University of Glamorgan are hosting the 2nd Annual ESCalate Student Conference on Friday 16 April 2010, and the theme this year is Students as Stakeholders: take an active part in your own learning. Several things about this event look very interesting: firstly it’s excellent value at £30! Secondly it is a student conference with a keynote from Aaron Porter, Vice-President of the NUS (Higher Education) on The Importance of the Learner Voice in 21st Century Higher Education. Thirdly the topics (eg impact of new technologies on the learning process) complement well the work RSC Wales is currently doing to take our free Learner Voice Learner Choice Roadshows round the country (by the way we’re still taking bookings for the dates in Mold and Bangor but hurry, the South Wales dates are already fully booked!).

Anyway, back to the ESCalate conference: it is open to staff and students in all fields of education. RSC Wales have gained great benefit from joining in past ESCalate events and we’ll look forward to attending this conference too. The deadline for bookings is 19 March.

One of the best things about being part of a Regional Support Centre is that if you don’t know something, or can’t get to an event, there is often someone who does know, or has been there, and can pass on the knowledge. I wasn’t able to get to the JISC Techdis/ALT event Rewiring Inclusion recently, but a colleague at Swansea University went along and and kindly sent details of some simulations (a recurring theme this week!) which are being designed  to give the user experience of what it is like to experience difficulties with computer interaction when you have certain disabilities.

The disability awareness tools are being developed by the Accessibility Research Centre at Teesside University.  They are still in progress (apparently a tool based around dyslexia is coming soon) but you can try out the tools for cognitive disabilities, motor disabilities and visual disabilities at http://rime.tees.ac.uk/ARC/simulations/. The project team would welcome your help with completing their questionnaires (available from the home page) so they can further develop the tools.

The recent Higher Education Leadership Summit “Leading the Agile University” saw the launch of a new set of free resources for leaders in UK Higher Education. The resource, entitled JISC Portfolio for Senior Managers: employ technology to support your business goals, covers five areas:

.    Strategies for agile institutions: scenario planning

.         Relationship management and business intelligence

.         Research rigour, accessibility and impact

.         Alternative business models for higher education

.         Enhancing the student and staff experience

The publication is available for download here both as a simple pdf and as an interactive version with video. Alternatively, you can view a summary page with invitations to ‘take three steps’ plus video clips on the JISC website.

Ewart Woodridge CBE, Chief Executive of the Leadership Foundation for Higher
Education, welcomed the publication, commenting that the agile university  required “a strategic and entrepreneurial approach to the use of technology”.

As well as providing food for thought for leaders, this resource provides a clear summary of some of the key tools available from JISC to support university managers, and brings home the importance to the ‘agile university’ of integrating IT strategy across the organisation.

The Simshare project, one of the projects under the HEFCE-funded JISC Academy Open Educational Resources programme, has been looking at bringing together simulation resources and enabling them to be shared. Simshare is based in the UK Centre for Legal Education at Warwick University, and evolved from an earlier project SIMPLE, which focussed on legal education and attracted various awards . Now Simshare has taken this work beyond the field of law to include simulation learning in all subject areas.

The Simshare team, whose partners include University of Glamorgan, are now offering a series of free one-day workshops. One is taking place in Cardiff University on 15 March and is designed for academics in any discipline who are interested in knowing more about simulation learning and how to share resources. You will:

1. Learn about OER (Open Educational Resources), and how you can be a part of it.

2. Have access to a wealth of free resources for teaching.

3. Have help in getting started in using simulation as a form of teaching, learning and assessment.

4. Practise assembling a simulation on paper and have access to online resources to help you do this.

5. Know how to download and upload resources to the OER website.

Full details are available at http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/simshare/workshops.html and the contact for more information is patricia.mckellar@warwick.ac.uk. You can also download an event flyer.

I’m grateful to Karen Counsell at University of Glamorgan Law Department for letting me know about this event (she also put me on to an evaluation which her department carried out for JISC Techdis, of the accessibility benefits of the SIMPLE law simulation in assessment – thank you Karen!

Here at RSC Wales we’re very pleased to be involved with a new round of HEAT funding that is specially for Wales. HEAT is HE Assistive Technology, a programme funded by JISC Techdis with the Higher Education Academy, and you can find out all about the HEAT4 programme on the JISC Techdis website.

We know from the feedback from our current Barrier Busting Roadshow events about Accessibility and Inclusion - attended and enjoyed by staff in all supported sectors, HE included – that lots of people are interested in how to use technology to improve effectiveness around inclusion and accessibility, not just for ‘disabled students’ but for all students and staff.

Not only is the HEAT4 funding highly relevant to current concerns, it also has the big advantage of enabling small, manageable projects within the reach of any staff. A HEAT project can achieve great benefits without demanding large amounts of time or resources in the application process or the running of the project. Take Newport University’s HEAT3 project for example, which got staff using vodcasting to give students feedback, or Lampeter’s, where staff in Classics digitised image collections to make their teaching materials more inclusive and engaging.

The JISC Techdis website offers full details of previous projects so you can see the kind of thing that’s possible. So if your reaction to project funding is “but I don’t have time to bid” or “we’ve never done anything like this before” then I suggest think again – HEAT4 could just be the way in.

Proposals are particularly welcome in these areas: Lifelong Learning, Work-Related Learning, Employer Engagement and Business & Community Engagement (see www.jisc.ac.uk/bce for more information about this whole agenda) but no theme is excluded. Funding of £1200 is available per project and is to purchase technology.

We’re looking forward very much to working with colleagues at JISC Techdis and Academy Wales on evaluating the bids (due in 22 February), and seeing projects evolve and share their experiences with the sector so we all benefit.

Towards the end of last term I was pleased to be able to attend the launch at our host institution Swansea University, of the Swansea Academy for Learning and Teaching (SALT). The event was marked by a well-attended event on Assessment and Feedback, with a number of very good presentations, covering good assessment and feedback generally, and the use of technology as a means to this end. I particularly enjoyed the one by Sam Webster and Jo Bishop of Swansea University Medical School, about their use of clickers in embryology and anatomy teaching. It showed very convincingly that clickers (aka voting systems) have the potential be used in truly interesting ways to afford deep learning and self-assessment. Links to video clips of all the presentations are available here.

(By the way, if you’re interested to know more about what Swansea University Medical School have been doing with clickers, there’s also an interview with Sam Webster about his project on the Swansea University Learning Lab, as part of their podcast/vodcast series.)

All the best for the future to SALT! If you work in a university learning and teaching development unit or e-learning team in Wales and you have something you’d like to share with other organisations in Wales, why not send it to us here at RSC Wales and we’ll do our best to cover it in this blog.

Last term I went to an excellent event in London called “Effective Practice with E-portfolios”, the last one in a series that grew out of a big programme of JISC-funded projects about e-portfolios in FE and HE.

The day was particularly useful as it combined honest and lively contributions from staff who had tackled eportfolios at the coal face, together with views from experts at JISC and the Centre for Recording Achievement (the organisation leading on Personal Development Planning in HE). It was also valuable in terms of the contributions from the audience who brought their own expertise to the event and enabled some rich debate.

Delegates from universities and colleges in Wales made up about a fifth of the participants, and most participants, whether from FE, HE or workbased learning, were piloting an eportfolio of some kind or on the verge of doing so. A wide range of tools were being considered by participants, e.g. PebblePad, Mahara, Blackboard Expo and Wordpress.

Now the materials from that event (plus the five others in the series) have just been made available for free via Netskills, including presentations, links to resources, activities and feedback from the discussions.

Here are some of the most useful points that came out of the event for me personally:

• the presentation Emergence of the Personal Learning Space by Geoff Rebbeck from Thanet College, was one of the most persuasive and down-to-earth talks I’ve heard not just about eportfolios but about any e-learning tool (several other delegates told me they’d also enjoyed this one). It included this brilliant Youtube video with college staff talking about what they’ve used their own eportfolio for.
• I also enjoyed the presentation from Merv Stapleton of City of Sunderland College, looking at the introduction of an e-portfolio in a work-based learning context (Foundation Degree in Service Management). One of the findings that interested me about this one was that students found their digital literacy skills were enhanced by having to use the e-portfolio.
• It was agreed that there are many different notions of what an e-portfolio can be, ranging from the use of an eportfolio to track learners (this is what schools have concentrated on) and accredit learning (with the push coming from awarding bodies) through to the kind owned by the learner, geared to personal reflection (eg the commercial tool PebblePad). The latter type has attracted most interest in Higher Education. FE colleges were initially interested primarily in the tracking/accrediting type, but are now getting much more interested in the reflective type.
• However, ideas often associated with e-portfolios include: capturing informal as well as formal learning; reflection and opportunities for feedback; enhancing the student experience and providing more opportunity for the learner to take control
• We looked at the question: what’s the difference between an e-portfolio and a VLE, given that they now seem to offer many similar functions? One way of distinguishing them is to think of the eportfolio as the learner’s space, and the VLE as the institution’s space. I liked the the way one presenter defined an e-portfolio neatly as a ‘VLE of one’!
• The question of portability of e-portfolios (or rather lack of) came up frequently, and it is an area that still needs a lot of work if students are going to be able to take their stuff with them from one organisation to another. JISC is working with other bodies to try and make progress with this thorny issue.
• Several speakers made the point that you can’t necessarily expect students (or staff) to immediately get the point of an eportfolio. They may need time to realise the benefits (though it was argued FE staff may find it easier than HE). There can be strong disciplinary differences in the degree to which a portfolio approach (let alone an e-portfolio approach) is valued.
• If all you want is to replicate what you are currently doing on paper, maybe you should stick to paper! But at the same time, moving to ‘e’ can help to make more explicit the transformative process of ‘learning how to learn’
• One benefit of eportfolios which was repeatedly cited was the opportunity it gives to help to make connections between the otherwise fragmented components of courses
• Another benefit particularly relates to work-based learners in professions where they can be isolated. Professional development particularly at senior levels can seem slow and fragmented: some people can feel they are going backwards! Relating to peers via an eportfolio could help counteract this feeling.

Tips on getting started

After we’d all had some hands on practice using a variety of eportfolio tools, we finished up with some plenary discussion during which we shared a number of good tips for getting started with eportfolios, eg

- run a pilot

- do some action research to build a case

- talk to awarding bodies

- talk to students

- importance of preparation

- consider access from the workplace

- use networks such as JISCmail lists. There are a few useful ones: go to www.jiscmail.ac.uk and do a keyword search for PDP or e-portfolio

- some Regional Support Centres have eportfolio resources to share, for example my colleague Kevin Brace HE Coordinator at RSC West Midlands maintains a useful eportfolio wiki.

Despite the diversity of the audience in terms of sectors and products used, there was a remarkable degree of common ground between delegates in discussion, and the focus was firmly on the pedagogical and staff development issues rather than on the technicalities of specific products.

The event also gave a good opportunity to look again at the JISC InfoNet Infokit on E-portfolios authored by Susi Peacock of Queen Margaret University et al. It’s excellent for dipping into for case studies, resources, ideas and guidance. If you’d like to get an overview of all the JISC funded projects and resources on e-portfolios there’s a summary here, and the JISC guide Effectice Practice with E-portfolios (2008) is also available to download.

This post is quite long enough, but there’s more I could share. I’ll be updating our RSC Wales eportfolio resource on our Moodle shortly: watch out for details later in the term. And if you’re interested in further support on e-portfolios, we’d like to hear from you! Get in touch at support@rsc-wales.ac.uk.

I’ve just been looking at the list of free seminars on offer at University of Glamorgan this term, organised by their CELT (Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching). I feel spoiled for choice and will have trouble deciding which ones to book onto! As last year, these lunchtime seminars are open to all but you do have to register in advance -see the website for full details and booking information.

The ones I am particularly interested in include Learner Generated Contexts and the Co-Creation of Learning with Fred Garnett of the London Knowledge Lab and Nigel Ecclesfield of Becta; one on Assessment and Feedback from the student perspective, and one on Putting Assessment at the Heart of Learning. The one featuring the University of Hertfordshire Blended Learning Unit also looks good – I went to the Hertfordshire Blended Learning Conference last year and saw a lot of interesting work going on there. But those are just some of the topics on offer that could be of interest to many institutions, not only internal Glamorgan staff. What’s more, there are a good number that are being held over from the “snow days” earlier this month, so I’ll be checking the Glamorgan website for updates later in the term: the session on the new Glamorgan flexible learning space or Collaboratory looks well worth checking out.

A JISCmail list has just been set up called MOBILE-SIG (SIG standing for special interest group). It describes itself as

“a forum for discussion of all aspects of mobile computing, including mobile websites, mobile application development and increasing access to services from mobile devices.”

and has been set up by Alex Dutton based at the JISC funded Erewhon project at Oxford University Computing Services. The focus is on Higher Education and a number of university staff working on mobile technologies have already posted information about their projects. It’s interesting to see the range of activity going on round the UK. If you’re involved in any projects to do with mobile technologies in HE it would be well worth joining the list via the JISCmail website where you can also see the messages posted by members so far.

If you are in HE and interested in the use of technology for inclusion, then you’ve probably heard of the HEAT (”HE Assistive Technology”) scheme which funded a massive range of projects in universities across the UK. JISC Techdis, which managed the projects, have upgraded the information available about the projects on their website, including:

• entries for over 80 projects (they’re also working on getting updates for the earlier projects in the scheme)
• you can find projects by Subject/function (eg Library)
• you can also search by technology (eg mobile technology)
• Del.icio.us tags make it easier to find what interests you

Other recent JISC Techdis news of interest to universities:

• ALT/JISC Techdis conference Rewiring inclusion , 9 February 2010 in Nottingham – book now!
• Universities will be expected to comply with the Autism Act, which is on its way to the statute books before the end of the year

Finally a reminder that JISC Techdis have a dedicated page for HE information here. And if you would like to order or download JISC Techdis publications for staff development events or meetings there are a number of guides specifically for HE here.