Improvements in teaching and assessment can be greatly enhanced by advances in technology which have come about for other reasons. In the video area, transformations are driven by Gaming, HDTV, and 3D, Touch-screens, Video Walls and Global Conferencing. Now, ultra high resolution Quad-HD video is available from YouTube; offering internet connectivity.
The aim of this TALIF proposal is to make Telecommunications and related analytic subjects more interesting to our typical student cohort. Feedback has suggested that students find such modules unengaging so a way of making the subjects come alive by using the technology being taught is offered here. In essence, the principles of signal-processing, wave–propagation, wireless and power-line communication are used to deliver the lectures including animation, scalable resolution, online Q&A, formative and summative testing and enhanced student participation. Improvements in technology, going forward, can be painlessly included. Multi-classroom interaction is available using the same Flash player techniques as YouTube currently offers for high-resolution downloads.
The opportunity to use arbitrary resolution cameras introduces the basic principles of the Nyquist criterion, bandwidth and packet loss. Students will see the signal visibly collapse as the frame-rate rises and vice-versa. Advanced video techniques have been classified as the best medium for providing education as people learn in a visually stimulating environment. The flexible and modular approach will, going forwards, offer 3D filming and rendition with its attendant bandwidth restriction all using readily-available technology.
Overall, the material being taught is delivered using the same techniques. It is future-proofed as all components are commercially-available and modular.
Project team: Professor Stuart Walker and Anthony Olufemi Ejeye (Computer Science and Electronic Engineering)
I would like to pursue the possibility of using screencasts as a way to provide additional study skills support. I would like use screencasts to illustrate some worked examples of key calculations related specifically to drug administration. There are numerous nursing calculation texts around but what’s often lacking is a carefully graded sequence of audio-visual explanations that students can view as many times as they need to develop real understanding of the processes involved. Feedback we have received from students suggests that they don’t have a firm grasp of some the very basic strategies that are transferable to many drug calculations e.g. expressing one amount as a proportion of another. With funding I would like to buy the commercial screencasting package Camtasia (as recommended by the Learning Technology Team – Marty Jacobs). By using this package students could be provided with a learning resource that is explanatory and personal. Various strategies can be utilised to support student learning. Generic screencasts can be provided prior to teaching sessions that convey the basic details of key information related to drug calculations. Individualised and responsive screencasts can be provided that are produced following a session; where students have idenitifed difficulties with specific aspects of the learning. In this kind of screencast the lecturer can focus specifically on the key areas that the student identified difficulty with.
Project leader: Iain Keenan (Health and Human Sciences)
This project will enable more effective communication with work-based learning providers and thus enhance student learning within this context.
The project will develop tools and procedures that enable students to set and record their learning objectives for work based learning placements. This will include options to consider and record reasonable adjustments for disabled students or students with other requirements i.e. caring responsibilities. As well as making placements more accessible this will enable the University to meet its obligations under the Equality Act (2010). As part of the project we will develop disclosure policies and procedures taking into account the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts.
These processes will help to support students on placements and ensure they meet the students own objectives as well as the objectives of the placement. In addition we will develop web based information for placement providers to support them in meeting their responsibilities under the Equality Act (2010). This will include information such as confidentiality, data protection, and determining what adjustments are reasonable.
In this way;
- All students will be able to set and record the development of skills to improve their learning within work-based placements and thus their employability
- Students with a need for reasonable adjustments with have a recognised mechanism for conveying their needs to placement providers
- The tools and information can be made available to all departments offering or considering offering work based learning
- Ultimately the aim is that technology will be used to enhance this process.
Project team: Tracey Burge and Mark Francis-Wright (Health and Human Sciences), Angela Jones (Student Support)
The goal of this project is to design and run a new online module in teaching with Information Communication Technology (ICT). This module is completely online. By the end of the module we would expect the students to be able to design their own teaching activities through the tools of ICT.
The intended audiences of this project are adults interested in becoming teachers, experienced teachers and/or curricula designers, who are looking for development through practical knowledge on teaching with information and communication technology. They are teachers or curricula designers in any subject. They will have basic IT skills and have access to the Internet.
The International Academy has already embraced the rapid development of ICT and approved e-developments for students and for the training of teachers. In our proposed project, the pedagogic objectives of teacher training and of, in particular, teacher training in ICT are enhanced by using ICT. These tools include the Internet, webquests, multimedia and a multiplicity of existing software.
Teacher guidance in the use of ICT is not new for our department but in this project the innovations are in the teaching methods we will use, how we will assess the module delivery and outcomes. The fact that it will be completely online is innovative. This means that the module looks at different types of ICT, critically analyses them, reviews recent trends in choices of tools for information and communication, predicts future trends in how they are embedded in curricula and in classrooms and identifies different educational objectives in case studies.
Project team: Iffaf Khan, Dr Nilüfer Demirkan-Jones (International Academy)
The CCS Associates Programme is an innovative learning and teaching environment for on-course students and alumni of art history and curatorial studies at The University of Essex.
The programme will bring current on-course students together with former students now working in the field of museums, galleries and other arts and culture institutions.
This will provide an extremely valuable reciprocal function in that:
a) On-course students will learn from the experiences of alumni working in the industry,
and,
b) alumni will have access to a new and innovative CPD environment offerd by our Department.
Each year a group of on-course CCS MA curating students will devise and manage a series of events (talks by professional contemporary artists, curators, art critics and other museums and gallery professionals), plus video and film screenings at a new gallery/project space in London, which CCS will be taking over in Summer 2011. In addition to this, a series of reading seminars will be devised and managed by the on-course students.
All of the above activities will be available to current year students in Art History, CCS, and other departments in the university, as well as to alumni who have subscribed to the CCS Associates Programme.
Alumni who subscribe (no charge) will receive priority invitations to events at the project space.
Project leader: Matthew Poole (Philosophy and Art History)
The HE Operations department has a growing portfolio of high quality Research and Scholarly Activities which is an indication of the positive development taking place in the sharing of good teaching and learning practice. Further to this, four transforming learning development days provide the framework and opportunities for the growing community of practice that spans across all the HE curriculum areas to explore technology enhanced learning (TEL). TEL is promoted through weekly workshops and on-line blogs which incorporate official YouTube channels, Facebook and Twitter feeds to encourage debate and the sharing of good practice. In addition, a network of Professional Development Advisors (specialist trained academic staff) are located in every curriculum area and campus to cascade knowledge up, down and across the staff structure.
The recent announcement by the Director of Learning (HE) has stated that every new student enrolling onto a HE Programme of Study from September 2012 will be given an iPad. With a view to ensuring that the iPad becomes an essential learning and teaching tool for both the lecturer and student, training videos are to be produced to demonstrate how to use the device to access and use common social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter; Moodle; PDP/CPD application, Dropbox, recording & playing audio/video files and especially video conferencing.
The National Student Survey (NSS) has indicated a weakness in feedback practice across the engineering and technology sector listing these common criticisms:
- ambiguity
- lateness
- miscommunication
- negativity
- uncertainly
Feedback is recognised as a key aspect of assessment and is linked to improving motivation of the student and the development of self –assessment (Brown et al., 1997). This project wishes to utilise the communication conduits available by the iPad2 to provide formative feedback to the student via the video conferencing application, e.g. Skype.
Project team: Paul Jennings, Trish Bradwell, Jim Daly ( Colchester Institute), Dr Maxwell Stevenson (Learning and Development)
The project aims to develop the currently validated module; HS972, Intermediate and Advanced Use of Musculoskeletal Ultrasound.
This module aims to respond to a recognised need for musculoskeletal ultrasound training, a modality that is becoming increasingly popular in the clinical environment. Rheumatologists, specialised physiotherapists and training radiologists are trying to implement musculoskeletal ultrasound into their practice for the potential benefits for both patient diagnosis and management. The nature of the subject area is highly suited to e-learning for several reasons:
1. Students need to respond to the learning outcomes in a way that matches their clinical area of expertise. They will be exploring technological opportunities with their patients in their place of work.
2. Students will be acquiring new skills that will preferably be acquired and practiced on their own department’s equipment.
3. Potential students have approached the university and expressed a preference for a module that is predominantly e-learning. As clinicians are struggling to obtain leave from work for study, options that can be completed with minimal attendance are increasingly attractive.
4. Students from an extremely wide geographical area could be recruited with this method of module delivery.
To develop the module, I intend to work alongside side highly respected clinicians in the field of musculoskeletal ultrasound. Mark Maybury, Extended Scope Musculoskeletal Physiotherapist from Goodhope NHS Trust and Professor Dasgupta, Clinical Director of Research at Southend Hospital are both enthusiastic and prepared to support this project.
Support is required to purchase a suitable digital video recorder that can be used to record materials that can be uploaded to Moodle. Support is also required to fund the time commitment and travel of the staff involved.
Project leader: Sue Innes (Health and Human Sciences)
Ecology is a rising discipline at Essex but currently little is known about the ecology of our University campus. This project focuses on student recruitment, improvement to student learning and employability.
We would like to increase to student recruitment to Ecology degree schemes and we understand the importance of employability. For this reason, we are enhancing our marketing strategy and have employability embedded within the curriculum. However, there are very specific skills identified that graduate ecologists need and it is not always possible to accommodate additional training during the academic year, mainly due to seasonality and the nature of ecological field work.
With this project, we aim to engage students in ecological field skills and extra-curricular learning experiences from their first year of study. This will take the form of biodiversity surveys on campus, specifically Moths, Butterflies, Birds, Reptiles, Bats and Small Mammals. A cohort of students will be trained up in the first year to conduct surveys of the University Campus. This data will build up a yearly bank of census reports and identify any rare and protected species present on site in order to inform appropriate management. The data can be used in student learning as a valuable bank of long term real ecological field data. Results will enable enhancement of biodiversity on campus, especially European protected species such as bats. This project will enable the students to conduct voluntary field surveys which are essential for their CVs and allow a greater number of students to engage fully with field ecology from their first year of study making them more competitive when they actively pursue careers in the field.
Project team: Dr Leanne Hepburn, Dr Steve McMellor (Biological Sciences)
The effectiveness of lecture-based learning depends on students extracting the important information from lecture materials, and lecturers communicating central ideas in the best way possible. This project, the collaborative lecture annotation system (CLAS), is designed to (a) make the extraction of information from lectures a collaborative and interactive process for students and (b) provide instructors with feedback on their communication of key points. CLAS allows students watching a lecture to tag important points by pressing a button, just as they might highlight a passage of text. Individual annotations are recorded by our software and plotted over time, and the collaborative element emerges when the software aggregates the annotations of a whole group of students into a single graph—producing a consensus representation of the important parts in the lecture. Students can use their own individual plot, with the consensus, to identify key points for revision. Lecturers can detect and recap those points which are not being communicated clearly. CLAS is a unique educational tool, one that has the potential to improve pedagogical practice by enhancing student extraction and instructor communication of critical ideas. This project aims to implement, test and improve CLAS for use at Essex. Specifically, it will (1) test our prototype software on volunteers watching videos of lectures online in a laboratory and (2) integrate CLAS with digital lecture materials (audio, video, podcasts) currently used in the Department of Psychology and elsewhere. Further developments are planned to use CLAS with students watching a live lecture (e.g. with PDAs).
Project leader: Dr Tom Foulsham (Psychology)
The purpose of this project is to improve students performance in the computer programming subject area. The subject continues to be a major concern for lecturers and students especially at an introductory level. Traditionally the teaching of this subject has only taken into account students varied levels of technical experiences and skills in determining the design of teaching material. Student’s social or cultural preferences are not considered. With an ever increasing diversity of student cultural backgrounds the demands for designing teaching material that reflects such diversity becomes more pressing.
This project aims to build a set of interactive 3D based learning material that reflects a range of students social and cultural dimensions. The project is based on Storytelling, seen as one of the best ways for learning anything, as a strategy underpinning the design of the learning environment. There is increasing evidence of the usefullens of such a strategy in higher education.
The International Academy we have the unique environment of students from various cultural backgrounds and nationalities including home based students. Input from those students will help guide the development of the project. The platform for developing the project will be based on the Alice 3D interactive programming environment.
Previous work in this area uses generic storytelling scenarios built in the Alice environment to increase the appeal of programming amongst students. This project takes such work a step further by incorporating social and cultural dimensions in the development of the learning environment.
Project leader: Dr Kamaran Fathulla (International Academy)
