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...in which I don't go up mountains

Month: May 2020 Page 1 of 2

Academic Blogging Links

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Mini-series: Academic blogging at University of Edinburgh


https://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/mini-series-academic-blogging-at-university-of-edinburgh/

Blogging to Build your Professional Profile


https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/professional-blogging/

Academic Blogging Service at the University of Edinburgh:
https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/learning-technology/blogging

Coronavirus apps

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I collected some links about apps people have been developing in connection with the coronavirus pandemic:

Coronavirus App Links

A Checklist of Practical Steps for Time Management in Online Teaching

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This checklist from the course materials is a great resource for managing time and time-based expectations in online courses.

Time Management for Online Learning

Managing Time in Online Education

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Engaged Online Teaching and Time Management

Because technology is often associated with flexibility and fast time, this can lead to assumptions that online learning is faster and better. Institutions need to provide education in ways that fit with the lives of individual learners, and that means restructuring teaching time in flexible and personalised ways. A key part of engaged online teaching is mitigating transactional distance by planning for how teaching can be structured in both synchronous and asynchronous ways.

Redefining Contact Time

Contact time generally refers to the tutor-mediated time allocated to teaching or providing guidance and feedback to students. There has to be a different way to define contact time online, taking into account student mobility, distance education and flexible patterns of study. Online contact time can be characterised by personalised tutor presence and input within a specified time-frame.

Testing the new Subtitle Editing Interface

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You know how occasionally you get a message that just makes you feel so special and appreciated? Well I decided to have done that when I got this:

Subject: Testing for new Media Hopper Create subtitle editing functionality
Dear Colleague,

I am writing to you as you have either attended training on editing subtitles on Media Hopper Create, or have recently requested captions using the service. We will soon be launching an updated version of the automated subtitle editing interface for media content that has been added to Media Hopper Create, and are looking for people to help us test this new functionality. We have some brief testing scripts that we would be asking for help with, and are looking to have testers completing by the end of Friday the 24th of April. If you would like to help with this process, please reply to this email with ‘UAT Testing for Media Hopper Create Subtitling’ in the subject line, and I will send you further instructions and login credentials for the test instance of Media Hopper Create.

Thank for your assistance.

Best wishes,

The Media Hopper Service Team

How awesome is that? Me, a Colleague? I’ve only been back in a full-time job since September! And I can help them because I went to their training! And I LOVE testing things!

Pedagogy Word Cloud

Pedagogy word cloud

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My pedagogy

Pedagogy Word Cloud

19 words submitted in total.

Your words were:

  • engaged 5%
  • multimodal 5%
  • authentic 5%

I thought this was a lovely activity to end the course with! I think my cohort had the bad luck to be disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak, so not as many made it to the end, but I know the current and future presentations of this course are packed (including with my manager), so I hope to see their word clouds at the end of it!

Course: ‘An Edinburgh Model for Online Teaching‘. Licence for content: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Technology for Assessment

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As the course leaders say, it is no good coming up with creative and inventive assessment ideas if we don’t have, or can’t use, the technology to implement them.

I was interested to see these screenshots of assessment options available in the edX platform, and particular that there was an option for inputting Maths expressions:

edX assessment options
 

Desktop cactus, book and pages

A review of the assessment module

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It’s time to reflect and review this part of the course.

We are asked:

  1. Consider how the feedback that has been provided so far in this programme lends itself to a particular kind of assessment.
  2. Consider how a misalignment with feedback and assessment might impact transactional distance.
  3. How would you assess what we have done in this module so far?
  4. What types of feedback would I need to provide in my own course to support the type of assessment that is expected in my discipline?
     

So, can I answer?

  1. I think the feedback on this program has been timely, low-pressure and informal. That would seem to lend itself to small, frequent, informal, low-key, non-compulsory assessments.
     
  2. If the tone and expectation setting of assessment and feedback didn’t match, it would drive students away. For example, either a seemingly very low key, informal assessment that was followed by an onslaught of harshly judgemental criticism, or a strictly defined and substantial assessment task that was followed by vague, brief, non specific and casual seeming feedback, would definitely be quite demoralising.
     
  3. I’m not sure what this question is asking: do I think it was a good module, or what would be a good way to tell what we have learned from it. So firstly, I think this whole course has been incredibly interesting and I wish I could do the MSc in Digital Education because it sounds fantastic. But it’s more likely I’m meant to think of a way to assess knowledge gained through study of this module, in which case, inventing an assessment task sounds like the most obvious choice!
     
  4. That first thing that comes to mind is that ‘feedforward’ assessments would be most useful for the practical aspects of scientific courses. I also think peer review would be an authentic assessment practice for scientific work. Another idea, which I suggested in the course discussion was that I think it would be interesting if some of our Environmental Science / Ecology students could do an Open Educational Resource (OER) as a group project relating to local environmental or sustainability issues and interacting with relevant local groups and officials. I think this would also be an authentic and relevant activity, with plenty of opportunities for timely and actionable feedback.
     
Distance education in Second Life

What is Transactional Distance?

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It is apparently time to review what ‘transactional distance’ means:

Wikipedia tells us:

Transactional distance theory was developed in the 1970s by Dr. Michael G. Moore, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education at the Pennsylvania State University.

InstructionalDesign.org tells us:

The theory of Transactional Distance states that as the level of interaction between teacher and learner decreases, learner autonomy must increase.

When talking about distance education we are typically talking about a teaching environment where the separation between the teacher and learner is significant enough that special teaching-learning strategies and techniques must be used.

Even though there are clearly recognizable patterns, there is also enormous variation in these strategies and
techniques and in the behaviour of teachers and learners. Within the family of distance education programmes there are many different degrees of transactional distance.

Haiku about Mars

Is it easier to write more or less?

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In my case, apparently it’s only possible to write far too much.

However, if I were writing a how-to guide or manual, I know I should be making it as short and to the point as possible.

In some cases, the same point could be made of assessments. A word count is not a very meaningful metric in itself, but does a strict word limit make an assignment harder, because it takes more skill to be concise, or easier, because there’s less to write? Either way, larger word counts add more work for the teacher, without necessarily making the assignment any more meaningful.

As one of my fellow students put it, quoting Einstein,

‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough’.

Another quoted Antoine de Saint-Exupéry about the creative journey:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Sharing a different perspective, a commenter from the art school discussed enabling constraints, which should be related more to project duration (how long will the work last?) or should detail what students can NOT do. They argued for the importance for art students of learning how to distinguish between enabling constraints and concepts.

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