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Author: s1898972

I'm originally from Wales but currently live in Madrid for most of the year and Bristol during the summer months. In Madrid I have been working as an English language teacher for adult learners at the British Council, as well as giving private classes both face-to-face and online (using a very handy platform called Zoom, which I recommend as an alternative to Skype). During the summer I work as a teaching fellow in English for Academic Purposes at the University of Bath, which involves preparing international students (mainly from China) for their Master's studies at the university by improving their English language and academic skills. I have been taking an active interest in educational technology for the past two years or so, and have had this MSc programme in my sights for much of that time. Meanwhile, I have completed the online Trinity Certificate in Teaching Languages with Technology, which was my first significant venture into distance learning and introduced me to some valuable teaching, learning and study tools, such as social bookmarking sites, screencasting software and the multifarious uses of G Suite! I'm greatly looking forward to continuing this journey of digital discovery during the MSc programme.

In this post I’m simply going to scatter, without elaboration, some seedlings of ideas for future investigation and related links on topics which have particularly sparked my interest during IDEL and are currently at the forefront of my mind. The list may well have changed by this time next week and again the week after […]

I would like to begin my reflection on the IDEL course with a song: ‘Living in Another World’ by Talk Talk. I’ve listened to it multiple times since the death of lead singer and songwriter extraordinaire Mark Hollis in February and it has taken on personal significance which is interwoven with my experience of IDEL. […]

Case study: Sussex Downs College ‘Employability Passport’ The Employability Passport comprises a set of sixteen badges acquired via completion of a variety of tasks which are intended to demonstrate possession of transferable skills in four areas deemed to be key to working life: communication, collaboration, critical thinking and work readiness. The Employability Passport was developed […]

For the Week 8 activity, I eventually decided to put not one but two MOOCs through their paces. Initially I signed up for ‘Digital Skills: User Experience’ on FutureLearn because I wanted to find out what lay beneath the UX buzzword and consider the extent of its relevance to my professional context, the MScDE programme […]

    Learning analytics mind map I decided to try out a mind mapping tool to summarise the key points of this week’s core readings, with a focus on how different learning analytics methods may be used to track aspects of students’ participation in online courses and inform interventions to improve participation. As well as […]

**spoilers alert** – it may be best to read this after checking my assignment! After a blogging hiatus of two weeks I’ve decided to make my comeback with a post about the whole experience around the assignment. I thought it would be useful to do a kind of informal SWOT analysis as a way of […]

In this second HEA-related post, I would like to turn to the issue of learner diversity and discuss this with specific reference to the different ways in which online students perceive being ‘at’ university. This is an area worthy of consideration because the more awareness course designers and tutors have of these differing perceptions and […]

During the process of putting together this outline I have deliberated a lot over whether to focus on ‘informal’ (self-directed) or ‘formal’ (accredited) digital education. In the end I have included both but I fear that the scope may be too wide for an assignment of this length. If I decide to narrow the scope […]

Here is my belated response to the Week 7 task for which we were asked to depict our online studies using a spatial metaphor. Perhaps I diverged slightly from the brief but the outcome is interesting and pleasing, to me at least! Completing this task has helped me to articulate the significance of the IDEL […]

My intention in the next two posts is to address two of the HEA topics within the context of discussions and readings from Weeks 6 and 7 regarding the concept of ‘space’. Admittedly I have found the subject matter in this section of the course quite challengingly abstract and have observed myself retreating into “lurker” […]

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