Higher Education Academy

HEA UK provides a standards framework for academics teaching in the Higher Education sector and facilitates the accreditation process for different fellowship levels.

The four fellowship levels align with different levels of expertise, with Associate Fellows typically being early career teachers or teaching support staff for example, and Principle Fellow of relevance to those in strategic leadership positions.

The framework itself is organised into three dimensions covering teaching activities, core subject knowledge and teaching methods associated with it and professional values.  The HEA facilitates a process through which evidence to demonstrate achievement of these framework standards at the different Fellowship levels can be captured and accredited.

The HEA website also provides a host of teaching resources (articles) through their Knowledge Hub which can be searched through a range of thematic and discipline specific filters.

Other services the HEA provides are facilitated Communities of Practice through face to face and virtual spaces; with current clusters around flexible learning, employability, assessment and feedback for example.

A special focus area of support is Enhancing Student Success in HE and HEA offers a consultative process to guide institutions through a collaborative focus on this again around key topics; some as mentioned in the Communities of Practice.  Within this area key reports and frameworks are provided for some of these topics for instance; Technology enhanced learning, internationalization of HE and student engagement.

They also  publish an open access journal Higher Education Pedagogies which is free for Fellows to publish to with a APC charge for other contributors.

 

 

 

 

 

Which Information Literacy Standard

September 2015

A project undertaken in my work as a librarian in the HE sector was to map the integration of information literacy skills development into Unit Curriculum across the University.  One of the first dilemmas we encountered was which version of the Information literacy standards we should use.

The three major IL standards available internationally are:

• The ANZIL Information Literacy Framework, developed by the Australian and New Zealand Institute for Information Literacy in 2004
• The Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) in 2000 and currently being updated into a series of threshold frameworks.
• The Seven Pillars of Information Literacy Core Model for Higher Education updated by the Society of College, National and University Libraries in 2011.  This core model is built on through the use of  a series of lenses that can be applied to specific situations (i.e. Digital or Research Literacy).

We constructed a table that tried to summarise and compare these three main IL frameworks across the main aspects of information literate capabilities; Define/Scope, Source/Gather, Extract/Manage, Prepare/Present, Contextualise/Contribute.

All of the standards are useful sources of information for defining what it means to be a literate person.  The ANZIL and SCONUL Digital Lens frameworks focuses more on skills and competencies whereas the new ACRL threshold framework focuses more on dispositions or understandings required of a critically aware information user.

In summary all of the frameworks offer professional librarians a rich source through which to understand the inter-connected and developmental nature of information skills and dispositions.  However, they are not documents that are necessarily easy to use in discussions with unit coordinators and teachers simply because of the sheer volume of information they contain.   Instead our role as librarians may be to identify, and incorporate into a given unit, the parts that best articulate and describe the skills and dispositions of relevance to a particular learning need and that will best assist students in meeting the given learning outcome.

The whole of the picture of what it means to be information literate does need to be easily communicated and shared in some way however so that a sequential development of these skills and dispositions can be ensured within and across course programs.

Patterns in successful MOOCs

July 2015

As part of the UWA transition to Blackboard, speakers have been invited in to discuss the lessons they have learnt in building successful blended learning environments.

1. Lionel Skinner – Associate Lecturer Curtin Business School explained the features of the Fundamentals of Business Unit he presents to 1500 students a semester.

Lionel set out three main stages –

• Pre-workshop through which students are introduced to key concepts through pods that link out to online activities and content.  This links  to in video quizzes that must be answered before students move on and that seek to identify prior knowledge.
• Workshop stage – in which students are grouped together around engaging activities and case studies.
• Post workshop stage – personal reflection an linking of theoretical ideas and practice. 

This is reflected in a Model that begins with 
Connect – the unit coordinator introduces the topic/concept and set up opportunities to engage learners through the commencement of the inquiry process. 
Active Research – Investigating, analysing and processing information to construct new understanding. This is where opportunities to scaffold learning to enable (active learning) students to conceptualise their understanding of a concept. 
Action – Sharing and evaluation of outputs, with peer feedback and reflection on assessment.

 

2. Professor Mark Grimley of Swinburne University talked about their experience in building a massive online autism spectrum unit.
This unit on autism, was not targeted at academic staff/students but  anyone with an interest in the topic area. Design of the MOOC at first was based on the transmission model of teaching – with the usual assumption that the MOOC site needed to content dump all of the information required.  Other criticism was that e.tivities were one dimensional and assessment too traditional. 

The new model sought to first introduce – or signpost – the concepts and ideas but controlled introduction to these.  This then led to the expectation to participate in a number of asynchronous activities over the 12 week period.  Participants helped each other to answer and understand a range of issues on their topic relating to further information links as required.   This allowed users to investigate and share resources that addressed these issues and shifted the requirement to students themselves to produce content and make links with their own personal experience or work place contexts.

He discussed how John Birdman relates the flipped model to flipping Blooms remembering and understanding levels to online and higher order thinking towards interactive activities.

The important lessons learnt in these models is to firstly:

• Firstly introducing participants to concepts and ideas and gaining curiosity and interest is very important. 
• This then triggers further interest into further reading and investigation of the available content
• Resist the temptation or urge to feel you have to introduce students to everything they will need to know about a topic (allow them to do some exploration)
• Teachers role should be more about chunking and introducing students to the journey. 
• Activities (especially inquiry based) drive the further in-depth use of resources and the application of the concepts and ideas within them. 
• Activities developed throughout need to be seen as tangible and relevant to learning, and be of practical use (Feed forward activities leading towards assessment)

Inspirational Teachers – James Arvanitakis

Professors James Arvanitakis is a University lecturer in Globalisation who has developed innovative teaching techniques to enliven his lectures and connect students to the core concepts he is introducing in interactive and engaging ways.

An important approach of his teaching style is to look for ways to get his students to make a personal connection, either positively or negatively, with a issue or point of view; then to use this connection to unpack the context and begin to bring critical thinking and academic thought to bear.

This seems to relate to Vygotsky’s notion of teaching within a student’s ZPD but is much more in that it is not just scaffolding onto existing levels of knowledge but creating the motivation to what to learn the content by finding a personal, emotional connection to it.

He was named University Teacher of the Year in 2012

This is the link to his website and blog which is where he shares his teaching philosophy and techniques. jamesarvanitakis.net

 

 

GERRIC – Gifted and Talented Research and Resources

A partnership between the University of NSW’s Faculty of Education and the NSW Education Department – GERRIC  offers research into best education for gifted and talented students as well as training for teachers and interested parents.

The Resource area provides links to a reputed Professional Development Modules for Teachers that developed by GERRIC with the DEEWR in 2004.  They only ask that you acknowledge and provide them with feedback of the usefulness of the packages to you. 

Mark Pesce – The Human Network

Mark Pesce is an inventor and commentator on how being interconnected online is going to impact on our future.

View his blog to read some of his detailed analysis about what it means to be part of the human network and about his other publications and regular articles.

http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/about/

MobileBlogging and Learning

Use of mobile devices for the transmission and the creation of content in a learning environment.  Listening to podcasts or viewing vodcasts is very Web 1.0, introduce ability to comment on and to create to build interaction.

Sending content from your Mobile:

At its simplest, this means posting updates to social networking or microblogging sites through services like Facebook Mobile or Twitter Mobile.

LocoBlog and Moblog. Earfl allows users to phone in stories and later link them to an image. A more general service is provided by Zannel, which lets you post text, images and video to a blog as well as to sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. Leonard Low’s slideshow, An introduction to moblogs in education, contains ideas for educational uses of moblogs.

Hipcast: http://www.hipcast.com/

Offers the ability to create podcasts and vodcasts and to load them to your page area using mobile device applications or the web.  Audio and Video Tools and Blogcasting Service. Has ability to post to a range of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter or your blogs) and the potential to index.  Says it takes the worry out of converting your casts for a range of devices.

GPS and Social Mapping to Augmented Reality

New generation social mapping services like Aka-Aki and Loopt, – these use GPS to identify people and places that may fit your interests and that are in your general area.  There are then options for setting up communication based on your settings.  Review of businesses etc.

Build into augmented reality – services like Wikitude, offering the ability to see where your friends physically are (through geo tagging) and will be offering informaiton about special coupons etc.  Where you are is overlayed with wikipedia content. “By using the camera, simply hold up your smartphone and explore your surroundings. Wikitude will overlay the camera’s display and the objects you look at with additional interactive content and information – really cool!”   While Wikinear can show Wikipedia pages relevant to your location, tracked through your mobile device.

Augmented Realities:  Involves mixing the real world with the augmented world.  Harvard example based on using the cell phone (considered to provide equity)  http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=harp.  Students set mathematical problems to solve in the real world based on alien landing scenario and informatin given to them online.

Junaio – http://www.junaio.com/

Talks about their role in the development of Optical tracking software that will allow real 3D objects to be recognised by mobile devices and linked to online information about them.
QR Codes: generated with the Kaywa service. Other services which generate QR codes include Trakqr and QRcards. Common apps for reading QR codes include ScanLife.  Takes user to specific web page content linked with the topic/object where the QR code appears in the real world.

Retrieved: http://e-language.wikispaces.com/m-learning on 25/09/11

MoBlogging and Pedagogy

Definintion of Moblogging:   A mobile web log; a site you own and control and can post content to through your mobile device.  A way to get students to reflect on how their area of study is part of life generally. Can also be used as a means of documenting a specific process or towards assessment. Group blogs allow chat and commentary and collaboration.  (See example, Advertising students and HongKong group site).

“Pedagogically speaking moblogging favours situated and exploratory learning in a social constructivist framework”

Definition of Locoblogging: Moblogging combined with a record of the location of each sound, photo or video which can then be saved  and retrieved chronologically or by geographic location.  (Good for history, geography, forensics etc).  Useful if location adds relevant context to the media (see www.locoblog.com or manually geotag your images in Flickr).

Reference:  Slideshare presentation by Leonard Low: http://www.slideshare.net/leonardlow/an-introduction-to-moblogs-in-education-102029  Retrieved 27 September 2011

Retrieved: http://e-language.wikispaces.com/m-learning on 25/09/11

Digital Storytelling Web

As well as using PC based software such as Power point or Movie Maker for digital storytelling there is a growing number of online web2.0 type of digital storytelling software, making it more readily available for a web based audience.

Capzules:  http://www.capzles.com/

Allows you to bring together a number of different types of media products (photos, text documents, vodcasts) into a timeline that can easily be navigated along and entered into at different points.

Dipity:  http://www.dipity.com/’

Allows you to create a timeline from youtube videos (or other content) on a particular topic area – it becomes a timetube.  Users can create, share, embed and collaborate on interactive, visually engaging timelines that integrate video, audio, images, text, links, social media, location and timestamps.

Our Story:  http://www.ourstory.com/splash.html

Invites you to share photos, stories and videos on a collaborative time line – seems to be geared more towards personal storylines.  Calls itself the Internet time machine and has a series of questions sets to generate story-telling around specific significant events etc.

Tiki-Toki:  http://www.tiki-toki.com/

Promotes itself as a beautiful web based timeline package and it does look beautiful.  Ability to include photos, text and video etc but also lables, and backgrounds are easy to integrate.   It seems to run very smoothly also.

Timetoast:  http://www.timetoast.com/’

Another with little caption pointers to identify specific times.   Allows comments about the timeline to be posted.

Storybird: Collaborative Story telling:  http://storybird.com/

Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print.  Read them like books, play them like games, and send them like greeting cards. They’re curiously fun.

Allows you to select a range of images from the collection of themes that has been submitted by illustrators and then to add your own text to it.  Allows you view like an online e.book version that you can select from an existing library.  Book editor engine – provide a book layout for you to use.   Can collaborate and invite comments to your stories.

Smilebox:  http://www.smilebox.com/

Like a online scrapbook, invites you to use your photos and videos to create online photo albums and collages that can be embedded into other locations.   Offers a range of designs you can choose from and also music and other customable features.   As well as scrapbook creations, has slideshows, invitations and occasions creation templates.

Voicethread:  http://voicethread.com/

Bringing together images and discussion boards that can be held around images included.

Another possibility is to use one of the new generation of flipbook services, like FlipSnack and PageFlip-Flap, which generate digital booklets from pdf files.

Vuvox:  http://www.vuvox.com/

• Use COLLAGE to quickly produce dynamic interactive panoramas with hot-spots.
• Use STUDIO to build a personalized media presentation… and, place it in your COLLAGE.
• Use EXPRESS to build presentations with dynamic content from RSS feeds and online albums.
• Tap into CUT-OUT Express to use your photos as frames for slideshows.

DataVisualisation Web2.0

A technique which can make use of different web tools and services. It involves displaying data sets in visual, including video, formats.

Visual.ly:  http://visual.ly/about

Currently this site has examples of visualisations that have been created inhouse or by others that have submitted data/diagramatic representations.  However at present it is more of a repository of data visualisations not a creating space.  Says it is building the data visualisation tools of the future.   (They have one tool in their lab – a personality mirror of your twitter feeds).

Betterworldflux:  http://betterworldflux.com/ie.php

Needs you to be upgraded to a Chrome, Firefox or Safari browser.

Google Labs:  http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

Considered at the forefront of datavisualisation, offerings include Books Ngram Viewer – test the propensity of certain phrases to appear in books.

MashupAustralia:  http://mashupaustralia.org/

This site promotes the use of available Government data to create meaningful content and runs a competition each year to encourage mashups…  There are some wonderful examples that have been created and they have been made available in key category areas.

 

 

ITunes U and ITunes Podcast Repository

Over 800 universities have active iTunes U sites, and nearly half of these institutions — including Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, and UC Berkeley — distribute their content publicly on the iTunes Store. In addition, cultural and education institutions, such as the Library of Congress, public broadcasting organizations, and state departments of education, also contribute to this growing educational content repository that includes over 350,000 free lectures, audiobooks, lesson plans, and more. iTunes U is the ideal resource for educators who want to gain insight into curriculum being taught worldwide, get access to primary resources, and find inspiration for enhancing teaching and learning with technology.

Itunes also has a general podcast area – possibly with a slightly more commercial content offering but still with a lot of free content from providers such as the ABC and Triple JJJ.

The site also includes an extensive FAQ section for users and creators of Podcasts which includes clear instructions for meta-data and recording quality.  They suggest using the GarageBand software for the creation of podcasts.

Here’s just a sample of the extraordinary resources available for both K–12 and higher education on iTunes U:

	QUEST: Science and Nature KQED		Roy’s Writing Tools Poynter Institute
	Ask a Biologist Arizona IDEAL		Professional Development Edutopia
	Teaching Mathematics Virginia Department of Education		Archival Films The Library of Congress
	Lit2Go University of South Florida		MIT OpenCourseware MIT
	Three Countries You Ought to Know About Virginia Department of Educatio		College Courses UC Berkeley