Can you help me crowd source a solution?

I work in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Leicester. This comprises 4 departments and we run 11 degree streams. Before Easter our 200 second year undergraduates need to choose a library or laboratory research project to undertake in their third year.

Traditionally, students have submitted their project choices on paper, creating a lot of administrative work across four departments to make sure everyone has a project to do. Last year we used a google form to collect student choices, and while this worked fairly well, the form was pretty long and relied on free text entry for the descriptions of the projects, staff names and departments. This led to a lot of man-handling of the data submitted (different/ incorrect spellings or abbreviations of departments, deviations of project titles etc).

This year, students will make five choices from a list of over 200 projects that have been anonymised so that the choices are made on the basis of the description of the project and the department and not on the supervisor. We will give each project a code, and have already entered all the details into an excel sheet so we can tie the project code to the supervisor.

We need a solution that will enable students to enter their project code and then have the title of the project displayed as a check to make sure they have entered the code correctly. The list of projects is just too long for a drop down list, even when split by department (around 50 in each).

Does anyone have any suggestions of tools that we can use for students to submit this type of information, so that we get it in a format that we can use, and they get confirmation of the project titles they have chosen? A simple google form isn’t going to hack it!

All suggestions welcome!!

Emerging peer support networks on twitter #lff10

I had the weird experience of giving a presentation without actually being present at a conference yesterday. I pre-recorded by session for the Learning Futures Festival back in December and it was broadcast on 14 Jan 2010 whilst I was at home collecting my children from school. I am greatful to my colleagues for stepping in to be online to answer any questions about the project.

It was definitely one of the easier presentations I had to do, elluminate was straightforward to use and I had good support from the conference team. Below is a copy of the slides I used and the presentation will be available with audio and the chat commentary on the learning futures fesitval site until 14 Feb 2010 (registration for the conference is required).

This is a project we’ve talked about elsewhere and have published in ALT-N.

anti? social #durbbu10

antisocial

Despite the snow, the team at Durham put on another great Blackboard Users conference this year. My main reason for attending was to meet some of the brave souls who made the jump to Blackboard 9.0 in the summer. Leicester was considering a move from 7.3 to 9.0 but pulled out in August 2009. I work during school term times only, so last June and July I was busy blogging in preparation for the move. I don’t think much about who reads the School of Biological Sciences blog, as I mainly use it as a tool for me to keep instructions that I send people and a list of FAQs that save me typing out the same responses to the same emails every week. I was therefore rather surprised when Natalie Lafferty told me that she found the site really useful to gain information about Blackboard 9 in preparation for University of Dundee’s impending upgrade.

The panel discussion session was one of the most interesting sessions during the conference.

The cat that had 9 lives: Blackboard Release 9 upgrade experiences
Jake Gannon, University of Liverpool
Hannah Whaley, University of Dundee
Rachel Fitzgerald, University of Northampton
Russell Smeaton, University of Teesside
Malcolm Murray, University of Durham

The five universities represented had certainly had a pretty tough time with 9.0. The main messages were:

1. All had a well laid out procedure for making the decision to upgrade. Most had either asked their users (staff and students) directly about Blackboard 9 or used feedback from annual surveys to inform their decision. Northampton carried out user testing with their staff and students on 9.0 and the response was very positive.
2. All had periods of downtime in the first weeks of the academic year (2009/10) which caused problems severe enough to have senior management seriously question the decision to upgrade. This has prompted strategic reviews of eLearning in several institutions and much soul searching about why we use VLEs.
3. All now have a stable product, though with some minor bugs still outstanding.
4. Everyone agreed that the now stable system affords a much better user experience, especially in the area of group work tools but that the damage done by serious performance issues at the start of term had overwhelmed the potential of new features to impress.
5. Browser issues provide serious cause for concern. Now running in Java, one of the difficulties faced was a lack of java memory once the system was hit with a significant number of users at the beginning of term. Test servers did not replicate the real-world loads placed on the system. The main advice here was to make sure that the hardware was up to the job and to get the java settings checked by as many people in Blackboard as possible before launch.
6. Another browser problem is the requirement for IE 7. In particular, Dundee med school had problems with their staff working in the NHS who are limited to using IE 6 only (this is common across the NHS as far as I know). Without IE 7 staff cannot use the drop down menus that drive most of the editing facilities in Bb 9.
7. Final browser problem was the intolerance of the system to old browsers and slow internet connections. Rather than just take ages to load, the system dumps the connection and will not load at all. Could be a real problem for distance learners on dial up or ropey connections.
8. The most worrying point for me was that none of the Universities felt that they had blazed the trail for the rest of us to follow. It is common for us at Leicester to wait for the first service to be applied to a ‘.0′ release before upgrading. Those that had made the upgrade had all had individual patches or fixes made for them that were specific not only to their systems, but to the legacy of use of Bb they brought with them (particular combinations of adaptive release settings, recycling methods, previous upgrade paths etc). As far as I could understand this meant that a 9.0 SP1 would not be guaranteed to be a stable product.

Finally, it is worth noting that of all the Universities involved, Northampton ran on a service hosted by Blackboard. They seemed to have had less downtime than the other HEIs (though an unacceptable amount for a hosted system) and had a less negative experience overall. This seemed to be down to a large amount of preparation on their part, starting in December 2008 for a Sept 2009 launch with training, testing and information for staff and students very widely and thoroughly disseminated. Perhaps the fact that they were hosted meant that the blame for any downtime was deflected to Blackboard themselves, rather directed at the ITS team which helped them to maintain a good relationship with their users and encourage them to try the new 9 features.

Do you come here often? The fleeting nature of communication in a 140 character World #durbbu10

I am in the snowy frozen north for the next two days at the Blackboard UK users conference in Durham. I am presenting our work on encouraging our first year undergraduates to think about their personal learning environments and how this may have influenced their means of communication with us as instructors on the course.

The presentation blends two projects that involved Alex Moseley, Alan Cann and Stuart Johnson (all at University of Leicester) and myself.

Abstract: A first year undergraduate IT and numeracy key skills module on Blackboard (v 7.3) delivered to over 200 students over two semesters has made use of innovative online assessments over the last 10 years. The IT section of this module was substantially revised in 2008/9 to assist students with the concepts and competencies of information literacy, ultimately leading towards the construction of a personal learning environment (PLE) and a reflective e-portfolio (Badge et. al. 2009).  This was achieved by the introduction of freely available Web 2.0 tools. All the course content is delivered wholly online, including marking (EMCQs,  see Cann, 2005, Google Documents, delicious, Google Reader, see Badge et. al. 2009)  and feedback (via YouTube videos).  A Blackboard discussion board has supported this course as a place for students to ask questions about the content and any administrative details since 2002. For the first time in 2008/9 we introduced Twitter to the course and students were encouraged to use Twitter to ask for help. The discussion board was still available but questions posed here were markedly less than in previous years (~100 messages per year previously, this year, zero). A small cohort of students used Twitter to ask questions about the course, stimulated in part by our study on Twitter and the student experience (Cann et. al. 2009). Now in the second year of using Twitter to support this course, this has become an accepted channel for students to contact the convenor. The discussion board is checked regularly but has not been used at all by students this year. Despite this course requiring students to access Blackboard at a minimum of twice per week, students are still not using it as a communication channel. How does this plethora of parallel communication channels affect the way staff/students will interact with Blackboard in the future? How will adding Google Wave to the mix affect things? Where is Blackboard in the era of the realtime web?

References:

Cann, A., Badge, J., Johnson, S., and Moseley, A. (2009). Twittering the student experience. ALT-N, 17.

Cann, A. (2005). Extended matching sets questions for online numeracy assessments: a case study. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, pages 633-640. Citeulike citation

Badge, J. L., Johnson, S., Scott, J. S., and Cann, A. J. (2009). Encouraging lifelong learning habits in a web 2.0 enabled PLE. In Higher Education Academy Annual Conference. CiteUlike citation

Web 2 experiences at Leicester #cfbweb2

Doing a double act again, I presented our thoughts on how we have progressively used web 2 at Leicester during the HEA Centre for Bioscience event. For me, this was a whiz through how my PLE had changed over the last (almost) 2 years (from Jan 08 to today).

Alan made a wordle to represent his PLE and would probably have talked about communication and filtering if he had been there to say something.

Stuart Johnson asked me a really good question about whether my complicated diagrams of all the tools I use would put some people off from ever starting the move into web 2. I think that it probably would have put me off at first, but I hoped that people could recognise some tools they are perhaps already using and that they probably use them in a more connected way than they think.

Groups on Citeulike #cfbweb2

Oops, edited after the fact as I forgot I scheduled this post and intended to add content to it at some point. With the excitement of pretending to be Alan Cann all day, I forgot!

I briefly demonstrated our e-learning at Leicester group on citeulike and Alan was going to talk about how we are going to use citeulike for online journal clubs next semester with our second year students on a research skills course.

The slides are on google docs and embedded here from slideshare.

Dealing with plagiarism in the digital age

Our HEA ELT Synthesis project is now complete and is available on the HEA evidence net wiki.

Since my announcement about the project in October, some people have joined the Citeulike group which was set up to contain the references from the review, but will hopefully continue to collect interesting and useful papers on the effectiveness and implementation of the electronic detection of plagiarism in HE. I hope the group continues to grow and that the papers are useful to researchers and pracitioners in the field.

PLE evolution part 4

What started as an exercise to show students what a personal learning environment was has turned into a way of me tracking how I interact with people and information online. I’ve commented on the evolution of my PLE before but I thought it would be worth expanding on it for a meeting we have coming up next week.

This is how my PLE has evolved over the last two years.

PLE in Jan 2008

then twitter came long and changed everything, by July 2008, twitter crept in

PLE in July 2008

 Then by the end of 2008, twitter was becoming more central to everything I was doing.

PLE in December 2008

Flock was one of the main ways I kept track of lots of sites and services, but I stopped using it earlier this year when it stopped auto-updating and broke horribly. Looking at my PLE today (december 2009) I think it has become more refined and is beginning to reflect the different audiences I communicate with online. Facebook is isolated in this diagram as I took a decision over the summer to keep this for friends and family, with only a few work colleagues in my friends list. Just as I have a twitter community and a friendfeed community, facebook has developed as a third space.

The other main difference which has influenced my PLE this year, is the use of an iPod Touch. With wifi at home and work, mobile apps for twitter, modile access to friendfeed and services like evernote have changed and probably extended the way that I interact with these services.

PLE in December 2009

Enhancing learning through Web2.0 #CfBweb2

We are hosting a HEA Centre for Biosicence event at Leicester in December.

Enhancing learning through Web2.0

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

Medical Sciences Building, University of Leicester

Web2.0 technologies continue to grow, both in diversity and usage and have the potential to impact all areas of learning. How can a bioscientist navigate the technologies of Web2.0 and why should you bother? The Centre for Bioscience would like to bring together examples of Web 2.0 which enhance student learning or academic scholarship. The day will advocate useful approaches rather than advocating particular programmes and be aimed at the novice to moderate user of Web2.0 tools.

Follow this event on Twitter at #CfBweb2 to follow Centre tweets on Twitter or consider joining Twitter.

The Centre hosts a social network site, UK Centre for Bioscience Pilot Social network, to explore the potential of using Web 2.0 with academics in bioscience education in UK HE. Give it a go!

Full programme and registration

Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology (ESTICT) launch event

Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology (ESTICT) is a UK network of education practitioners and learning technologists interested in promoting good practice with classroom technologies that can enhance face-to-face teaching.

We are holding our first event on  Thursday 26th November 2009 at University of Leicester.

The aim of the day is to share best practice in the use of in-class technology, with a particular focus on the pedagogic uses of electronic voting systems (also known as ‘clickers’ audience response systems ARS, personal response systems PRS). This event is aimed at those both those with experience of EVS who wish to share their best practice and those with an interest in the technology that would like to know more.

Programme
Thursday 26 November 2009

09.30 – 10.00 Registration and coffee
10.00 – 10.15 Welcome and introduction
10.15 – 10.30 Networking event
10.30 – 11.15 Keynote : Dr. Steve Draper, Senior University Teacher, Dept of Psychology, University of Glasgow. Steve is an acknowledged expert in the field of EVS and has published widely on it’s use in Higher Education.
Title: Ways to improve learning with EVS: some deep procedures for teachers, and what
software features matter for these. Abstract.
11.15 – 11.30 coffee
11.30 – 12.00 Mark Goodwin, Teaching Fellow, GENIE CETL . ‘Teaching bioethics using electronic voting technologies’
12.00 – 12.30 Mark Russell, National Teaching Fellow and Principal Lecturer, School of Aerospace, Automotive and Design Engineering, University of Hertfordshire. ‘Tracking student progress with EVS’
12.30 – 13.30 Carvery lunch
13.30 – 14.30 Workshop : exploration of the pedagogical models which can be used EVS
14.30 – 15.00 coffee
15.00 – 15.30 Reports from workshop groups
15.30 – 16.00 The future and aims of the ESTICT community

Join the ning community for ESTICT

The tag for the event is #estict (friendfeed room which pulls feeds from blogs, twitter and delicious on #estict tag)