UoE IAD Learning and Teaching Conference slides
If you weren't able to attend the University of Edinburgh IAD Learning and Teaching conference, 20th June, you can now access presentation slides and watch the Keynote presentations here. Links to slides for presentations from Digital Education colleauges below:
'Near Future Teaching', Sian Bayne, Jennifer Williams and Michael Gallagher
‘Futures thinking’ has become popular over recent years as a way for institutions to understand the implications of rapid social and technological change (Slaughter 1996). In its most interesting forms, futures work takes place across communities to co-develop creative and speculative responses to change (Facer and Sandford 2010). At Edinburgh, the Near Future Teaching project has been working over the last year to apply this method to collaborative thinking about futures for teaching and learning in this university. Full abstract and further information
'Product, process or practices? Distributed learning and assessment in digital education', Tim Fawns
Assessment methods in higher education can isolate students from the people and many of the resources they have interacted with in the process of learning. We argue that ideals of reliability and standardisation privilege internal, individual and abstract forms of knowledge at the expense of contextualised, collective and adaptive practices. If we accept that assessment is an important driver of learning, and that graduates will need to be effective users of social and material resources in the workplace, then it follows that assessments in which students are able to make use of available resources may be more appropriate in relation to future employment. This is particularly important in light of an increasing requirement for rapid adaptation to technological change. Full abstract and further information
'What question? Enabling dialogue between students and their teachers', Anna Wood, Jessie Paterson, Paul Anderson, Hamish Macleod and Christine Sinclair
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Conversations between academics and students play a central role in successful teaching and learning in higher education and one important aspect of these dialogues is the questions that trigger them. However, at least anecdotally, it is common for both students and teachers to experience dialogues that seem to be at cross-purposes, are frustrating or in some way difficult. Full abstract and further information
'Assessment in a digital age: Rethinking multimodal artefacts in higher education', Jen Ross, Amani Bell and Jen Scott Curwood
Digital assignments are increasingly part of the landscape of higher education, with educators in many disciplines seeking to scaffold students’ competence and engagement with social, visual, interactive, and multimodal information spaces outside formal education into critical and creative capacities to work with and generate knowledge in formal settings. However, assessment rubrics for such assignments have not always kept pace: teachers may be consciously or unconsciously working with “a paradigm of assessment rooted in a print-based theoretic culture” (Curwood, 2012, p. 232). Consequently, technical and compositional assessment criteria do not always address the richness and complexity of multimodal work. Full abstract and further information
'HELP PLZ: Navigating Minecraft as a digital education space with postgraduate students' Stuart Nicol and Phil Sheail (with thanks to Noreen Dunnett)
This paper draws on the experience of the authors in working with postgraduate students in Minecraft, the highly successful ‘building block’ gaming environment, as part of a fully online Masters programme in Digital Education. In the context of the recent literature on Minecraft in education, and the programme team’s previous work in the virtual world Second Life, we consider the opportunities and challenges of working with Minecraft as a digital learning and teaching space for postgraduate students. Full abstract and further information
'Teaching research methods at Scale: connecting accredited University provision with open MOOC learning', Jeremy Knox
This presentation will discuss the design and delivery of a recent Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) entitled ‘Introduction to Social Research Methods’ (known as ‘SOCRMx’). Offered on the edX platform, this pioneering design combined an accredited University of Edinburgh online Masters course with the public-facing format of a MOOC, thus demonstrating innovative ways of approaching distance learning at scale. Full abstract and further information
'Wider Themes in Digital Education: flexibility, structure & student agency', Pete Evans
Wider Themes in Digital Education is a new course on the MSc programme in Digital Education. The course is flexible and student-led being centred on a portfolio of self-contained learning activities. The course provides a flexible framework for participants to engage with new and contested developments in theoretical concepts and practices in the fast moving domain of digital education. Full abstract and further information