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!

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.