Thursday 11 November 2010

Seminar: Enhancing learning through technology

Yesterday I attended a seminar snappily titled Synthesis Report on Assessment and Feedback with Technology Enhancement held at University of Southampton. The aim of the seminar was to present the findings of a project commissioned by The Higher Education Academy looking at the use of technology to enhance assessment.

I have recently started a role at Southampton Solent University where I will be developing their study skills website succeed@solent so this seminar was perfect timing.

They handed out copies of Effective Assessment in a Digital Age: A guide to technology-enhanced assessment and feedback. The guide is full of great case studies and more importantly for me examples of how practitioners have assessed the success of projects. With reviewing succeed@solent I'm keen to evaluate it's effectiveness. From a quantitative perspective some of this should be straight forward; analysing stats and traffic but how does one judge whether a user has gained or learned anything from an online course? I'll be reading the guide to find out more so I can plan my own action research around the use and development of succeed@solent.

During the afternoon we took part in workshop activities where in small groups we had to redesign 'analogue' elements of a course and consider digital alternatives. The course was Leadership in Disaster Situations and the current assessment methods were written case studies with multiple-choice and open questions, a two day practical exercise in a woodland and a final written paper with open questions. In our groups we had to recommend how technology could be used to enhance the assessment and feedback of the course, provide a rationale for choices and evidence that the methods will have the desired impact, explain what evidence needed to be gathered to prove the benefit of the new technology and consider the impact on the tutor, students, central exams office and departmental manager. It was a lively session with lots of different ideas, ranging from student blogging to the use of virtual worlds such as Second Life. I felt that the workshop was missing one large chunk of information - the profile of the end user (student). How could we design a technological solution if we did not know about the user's needs? There were also valid comments about how technology is not always the best solution, for example if you want to learn how to build a shelter it's difficult to learn unless you're hands on.

The seminar also reminded me to visit HEA and JISC to find out if other learning providers have carried out research into online study skills and I made some useful contacts.

Also, a few colleagues from Solent's Learning Technology Unit were there so it was a good chance to make some new acquaintances and also get their take on online learning.

1 comment:

  1. The people who titled that seminar are clearly unfamiliar with tl;dr ! Glad you popped by my blog - and glad the chip hash worked for you!

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