Learn Plus Monthly Update – May 2015

by Dewi Parry

Welcome to the first monthly update for the Learn Plus project by the Learning Technology working group. These updates will let you know what’s going on with the Learn Plus project, to give an insight into developments from a learning technology perspective.

The project includes a working group of learning technologists from all over the University and all members are there to help ensure University colleagues are informed of the work going on. As more people come into contact with Learn Plus, we hope to publicise good practice and innovative ideas through the form of this monthly blog post.

What the group is working on this month

The workload for this month consists is involved with various aspects.

Early Adoption Questionnaire

The group are working on a questionnaire to recruit early adopters, based around:

• Ambition / Appetite / Demand within the School to adopt Learn Plus;
• Technical Support available;
• What are the scenarios and practices the Schools hope to achieve?

Early Adoption teaching and assessment foci

From the pedagogical angle, we are looking at what we can learn from early adopters, and these are some of the scenarios we have put together which we would like to learn about:

Teaching (basics)

• Flipped Learning – taking a more learner-centered approach to teaching;
• Blended Learning – face to face sessions and reinforcing student understanding ;
• Helping students learn ‘on the spot’ –  using video to answer practical questions quickly.

Assessment and feedback

• Creative assessment exercises that utilise multimedia;
• Recording  assessment-related presentations
• Note-taking, reviewing and questioning  for formative assessment and revision assessments.
• Providing general / group feedback on assessment activities.

The project will look to early adopters to:

• Provide feedback to help improve the service;
• Contribute their experiences to the knowledge base;
• Contribute teaching scenarios and practices to the knowledge base.

Scenarios to evaluate will include:

• Lecture Capture;
• Personal Capture;
• Capture Room;
• Mobile Capture;
• Live stream events;
• Capturing learning materials to aid accessibility.

Other news from the group

About the technology itself

We’re now in a position to let you know that the successful tender for the project came from Panopto. Panopto are well known in higher education, have worked with many HEIs in the UK, and have already been working with our very own School of Law and Politics and the School of Psychology. Here’s a video outlining some of its possibilities:

Learning and Teaching Event (2^nd July)

Learn Plus will be represented fully at the up-coming learning and teaching event in July. The group are currently gathering ideas for themes / presenters to contribute towards the event. Further details to be released soon.

We hope that this update gives you an idea of what’s going on in the background at the moment. If you have any questions that you would like to raise, please contact the team: LearnPlus@cardiff.ac.uk.