Video from Module 3

The Toolkit for Teaching includes:
•        Module 1: Introduction to e-Learning
•        Module 2: e-Resources & Copyright
•        Module 3: Creating Interactive Resources (part 1)
•        Module 4: Designing an Inclusive Curriculum
•        Module 5: Creating Interactive Resources (part 2)
•        Module 6: Online Communications & e-Tutoring
•        Module 7: e-Assessment

In addition to this skills-focused toolkit, RSC Wales has also developed a Toolkit for Subjects. This RSC Wales Moodle area is not actually a collection of tools,  more a showcase of taster lesson/lecture plans: the aim was to provide a quick reference area covering a range of different topics and technologies that would provide ideas for the use of technology in subject teaching. Technologies were selected on the basis of their subject value (eg. online resources), their ability to provide interactivity (eg. voting systems), independent study (eg. interactive study packages from NGfL Cymru), collaboration (eg. online mind-maps) and communications (eg. Twitter). Reference is also made to other key aspects of teaching and learning including formative assessment and accessibility, and useful resources such as the RSC Wales Delicious links, Xpert and Merlot. The Toolkit for Subjects was not intended to look at technologies in any depth: there are many JISC publications and resources that serve this purpose.

from www.morguefile.com

We welcome feedback about these resources and how you have used them,  and value your suggestions for their further development. Please send any feedback to support@rsc-wales.ac.uk.

And just to add that by the time you read this, I will no longer be a member of the JISC RSC Wales team, though still working in the field of Technology-Enhanced Learning at CELT, University of Glamorgan.

Some teachers are natural innovators, but most follow rather than lead when it comes to using technology in their teaching, and some will be highly resistant to change (the so-called ‘laggards’ in Rogers’ ‘diffusion’  theory ). It makes sense to find  methods of CPD that might bridge the ‘chasm’ (as described by Moore) between the innovative minority and the slower majority. However, there may always be the barriers of insufficient time and money to hurdle!
Significant effort has gone into the development of schemes, frameworks and standards of CPD for TEL, particularly in the Lifelong Learning sector. Up to date guides can also be of great value, and also resources of the sort produced by JISC.  But  perhaps less thought has gone into the actual delivery of training, though TEL practitioners such as Joyce Seitzinger  have ideas. It seems sensible to me to apply similar pedagogic (or andragogic in this context) principles to the delivery of CPD for teachers as they themselves would apply to their students. Hence, the outcomes of CPD should be well-defined and their value and relevance made clear. Training activities should be varied and active, address a range of learning preferences, and incorporate an element of personalisation or self-direction. Positive reinforcement should be used where appropriate, and existing knowledge and skills should be taken into account. It is probably also benefical to provide training in a ‘little and often’ way rather than in large, infrequent chunks. In short, CPD  delivery should be as enjoyable, motivating and informative as the best lessons/lectures, and should avoid too much passive listening or pages of small print . ‘Testing’ scenarios, as in inspections or peer observations,  may also have  limited developmental value.

Based on the above thoughts, here are some approaches to CPD that I believe are worth exploring:-
• Discuss TEL within regular team/departmental meetings, or in informal gatherings, making reference to subject-specific good practice. It may be useful to look at technology use from different angles (as described in a recent blog post by Paul Richardson), and important to respect differing points of view
• Ask teachers individually about what has gone well in their teaching – ie. appreciative inquiry. Use this to find examples of good practice, and identify situations where TEL could have a positive impact
• Liaise with Education/Initial Teacher Training (ITT) departments to set up projects with teachers to explore particular technologies in the context of their teaching.  Action research and other scholarly approaches could be incorporated.
• link TEL CPD to wider schemes of accreditation and progression.

In addition to these approaches, organisations need to raise awareness of useful technologies (because ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’),  via a range of methods  including bite-size, visual chunks (eg. TeacherTube/YouTube videos on an intranet). Organisations could also make use of ‘champions’ to aid dissemination  and promote good practice, and their managers should aim to provide  leadership in the use of TEL.

What other approaches/factors are should be considered? Conversely, what hasn’t worked? Your experiences and comments are most welcome!

Queries
These are just a few of the queries (received in person, via email or Skype or over the phone) I have delt with this month:

Text Wall - we use a text wall to collect comments and questions from delegates who attend our events. During our recent ‘Learner Voice, Learner Choice’ roadshow we also suggested it might be one of the many tools that could be used to record the learner voice. A number of the organisations who attended the event had borrowed the text wall for a short period (in return for some feedback on how it goes) to try it out with their learners (Learning Centre suggestion box, opinions of Moodle, during Adult Learners Week, for feedback on lessons …) and one contacted me to ask for more details of the service (options for different walls, cost) because it was proving to be successful and she was interested in having their own wall. One follow up job for this week is to contact all of those who have borrowed a wall to find out how they got on. I’ll share the results via this blog.

Legal advice – at the last of our roadshows ‘Small Steps … Great Strides‘ I had a query from a college about whether there were any legal requirements or implications regarding allowing parent’s access to learners eILPs. JISC Legal, one of the JISC Advance services are almost always my first port of call for education related legal advice, so I contacted them and received a response within days which I passed on. Rather than attempt to summarise the response here the legal information regarding eILPs and parental access received can be found on a GoogleDoc.

Moodle – there have been a few Moodle queries this month but 3 of the most common ones are asking for a recommendation, asking for a way of doing something and asking for a solution.

• The recommendation was for someone who had experience of networking a number of Moodle’s together … I recommended the North Wales 14-19 Network;
• The way of doing something was for how to embed a web page in a Moodle page … I suggested using a handy piece of code (with the relevant web address inserted) given to me a few years ago that has been very useful: <iframe width=”100%” height=”500″ align=”middle” frameborder=”0″ src=”http://www.rsc-wales.ac.uk” border=”0″></iframe>
• The solution was for a problem a Learning Centre were having regarding how to push news out to their students, rather than expect them to go looking for it … and I recommended the RSS feed for Moodle forums that anyone could then subscribe to.

Facilitating the Moodle-Wales group
As the vice chair of the Moodle-Wales Steering Group, I have the honour of facilitating meetings. Usually the Steering Group meet face to face after one of the Moodle-Wales User Group meetings or via video conference but this time we decided to try something a bit different and we chose to use Skype (the latest beta version that allows up to 5 videos). This meant that we could all meet from our desks rather than having to book and travel to VC studios. It worked surprisingly well for a tool that is in beta.  After the meetings I compile and publish the minutes online and then get on with my actions!

Visits to providers
We try to visit all of our supported learning providers at least once a year to find out what they are up to and how we can help but we also do follow up visits too. The following are some of the real (and virtual) follow up visits I’ve done in the last month:

• Coleg Elidyr to show staff the potential of some of the free, open source applications available via Edu-Apps.
• Coleg Glan Hafren to collect the Turning Point interactive response system set we loaned them, along with feedback about its use.
• Barry College to take them on a virtual tour of our Second Life Office, followed on another day by a face to face session to show them the basics of building in Second Life so that they could borrow some space on the University of Wales Newport, School of Health and Social Sciences island (where our SLOffice is based) to try and engage with learners who won’t engage face to face.
• Coleg Gwent to take a virtual tour of our Second Life Office and the island and later to test (virtually) the Skype (Beta) multi video setup for a session they want to run.

Events
Organising and facilitating events is also another part of my role as an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). This month I supported colleagues at the Cardiff  ‘Small Steps … Great Strides‘ roadshow, which was the last of the series of three roadshows, the other two of which I was much more involved in (‘Barrier Busters, Accessibility and Inclusion‘ and ‘Learner Voice Learner Choice‘). For the last few months I have also been working on organising the one big, cross sector event that we are running in Cardiff on 30th June this year – ‘Learning in a Digital Wales – Dysgu mewn Cymru Digidol‘. There are still some places available on this FREE event so if you are interested then you’ll have to be quick and book now!

Virtual communication
We communicate with our learning providers in many different ways but 2 areas I have responsibility for contributing to (as do most of the team) are:

• Twitter – I tweet as@HelenHRSC on a very regular basis but also as @rscwales when it is my turn. As a learning technologist I am constantly on the lookout for news ideas and examples of effective practise and I find that Twitter is an excellent way of sharing what I find quickly … as well as also finding out what others are doing and sharing that too.

• Our teaching and learning (and technology) blog – I managed to blog 3 times last month (twice about Moodle and once about digital communication) but this varies depending on how much I am at my desk and whether I have been inspired to blog and feel I have something worth saying!

Twitter is my first virtual port of call for sharing stuff, followed by our blog and also the news pages on our website.

Keeping up to date and sharing with the team
I use a whole variety of ways to keep up to date with what is happening in the world of education and technology (RSS feeds, Twitter, mailing lists, newsletters, attending events, taking courses,  talking to people … ) and as well as sharing all of this with our supported learning providers I also make sure I share with the team too. A couple of tools that I have come across and shared recently are Twiddla (a bit like Etherpad(as was) but allows images and password protection) and Wallwisher (a web page for sharing ideas and comments that can been used in many ways).

As I said at the beginining, each day is different and this is just a flavour of the things that I am involved with as an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). I guess the job is like both education and technology … always something to learn and share … but also ever changing!

(If you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into Balabolka (one of the tools available as part of My Study Bar/EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file).

Swansea College was also highly commended for its entry to the FENC Award for the creative production, adaptation, and delivery of learning resources.  Their project involved the production of French-language podcasts as a flexible resource for adult and community students in particular. Podbean was used for free online hosting, and the very popular podcasts mainly involved brief weekly round-ups of news and events in France. Accompanying transcripts were also provided on a specific Podbean site to help learners, along with lists of key vocabulary. Further information about the award can be found on the Swansea College web-site.
   
Congratulations to both colleges, and all the other award-winners and entrants from Wales. A full list of all awards and winners can be found on the AoC site

iPod/iPhone/iTunes/Apple fans might be cheering at this point but I can also hear the sceptics crying ‘what about those who don’t have/like/use iPods/iPhones/iTunes?’ and ‘why would you hand all of your content to a third party?’ … which I must admit I also thought too when I first heard about iTunes U a few months ago. However, as with many of the presentations at FOTE09, Peter Robinson’s explanation of why and how iTunes U works for the Oxford University students and staff has made me think again … hence this blog.

What I heard about iTunes U was:

• Universities have lots of good stuff to support teaching and learning but they aren’t all great at (a) telling people it’s good (b) making it easy for those who know about the good stuff to find it  … iTunes U can help.
• The content can be stored on your own servers … you don’t have to hand it all over to Apple
• You can also have a web portal … which allows access to all of the resources without having to go through iTunes
• It’s free
• The audio can be MP3 and the video can be MPEG4 … not proprietary Apple formats
• With structured and guided support staff can create content to share relatively easily and quickly … and students can too
• Cross departmental sharing and working on a project like this can break down some of the barriers that may exist
• The legal side of who owns what and can share what with whom can be tricky but it can be overcome
• Marketing is a key to getting the students and staff on board … and Apple even have promotional advice for you on this

From Oxford University’s point of view (according to Peter Robinson) it has all been worth it. Here are few stats to support its success:

• 1 000 000 downloads and a number 1 hit in less than a year
• 2 500 downloads per week for popular feeds
• 956 items in 186 podcast feeds
• 90% of the downloads via iTunes, 10% via the parallel web portal

… more stats and information are available via the FOTE09 presentation or from the iTunes U at Oxford web portal, http://www.ox.ac.uk/itunes_u.

In my subsequent quest to find out more about the use of iTunes U, I came across this briefing paper from The University of Edinburgh about their new and developing presence on iTunes U … if you want to know a bit more, then this is worth looking at (imo).

So now I am going to spend a bit of time looking at the content on the Oxford University iTunes U and the iTunes U’s of the other Universities … The Open University, Coventry, Warwick, Brimingham City, UCL, Trinity College Dublin to name but a few of those from the British Isles. I could look at the content on my laptop but for a true test of how mobile my learning could be I shall download a selection to an iPod and see what I learn

• ‘Effective practice in a digital age’ is a very readable publication that I have already referred back to on a number of occasions since first reading … and know I will refer to again in the future.
• The supporting videos in the Effective Practice Resource Exchange are great additional resources, especially the ‘Responding to learners’ video from the University of Edinburgh and ‘Rethinking learning resources’ from Birmingham City University.
• The ‘Choosing pathways’ table (p18-19) gives a clear overview of the case studies, from ‘simple’ to more complex in terms of the type of technologies used and includes the learning outcomes (goals) expected, the technologies used, etc. It is also a very helpful quick reference when going back to the publication to look for a particular case study or example of how a technology has been used effectively.
• The highlighted ‘Key points for effective practice’ for each case study are great for focusing you or making you think further about the specific practice (example below).

• The continuing story of effective practice (Where did we start? Where are we now? Where are we going? p50-51) demonstrates quite clearly that this is an evolving story and that as institutions, thoughts about pedagogy, technologies and learners continue to develop and change then so will how we define ‘effective practise’ with regard to technology enhance learning. The story most definitely has a long way to go (IMHO) and as the quote by Lewis Carroll (p4) points out:

The last point above should probably have been my final comment on this subject but, as the first thing that caught my eye when I initially read the publication was e-Learning = enhanced learning (page 8), I am going to end this post by saying that if anyone asks about my job title (e-Learning Advisor) in future then I am considering explaining that I am an enhanced learning advisor for RSC Wales because it sounds a lot more appealing and far more relevant than saying I am an electronic learning advisor

I have also just read Steven Wheeler’s, Faculty of Education, University of Plymouth, blog about ’7 skills for the successful e’tutor’, which is what actually prompted me to put my thoughts down in words. Comparing the skills he lists for e-Tutors to those listed by Alan Clarke (on the 7th slide of his presentation) for independent learners the two that sit together are the confidence of the learner which can be developed by the support and encouragement of the teacher and the communication skills that both require.

Even after writing my thoughts down I am still not sure where I am going with this one. I think I was just pleased to see from Steven’s blog post today that it has been identified (by some) that the skills need for eteaching are different to those needed for teaching and that just because you can teach it doesn’t mean that you can eteach without a bit of help … as we can’t expect learners to elearn without support too.

All comments and thoughts welcomed!