I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day.
Some brief highlights from me….
I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life INCLUDING university – some people have a bigger lifeload than others and lifeload needs to be considered when thinking about inclusivity. This was in a keynote by Gabi Witthaus where she was talking about rethinking inclusion. She made some really good points highlighting injustices as well as possible solutions and reflections.
Steph Comley and Cat Bailey from JISC ran a great workshop on piloting edtech tools – JISC are planning a framework and the workshop will feed into that. It was a great way to reflect on what works well/doesn’t work.
I then really enjoyed the presentation by Ruth Clark, Leeds Conservatoire, about how they moved from Mahara to WordPress for their student competency tracking. Mahara wasn’t popular and it went from being free (& open source) to having a charge and that was the trigger for a rethink. They felt WordPress was a good option and felt it also provided students with transferable skills given how much of the internet uses WordPress.
After that, another really enjoyable presentation by Johnny Briggs at Glasgow who was building immersive experiences but using simple technology like 360 images and video. Although low tech, was much more accessible and widely usable. Johnny had built some really cool stuff like a virtual tour of Wallace’s monument and was doing an accessibility tour of a new building at Glasgow, aiming to show building users with mobility difficulties how to navigate the building.
After lunch, a workshop about reviewing a VLE review toolkit developed by UCISA. The penultimate session of the afternoon I went to was Joseph Spink from the University of Birmingham did a presentation on their business continuity plan. It was really interesting, and quite similar to what we’ve been doing – which is always a relief. He talked through their priority 1 incident process and what they did to create a Business Continuity Plan and Business Impact Assessment. He highlighted the importance of reviewing these documents regularly because things change.
The final session I found particularly interesting and useful. Andrew Larner from Manchester Metropolitan and his colleagues had been working to review and provide advice on assessment in the age of AI. They’d reviewed all the assessments in a department and attempted them with AI tools and then categorised them in a way which showed how easy it was to use AI to complete them and looked at the ones which had been harder and extracted the parameters of those to help them redesign the other assessments.
Summary of the work done and findings (really worth a look).
Then I headed home. With thanks to Scotrail for getting me home …. Eventually…..
