Portsmouth Business School Learning Support

1. PBS Learning News Achieving the right blend! 1 Issue 8 – Summer 2010 Virtual Space...the Final Frontier? Modern schools have extensive computing facilities and software that facilitates increased use of technology in learning. However, evidence shows that these same children have often been over-assessed in school, and have learnt to cope with the workload by adopting a ‘live to pass’ mentality. Having had little time between assessments at school and gaming at home, some children have failed to learn how to reflect on a topic to find deeper meanings. Reflection is a key part of learning, but modern kids often appear to use the internet as a source of knowledge. They search for information in short intense bursts, and rely on Facebook and other software for their view on what’s important to their lives. As educators, we need to adapt to this new reality, and use technology to interact with students in worlds that are real for them, if we are to help them reflect and learn. Portsmouth Business School Learning Support Contact the team: eteam@port.ac.uk http://pedagoria.blogspot.com/ http://www.twitter.com/eteamnews

2. PBS Learning Support for Your Teaching Wimba Collaboration Suite: User Views 11 2 Need advice on teaching online? Success with Wimba Classroom Rachel Short: Educational Technologist Rachel leads the Learning Support team based in RB1.07. She can help you to create course portals that include a variety of media and interactive learning objects, podcasts and screencasts. She is the Project Manager for our adoption of Second Life in PBS, which has led to the creation of the PBS Virtual Student Placements Centre. Examples of how other institutions view the Wimba Suite Mandy McCartney: Online Course Developer Mandy assists Rachel in supporting a range of unit sites and course portals in our VLE. She can advise academic colleagues on the use of VLE tools - including formative quizzes, assignments, discussion boards and group management – and extract formatted web pages from Word using Wimba Create, or set up a Wimba Classroom. Anthony Harrison: Media Producer Ant can help you make use of media in your teaching. If you want to use video in assessment, or to produce short documentaries about a subject you teach, or need to know how to capture sessions using Camtasia Relay, Ant can help you to achieve this. If you need to call him, telephone: 07912 755571. David Starkey: Learning & Teaching Coordinator David can advise you on ways to use technology to enhance your teaching, without over reliance on it. For example, Camtasia Relay was introduced to allow you to provide lectures as pre-briefings, so that face to face teaching could be more interactive. Want to learn about project-based learning and how to introduce it? David can help! Sarah Gilmore: Learning & Teaching Coordinator Sarah is research active, and can advise you on new pedagogical ideas and techniques. If you’d like to adopt a new way of teaching, or see a need to form a coordinated group showcasing educational research in an area that interests you, then Sarah can facilitate that.

3. eTechnology Focus: http://www.wimba.com Launch of Camtasia Relay & PBS Media Support http://www.twitter.com/eteamnews 7 3 10 Advantages of Using Wimba Start..Stop..Submit! Auto Session Capture Relay & New Media Support PBS has installed this system to permit academic colleagues to record their lectures, seminars, or sessions where they want to record a voice over screen content like PowerPoint slides, and deliver it as a video. Relay makes recording easy, and will send you a link to the video when it has published it. You can mail the link to your students, post it on Victory or Twitter, without having to edit the video or ask someone else to do it. So the next time you are too ill to teach on campus but need to make a lecture available, or want to share ideas with others from home, or just can’t get into work due to snow, let Camtasia Relay do it via the web! Other learning support guides available: Kevin Papworth: Wimba Ltd Wimba is proud to work with more than half of all UK HEIs, helping them to tackle many of the big challenges that the sector faces today. Many recognise the central role that collaboration plays in key areas, enabling universities to grow, to diversify, and to provide a quality learning experience to students, irrespective of their location. Please feel free to discuss Wimba uses with me at the Joint Learning & Teaching Conference on June 24th 2010. Setting New Standards in Collaboration Focused exclusively on education, Wimba’s solutions and services are used by hundreds of thousands of teachers, students, and administrators at schools and universities around the world every day throughout the student lifecycle. Student Engagement From enhancing distance programs, to expanding options for blended learners, to supplementing traditional classrooms with guest lectures, language labs, or recording lectures, dynamic and lively interaction using the Wimba Collaboration Suite can engage students and improve outcomes and retention. Critical Business Initiatives For increasing revenue and enrolment, improving the student experience and retention rates, supporting green efforts and disaster preparedness planning, collaboration using the Wimba Collaboration Suite is mission critical in meeting the many challenges of education today. Cost and Time Saving Efficiencies By offering online academic services, delivering professional development or IT training, or running department, faculty, committee or student meetings, entire learning communities save time and money through the convenience of using the Wimba Collaboration Suite. This suite of tools has recently been awarded the 2010 “Best Collaboration Solution” CODiE Award by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

4. Portsmouth Business School Second Life Developments Media Delivery at the University of Portsmouth 9 4 PBS Virtual Student Placements Centre iTunesU: Yes!....iTunesUs: Maybe! iTunesU for Portsmouth? Shown here is the Stanford University iTunesU presence, although one could illustrate the use of iTunesU at many other universities – but not Portsmouth! The Creative & Cultural Industries faculty has published podcasts via its iTunes site for some time, but there is no coordinated iTunesU presence showing learning and teaching to potential and current students. There should be, and at the next ELSG meeting, a cross-faculty pitch for one to be created will be made via a short video. Rachel Short: Educational Technologist For a period of 6 months, I have been working on a project to investigate the potential for PBS to use the virtual world ‘Second Life’ as a student support mechanism. In collaboration with a subject matter expert from the School of Computing/CCI, we have designed, tested and implemented a Virtual Student Placements Centre (VSPC). This is a parcel on the existing UoP Island. It consists of a small campus where students can play videos, and access websites/resources. Students can meet with potential employers/supervisors, attend virtual classes and meet informally. Increasing Student Engagement The creation of the VSPC posed a relatively low risk area for building SL expertise, whilst looking at how students might interact in a 3D environment. 49 respondents to a pre-build and 16 to a post-implementation questionnaire. 69% agreed that they would be willing to use SL in HE with 49% stating that this would enhance their learning experience. More than 300 universities around the world use SL for research/teaching. Further Information The project will be the subject of a presentation at the L&T Conference on 24th June 2010. If you are unable to make it to the session, I can provide you with information concerning the initial findings and recommendations for PBS: eteam@port.ac.uk.

5. Problem Based Learning (PBL) Mobile Learning and Virtual Learning Environments 5 8 VLE Matters PBL at Ulster University What is Problem Based Learning? David Starkey: L & T Coordinator Our current VLE is WebCT Vista, called ‘Victory’ internally. This will not be supported by Blackboard after 2013, and an expert advisory group has been set up to look at alternatives. At the next UoP eLearning Steering Group meeting on July 15th, two representatives of Blackboard Mobile will present the Bb mobile offering, which in conjunction with Blackboard Learn can provide virtual learning via Apple iPads and iPhones. I will report back on how good this was after the meeting. Here’s a flavour of it… PBL has been used in the teaching of Economics at Ulster University for fourteen years, and it has been found to enhance learning and employability significantly. This will be explored at the L&T Conference on June 24th by Mr. Frank Forsythe: http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/frank-forsythe/16/608/88b Houston: We have a Problem! Teaching using PBL alone can have some detrimental consequences for student learning. Apart from the cost of running full PBL units, where students undertake only seminars in small groups (no lectures), PBL can lead to a reduction in the ability of a student to make decisions on their own, and insufficient breadth of learning. However, a combination of conventional and problem-based units provides for all the benefits of subject coverage and the acquisition of transferable skills for optimal student learning.

6. Increasing Student Engagement, Enriching Learning PBS Learning Support: New Online Help Facilities 7 6 Using Cue Cards The eHive Blog & eTeam Services David Starkey: L & T Coordinator In an ideal world, students would attend seminars because they were filled with a spirit of enquiry and the joy of learning. In practice, they have other calls on their time, such as having to work to pay for their studies, and they may need extra encouragement to attend discussions that bring out the learning the tutor intended. ‘Cue cards’ can be a powerful motivation to attend class, can improve student preparation and reading prior to seminars, and aid exam revision. The new eHive blog will provide information and video tutorials describing how to do things in our VLE, make use of screencasting technologies, and use Web 2.0 tools like Facebook, Twitter, Jing etc. It also provides guidance on how to initiate an eTeam project after June 24th. What are ‘Cue Cards’ and how are they used? If students are not preparing well for seminars, the quality of debate in seminars may be poor, leading to a downward spiral of preparation. Even the most enthusiastic students begin to feel that it is not worth taking time to prepare. To overcome this, students can be asked to submit a cue card with information on a particular topic during each seminar (with submissions accepted at no other time). At the end of the module, they are handed back to the students at the start of the exam. 10% of their marks for the module are then made up of the number of cue cards submitted, with the percentage allocated to the exam part of the assessment being reduced accordingly – say from 50% to 40%. For example if a student hands in half the possible number of cards, he/she would receive 5% rather than 10%. The cue card system can help to improve the preparations for seminars and lead to better discussions. It can also raise the awareness of current issues and the different text books available. Where it has been adopted, students commented that the cue card system had helped to improve their confidence, and had been extremely helpful to those who suffer from exam nerves, or for whom English is not their first language. For units where an awareness of current market trends or legal cases is important, cue cards enable students to record this activity as they discover it in the media, thus enriching their answers. Cue cards also enable staff to expect a higher level of discussion and analysis in exam answers than might otherwise be expected. Simple regurgitation of cue card records is not rewarded. Care must be taken when writing exam questions to take this into account. As the changes required by Curriculum 2012 pick up speed, cue cards may empower students, while cutting down tests of memory alone. Perhaps they are worth a look? You can find the eHive blog at: http://pedagoria.blogspot.com/