Working with E-Learning Environments, UCL Arena Teaching Associate Programme leaders in CALT have been trialling Workshop (Moodle’s peer assessment tool) to run a peer review activity with participants. We’re now on the second iteration – here are some opportunities and lessons learned. One group is using Moodle Forum, so in a month or so we’ll […]

UCL Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS) recently held an event to learn how to contribute to Wikipedia, the encyclopedia anyone can edit. These kinds of events are known as ‘editathons’ – we called ours a ‘translatathon’ because it involved 36 postgraduate translation studies students, all new to editing Wikipedia, translating English women’s health articles into […]

This morning UCL’s Joint Faculty E-Learning Forum – that’s Arts & Humanities and Social & Historical Sciences – met for the second time. The first meeting had focused on assessment and feedback, so ELE gave a brief presentation on our actions since then and recommended avenues colleagues in departments could pursue. This post provides some […]

There is a lot of social media use in higher education – see Rey Junco’s research, for example. One reason for this is summarised by David Wiley: Q: What would happen if Facebook worked like Blackboard? A: Every 15 weeks Facebook would delete all your photos and status updates and unfriend all your friends. So here’s bit of […]

Moodle now gives any staff member in an editing role the ability to create up to 15 test accounts for up to 15 days. These are easy to set up from any Moodle course area. They are assigned a student role in the Moodle course area where they are set up, but their creator can […]

I’ve attended a couple of very interesting UCL Arena Gateway workshops. Their purpose is to familiarise postgraduates who teach with the culture and practices of teaching at UCL. The session was primarily concerned with classroom activities so here’s a bit more about the opportunities technologies can bring. I was there to contribute some ideas as an E-Learning […]

  You’ve been warned about Wikipedia. You’ve used it before but it would be pointless to cite it – anybody can edit so how can it be a credible source? Searching Google yields better sources for your work. You’ve never tried to edit Wikipedia – why would you? Comparing Wikipedia to Google’s search engine as sources of ...

A few of us spent part of last week in Brighton at MaharaUK 2014. Mahara – the environment UCL calls MyPortfolio – allows individuals and groups to create and connect multimedia-rich pages which they can selectively publish.  E-Learning Environments gave a couple of presentations with an emphasis on how Mahara can help with assessed group ...

A conference dedicated to supporting learning and teaching (in the professional services sense) is a rare thing in higher education but UCL’s fifth  Teaching Administrator Conference which took place on April 24th is precisely that. As the first Provost to speak at this annual event, Michael Arthur’s opening was evidence of the growing importance of teaching ...

I’ve written this as part of the week-long Bring Your Own Device For Learning open course. Today’s topic is about curating online resources, something I do using Diigo for online bookmarking, Zotero for reference-managing formal literature, Evernote, blogging, a news feed aggregator, and a bit of If This Then That for shunting stuff around different ...

Digital literacy is gaining recognition and sophistication but the concept currently tends to fragment. For example, Doug Belshaw welcomes the explosion of interest in learning to code but makes the point that on its own it is unlikely to get anybody very far with reading, writing, or participating online. He concludes, “One thing I’ve learned ...

When using the Turnitin iPad app, what Turnitin refers to as ‘syncing’ doesn’t merge feedback and grades – it overwrites them for that entire submission inbox. Below are some examples of how this could affect you. More than one marker for an essay? Syncing from the app actually overwrites any existing marks and comments. In other words, ...

Cross-posted on ALT Mooc SIG. Today the Department for Business Innovation & Skills published a literature review on on ‘The Maturing of the MOOC’. It was written by Stephen Haggard (independent learning consultant at time of writing, now working at Desire2Learn) with the University of London’s Centre for Distance Learning and the Observatory on Borderless Higher ...

Earlier this year E-Learning Environments (ELE) won a mini-project grant from the Changing the Learning Landscape Programme on the theme of ‘Power in Your Pocket’. ELE has been working with UCLU, Student Support & Wellbeing, and the Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching for 2013/14 Induction Week, to set up activities exploiting the ...

I’ve been at the July meeting of Jisc’s Learning and Teaching Practice Experts Group (aspiring expert, in my case).

The day began with an overview of outcomes from the E-Learning Programme, pointing us to the Design Studio as a repository of programme outputs – tools, activity designs, models, and a …

Have you ever wondered what to make of an assertion about human ability to learn? That somebody has or hasn’t got a ‘maths brain’, for example, or that human ability to acquire a new language is limited by age? Research in neuroscience and psychology is growing fast – and yet when findings surface in the ...

One massive open online course-type thing I really admire is ds106 – a roll-on-roll-off place where open online participants can join students registered at the University of Mary Washington and others to develop skills and know-how in a wide range of digital media from text to video and everything in between (the ‘ds’ stands for ...

BETT is a gargantuan annual learning technology trade show. With digital literacies in mind I spent a few minutes at the Lynda stand – Lynda is a library of short, focused courses for different technologies and practices. Did they offer courses for open source applications? GIMP as well as Photoshop? Yes. OpenOffice as well as ...