My PG Cert in Teaching in Higher Education kicked off last week with a workshop and one of the group activities involved us all delivering a short 5 minute micro teaching slot. We had been forewarned about this so most of us had prepared a few Powerpoint slides to support our slots. After we’d done our stint we had to evaluate our own efforts and then we got feedback from the other members of our small group and a course tutor. This exercise stimulated some interesting discussion around student engagement and whether students today expected to be spoon-fed, in contrast to when we were all students when you had to take your own notes during lectures as there wasn’t the luxury of being able to download from the VLE what was written on the OHP or blackboard. This discussion continued in the plenary session. Some lecturers highlighted that they tended to use keywords on Powerpoint slides rather than have lots of text, which all seems to make good sense, but students weren’t happy because there wasn’t enough information for them on the slides. Were they unhappy because they would actually have to listen and make notes … I don’t know.
The debate about lecture Powerpoint handouts continued with some colleagues at the end of last week. We currently make our lecture Powerpoint handouts available after the lecture has been given. In a poll (run with Turning Point) in the last lecture of a 4 week teaching block one of the questions we asked was, ‘When did students want the Powerpoint handouts for lectures uploaded to Blackboard’. The options we gave them were before the lecture, after the lecture, at the end of a teaching block or not at all. 95% of them said they wanted them uploaded before the lecture. Discussing this with a couple of lecturers there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for doing this. The reasons for this are that, one they think that students won’t bother coming to their lectures if the handouts are available beforehand, and secondly as many of our lecturers are also busy NHS doctors they often don’t have their Powerpoint slides completed until just before the lecture.
I’ve had a very, very quick squint to see if I can find any literature that provides any evidence that releasing the lecture notes before the lecture affects learning outcomes for students and their performance in assessment etc or their attendance. I haven’t really found much on this yet that I can get access to, but intend to do a bit more serious searching.
I’m interested in whether other institutions have protocols or guidelines on whether lecture slides should be made available prior to lectures, what are you encouraged to do? What’s the rationale for making them available before hand rather than afterwards? Does this approach affect attendance at lectures or learning outcomes. Does giving out the handouts before the lecture encourage the students to come to the lecture more prepared and stimulate more interaction in the lecture or do you think it’s just spoon-feeding them?
Today I became a student again as I started my Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education. The course is run by my institution, the University of Dundee, and there are about 30 of us enrolled in this cohort. We kicked off today with a one day workshop, and whilst we predominantly study by distance learning there are a series of further half day workshops and we are all in small group study sets which will meet approximately monthly.
I’m looking forward to doing this course and in particular to reflect on the role that the Web 2.0 type tools that I use everyday will play in supporting my studies and helping to develop my personal learning environment. It will also be interesting to experience Blackboard as a student, as opposed to a teacher. Will my view on whether the VLE is dead or not change? Watch this space!
Each of the children in this Junior School class was given an iPod touch and could connect to the school’s wireless network. Here’s the video which shares reflections on how it’s all going from teachers and pupils.
I came across this video via David Hopkins‘ blog e-Learning Blog//Don’t waste your time. It’s the fourth in a series of videos which have looked at current and future global trends relating to technology and populations etc.
One of the things that stood out to me in the video was the statement at the end,
The mobile device will be the world’s primary connection tool to the internet in 2020.
I used to be quite sceptical about mobile learning, but since getting an iPod touch last year I’ve increasingly seen the potential that mobile devices have to deliver learning and to support learning. Is anyone using these or smartphones to support medical education? If you are I’d be interested to hear about how you are using them.
I’ve been in my new post for almost 10 months and it’s been an interesting time. I’ve been working with several clinicians who have been developing virtual patient cases around some of the core clinical problems which form a key part of our undergraduate curriculum. We’ve also been looking at other areas where the application of technology can help to enhance teaching and learning and developing new online teaching resources to support the face to face teaching.
Another development has been the interest in using blogs to support teaching. My colleagues in respiratory medicine were the first to show interest and over the summer set up DundeeChest. Over the summer the principal lead on this has been posting useful links and summaries of interesting bits of research from respiratory related journals etc. We’ve started to show Dundee Chest to others in the Medical School and it seems to have sparked off quite a bit of interest and we now have others wanting to start their own blogs to support their system or theme running through the curriculum. Colleagues in psychiatry were the first to follow the pioneering Chest team, followed by our GPs and cardiovascular physicians. I’m not sharing the links to these sites yet as they aren’t yet up and running but will hopefully remember to come back and update this post with links to DundeePsych, DundeeGP and DundeeHeart. Also in the offing is DundeeBones together with The Plexus which will look at hot topics in medical ethics and will have students involved contributing posts. I’ve also set up Dundee e-MedEd to share ideas and news about online learning and Web 2.0 with my colleagues. As I mentioned in my last post there are doctors who are interested in Web 2.0 and how technology can generally support teaching and learning but they have identified that they need support and staff development in these areas. This new blog will hopefully begin to address some of their questions and share what else is going on in e-learning.
The next step will be to see what the students think of these blogs. My DundeeChest colleagues will be using their blog to follow-up questions which come up in lectures and from Adobe Connect drop-in sessions which they are hoping to run. It will be interesting to see if the students find these new blogs a better way to support the teaching than the discussion boards in the VLE.
A couple of weeks ago there was another round in the VLE/PLE debate. Steve Wheeler kicked things of with his two fingered salute to the VLE, where he concludes that it’s inevitable that the personal web will win a straight fight with the VLE. On a comment Steve has posted in response to a piece by Mark Notess on eLearn Magazine he does admit he is being deliberately provocative to get the debate going. James Clay responded with his post It’s not dead … yet … followed by Matt Lingard with VL-istically speaking and Lindsay Jordan with The VLE/PLE debate. There is some consensus across these four posts and I find myself agreeing with many of the points raised by Steve, Matt, James and Lindsay.
Whilst I make use of the personal web to support my own personal development and think (hope) that ultimately it will win the so called fight against the institutional VLE, I too feel this is still some way off, particularly for medical education. There are two main reasons for thinking this
the current low level of use of Web 2.0 tools to support teaching and learning amongst both teachers and students and
firewall issues in the NHS which prohibit the use of a number of personal web tools to support teaching and learning.
In his post James responds to Steve’s piece by saying,
The concept that the majority of learners are adept at using Web 2.0 tools and services, are engaged with social networking and importantly are able to apply these skills to learning is a flawed concept at this time.
This is a view I would go a long with and the report on Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World published by JISC in May 2009 highlights these same points. For example the report identifies that nine out of 10 students will be regular users of social networking sites on entry to University, but they have little sense of how Web 2.0 technologies might be used to support their learning and they are not pushing for changes in traditional educational approaches. This report also identifies the need for targeted staff development opportunities aimed at identifying and spreading best practice in the use of Web 2.o tools in pedagogy.
The results of a study by Sandars and Schroter in the PMJ in 2007 also identified the need for staff development on the use of Web 2.0 technologies in medical education. They presented the results of an online survey which sought to identify the current familiarity and use of web 2.0 technologies by medical students and qualified doctors to identify barriers to its use in medical education. This study found that whist there was a high awareness and high interest in web 2.0 technologies there was generally low use. Sandars and Schroter concluded that for the potential of these technologies to be realised in medical education there needed to be increased training in how to use them. A couple of weeks ago I used this paper to kick off discussions at the Journal Club run by my colleagues in General Practice. Rather like the doctors in Sandars’ study my colleagues had an interest in web 2.0 technologies and how they could use them to support their teaching but all identified the need for staff development in this area. What was also interesting in the discussion was to hear their feelings about the institutional VLE with clunkiness and usability highlighted as issues.
Working in medical education there is an additional barrier to adopting the personal web to support teaching and learning and that’s the NHS firewall. A challenge that medical schools face is making content available to students in the clinical phase of the curriculum when students are on clinical attachments based in NHS hospitals and GP practices. Our students can access the institutional VLE from local NHS Trust PCs (albeit very slowly on IE6) however they cannot access the University’s webmail and there are problems accessing commonly used blogging sites, wikis, social bookmarking sites etc because of the NHS firewalls. A few months ago I was invited to do a staff development session with the psychiatrists involved in teaching our students and asked to demonstrate some web 2.0 tools and show sites where free content was available. I couldn’t access about 80% of the things I wanted to show and had to rely on back-up screenshots that I’d prepared as a standby.
I don’t know how we get around the NHS firewall issues but I think there are positive steps we can take to increase the use of personal web tools to support teaching learning. We need to provide more opportunities for staff development but also identify how we can encourage students to see how these tools can support their learning and not just their social lives. It’s also important to keep the debate going and to encourage and support the early adopters of technology and pioneers in e-learning to keep on innovating and being creative in how they use technology. There probably needs to be some sort of centralised VLE-type system which looks after managing cohorts of students and providing a secure environment for some activities, particularly in areas like health professions education where there are important issues relating to patient confidentiality which must be considered. At the same time the VLE of the future should be more open and support the integration of open tools so that students can pull together their own content to support their learning using tools which they can continue to use after they’ve graduated.
‘The VLE is dead‘ debate continues at the ALT meeting in Manchester in a couple of weeks time. Unfortunately I won’t be there but will be following on Twitter.
Many medical students will be getting ready to go off on their medical electives this summer. Whilst some will be going off to exotic places there are others who choose to go to resource poor countries. At Dundee we have links with Malawi and some of our students go there for their electives. The key issue is how to best prepare medical students for what they will face in these resource poor countries. The conditions and resources will be different to what they have experienced in their undergraduate careers to date.
This summer one of our 3rd year students, Anthony – who has a keen interest in international health, is working on a summer project and aiming to develop an online resource which will help to prepare students for electives in resource poor countries. As part of his project Anthony is looking at what online resources are already available to help students prepare for electives as well as thinking about the different types of resources that could be developed and also how Web 2.0 tools could be used. Anthony is also interested in hearing what other students think would be useful types of resources to help them prepare. To facilitate this he’s set up a short survey on Poll Daddy and if you are a medic or medical student it would be great if you could take a few minutes to complete it. During the course of the project Anthony is also planning to blog and feedback some of the comments from his survey at Elective Research.
If you can pass on these links to students in your school or to colleagues who’ve worked in resource poor countries that would be great.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted to my blog. This is partly due to doing an online staff development course which took up quite a bit of time over a 7 week period and spending more time on Twitter. There have been things that I’ve almost written about on my blog, but I’ve just not got round to it, perhaps because I end up thinking too much instead of just writing up what I’m thinking. Anyway I’m back up and blogging and I need to thank Anne Marie Cunningham for encouraging me to blog about a meeting I attended today on podcasting.
The meeting I went along to was the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes special interest group event at Glasgow Caledonian University. It was a good meeting kicked off by Peter Robinson from Oxford giving an overview of putting Oxford on iTunesU. It seemed to me (and others I chatted to) that this exercise was more of a marketing exercise on Oxford’s part as we didn’t hear anything about student uptake and responses to the podcasts which were being uploaded to iTunesU and the institutional VLE.
It was interesting to hear about what other institutions were doing with podcasting and in particular how they were involving students in creating podcasts and using audio/podcasts to give feedback to students. Various examples of how audio feedback might be used were given, for example feedback
on a module to a whole class
to groups of students doing group assignments and
to individual students posted in the VLE and added to the students e-portfolio.
I hadn’t come across audio feedback before and I would be interested to hear if it’s being used in any medical schools and how it’s being received by students. One of the sessions today was on student voices and involved 5 students sharing their experiences of receiving assessment feedback by podcast as well as their experiences of making both audio and video podcasts. These students were quite enthusiastic about receiving audio feedback, with some of them saying it was very valuable and excellent. They said it was best when tutors were direct and to the point, rambling on for 15 minutes was not helpful. One of the students had a preference for traditional written feedback, saying they felt this was more authoritative and that audio feedback could be too sugar coated. In contrast another student felt that audio feedback was more personal and it was good to hear positive comments along with any areas which the student needed to address and improve. A meeting on audio feedback is being planned later this year and I will share information on the details of this once I have them.
Whilst the students were positive about receiving audio feedback they were less enthusiastic about creating podcasts. They felt that they lacked the IT skills to make a podcast and would have liked to have received some training before being set the exercise. One of the students who was more technically competent raised how he found the exercise frustrating because he was working with other students who had lower levels of expertise and different expectations of what they could produce. Another student raised the issue of not being familiar with the software they were to use to create the podcast. I asked whether they had looked on the web or YouTube for screencasts on how to use the software, they hadn’t and tutors hadn’t highlighted that these resources might be available. I was surprised they hadn’t done a search themselves. Similar issues with students not having the skills to create podcasts were highlighted by Joe Maguire from the University of Glasgow who gave an excellent presentation on embedding podcasting in the curriculum.
Hearing about the Glasgow experience and the views of the student panel have made me think about whether we wrongly assume that most of our students are reasonably tech savvy and digitally competent? Should we be doing more to identify and address the IT/digital training needs of our students. What do you think?
One of the things I am reflecting on this week is what motivates teachers to engage with e-learning. Many of the people I’m starting to interact with via blogs and Twitter are already pretty engaged in e-learning, but what was it that got you motivated to get engaged. Do you find it easy to get other colleagues engaged? If you’ve got a a few seconds perhaps you could complete the short poll below.
P.S. Following on from Anne Marie’s comment I’m thinking specifically about what motivated you to start learning about and using e-learning in your teaching, ie developing interactive content, using virtual worlds or using Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis with your students.
This week I started a 6-week staff development course on Teaching & Learning Online. It’s been quite interesting so far and I’m quite enjoying being a student again for a few weeks. In this first week there are a series of activities for us to engage with, comment on and reflect on in our personal blogs. It’s been good to have some time to reflect. One of the things I’ve realised is that I should bookmark more to Diigo and Delicious. I keep thinking of blog posts that I’ve seen which I now want to read again because they relate to the issues I’m now wanting to think about and reflect on. Typically these are blog posts and articles that I’ve half scanned and which have half engaged me but I didn’t bookmark because they weren’t of that much interest to me at the time. Perhaps I need to rethink my practice here and start saving things which might potentially be useful or relevant to me a few weeks or months further down the line.
There is a bit of a buzz around Posterous at the moment and maybe should start using it to record some of my reflections when I’m reading things and pull in video clips and images etc. I’m interested to know how others are finding it or whether there is anything else I should consider trying out.
