be designing a more advanced module in which a discovery learning approach is more appropriate. Could we use enquiry based learning models here instead, asking our students to prepare to take a debate position, run a Moot or team-based discussion? The important thing is that we are developing a strategy and practical approaches that build on our design, not seeking innovation for innovation’s sake. The pages for this stage of the 8 Stage Learning Design Framework are summarised as:

      1. The content to be taught should serve the students ability to evidence the ILO
      2. The skills and attributes that are taught at a topic, week or session level should be designed to rehearse elements of the assessment
      3. Not everything that engages students is directly assessed but everything they are asked to do should be justifiable as informing the assessment and ILOs.

You might want to ask yourself as a course design team

        • How closely mapped are the  ILOs to each topic, week or session outline?
        • How confident are you that you cover the ILOs appropriately in terms of weighting and importance?
        • How much variation is there in the learning approaches taken throughout your module?
        • How are you enabling students to develop skills beyond knowledge acquisition?

    See 8-SLDF pages for a fuller explanation.

From Walled Garden to Open Jungle (33′ 30″)

This 33-minute presentation is from a session delivered to an internal audience of colleagues on my final day at BPP University as part of Digital Literacy Day (16 Feb 2018). Set-up as a demonstration, sharing QRs, Padlet, Twitter. After six years leading a portfolio focussed around teaching enhancement, scholarship and research and educational technology adoption, I outlined the pervasive nature of resistance to change and issued a call for recognising the urgent need to embrace sound educational technology practices. The presentation sets up the premise that our educational history has created a walled garden within which the majority of our academic practice exists. I suggested a few alternatives to existing practice, encouraging colleagues to take some small steps. These included Voicethread as a an interactive discussion platform and H5P (I misspoke in the video and said HfP!). H5P provides a degree of interactive possibilities.

My challenge to my colleagues was about who was going to design the learning experiences through educational technology. What is the relationship between instructional designers and content specialists? What about their relationships with ‘classroom’ practitioners?

 

Coffee Notes: Enhancement Circles (3’12”)

This morning’s short coffee note identifies some of the functions, and their advantages, in establishing ‘enhancement circles’. For faculty working in a less than supportive context, this works well as a collegial mechanism for personal, and collective, enhancement.

Reaching out to colleagues outside your immediate sphere, from different disciplines or institutions, you can establish a personal supportive network. I think between three and six colleagues Is about the right number. This means you can usually find someone to exchange practice with but you won’t run out of people too quickly. Remember that peer observations do not necessarily have to be done in person. In theory, you could be observed by someone in a different country providing they have access to video recordings of your practice. Just make sure that you provide your observer with some specific guidance, requests of what it is you want them to comment on explicitly. Focusing on something specific in your practice will help you focus and deliver a better quality of the evaluative comments.

Remember that whilst it is important that Members of your enhancements circle or all practising at the same level of study, in other words, all undergraduate, postgraduate, pre-university level. The discipline is significantly less important in terms of identifying effective practice. I hope to hear back from some of you as to how effective this approach might be for you in your context.

 

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