JISC Digifest 2016 – by Hannah (Post 2/4)

by Hannah Temple

My key challenge from this year’s conference is that we increasingly need to look outside ourselves, not just as an institution but as a sector, to find out what is working well. It’s close to home but we can learn a lot from further education, for example – There’s lots of interesting, innovative and impactful work going on there that we can draw upon when we’re designing for learning. I attended a thought-provoking session hosted by Loughborough FE College Learning Technologists. Titled ‘CPD in action,’ they were showcasing their good practice on making learning technology training accessible and effective for academics.

Loughborough had developed a 90-minute training session for academics built around a series of tasks or challenges. Each task was linked to an element of their CPD framework to keep it relevant and a different piece of software was used as part of each task. It was a great way of demonstrating to academic colleagues just some of the ways learning technologies could be used in a session to support and enhance the embedding of key skills. It also provided academic colleagues with the student experience of learning technologies before thinking about how they could use them in their own sessions. You can read more about their session here:

http://blogs.loucoll.ac.uk/learningtechnology/2015/09/08/cracking-the-code-with-cpd/

So what can we learn from this? Hearing some of the positive feedback from participants, it’s clear that sessions like this could be a great platform for engaging with curriculum design here at Cardiff – to reflect on the methods and tools we use to convey our messages and facilitate learning. It’s also a great way of building our levels of comfort and familiarity by experiencing the tools in action. This is really helpful for our team as we continue to design and develop our workshops.