Registration for the twelfth annual Learning and Teaching conference is now open.
This year’s Learning and Teaching conference has the theme Equipping for Excellence: Pioneering Learning and Teaching Design and will be taking place between Tuesday 10 and Thursday 12 September 2024.
Staff, postgraduate teaching assistants, and students are invited to submit proposals for the 12th Annual Aberystwyth University Learning and Teaching Conference held 10-12 September 2024.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.
Subscribe to SEDA’s mailing list for email discussions about educational development and emerging teaching practices. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
Follow University of Birmingham’s Higher Education Futures institute HEFi on Twitter for daily posts with links to pedagogical literature and more. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
Join the #LTHEchat on Twitter Wednesday nights for one hour of lively discussion about learning and teaching in HE. I often find out about good resources for the Roundup from the chat.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to welcome our next external speakers on 2 and 3 May 2024, Pedagodzilla, the pedagogic podcast with the pop culture core, to Aberystwyth University. They are running a very special series of in-person events and CPD sessions on 2nd and 3rd May 2024.
2/5/2024 10:00-12:00 Powering professional development with Pedagodzilla
Staff can book on our CPD booking system. Interested students should contact the LTEU team to be added.
The Pedagodzilla visit to Aberystwyth starts with an introduction from the team, on who we are, what Pedagodzilla is – and includes us giving away free copies of our newly launched book, Pedagodzilla: Exploring the Realm of Pedagogy.
The book aims to demystify and disentangle the domains of pedagogy, using the lens of pop culture in a playful and accessible way. The book stems from episodes of the Pedagodzilla Podcast, which has now been running for five years, and has led to collaborations and conversations across the world, conference pieces and journal papers.
We feel that the book will be useful to anyone interested in education practice – and how theory can inform how we teach. In particular, this book is aimed at practitioners who may be suffering from the common higher-ed occupational hazard, imposter syndrome – giving them an accessible way to use the language of pedagogy to discuss and develop their own practice. We will talk about the book – share a QR code for people to access the pdf – and share some print copies until they run out.
We then move to a workshop, starting by discussing the development and framework of the Pedagodzilla Podcast as a professional development tool, and then inviting attendees to form groups to ideate their own powerful professional development projects within a framework. We draw it all together with a discussion of the underlying pedagogies, and tips for powering up your own professional development with creativity and authenticity.
In the Aber Takeover session, we invite attendees to form a team (using self-described roles to break up groups) to design a short segment of a show within a playful structured framework. Groups will record their contributions, which will go into a special Aberystwyth Takeover episode, published on the Pedagodzilla podcast feed. If you’re not a confident speaking or being recorded then don’t worry! This format includes options for non-speaking contributions.
On the second day, join Pedagodzilla for a recording session! An experiment with our format where we invite attendees to submit their own Pedagodzilla Style ‘pedagogy meets pop culture’ questions, to see if our flustered panellists can somehow blag a legitimate answer within a tight time limit, in a recorded podcast.
In the final session, we invite the good folk of Aberystwyth to pick the brains of the Pedagodzilla team – HE professionals from high profile universities across the country. Possible topics include but aren’t limited to:
Learning Design theory and practice (All)
The ups and downs of distance learning (All)
Experiential learning in virtual worlds, and the pedagogy (or not) of VR (Mark)
Podcasting for dummies (Mike)
Education futures, and innovations in pedagogy (Rebecca)
Learning behaviours (Elizabeth Ellis)
About Pedagodzilla
Pedagodzilla is the pedagogic podcast with the pop culture core, that looks to playfully understand and explore pedagogies and education practice through the lens of pop culture. The Pedagodzilla team will be officially launching their first book, Pedagodzilla: Exploring the Realm of Pedagogy at Aberystwyth.
Facilitators
Mike Collins: Producer and host of the Pedagodzilla podcast, and Senior Learning Designer at The Open University. Mike also provided the illustrations for the book.
Dr Mark Childs: Mark is a Senior Learning Designer at Durham University. He has a PhD in Education and was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2021 for his research and teaching using virtual reality and videoconferencing.
Prof Rebecca Ferguson: Professor Rebecca Ferguson is an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Learning Analytics, academic coordinator of the FutureLearn Academic Network (FLAN).
Elizabeth Ellis: At The Open University, Elizabeth develops digital learning experiences for OU students as well as OpenLearn and FutureLearn.
The April update to Blackboard Learn Ultra includes a much-requested feature; Anonymous posts for discussions. Additionally, there are improvements to feedback and Gradebook calculations.
Anonymous posts for Discussions
Discussions play a pivotal role in nurturing peer-to-peer interaction and critical thinking. Students need to feel free to express their ideas and opinions without fear of judgement. To support this, Blackboard have added an option for instructors to allow anonymous posts in ungraded discussions. This feature provides flexibility for instructors. They can toggle anonymity on or off as the discussion progresses. Any existing anonymous posts keep their anonymity.
Image below: Setting to turn on anonymous posts
Note: When intending to post anonymously a student must tick Post anonymously.
Image below: A student making an anonymous post with Post anonymously ticked (highlighted)
Image below: An anonymous post in a discussion
Add question feedback when grading by student
Instructors can now provide contextual feedback by student on all question types. Question level feedback promotes deeper understanding and personal growth among students. Question level feedback complements the existing capabilities of overall submission feedback and automated feedback for auto-graded questions.
Note: Blackboard are targeting the May release for per-question feedback when grading tests by questions rather than by student.
Image below: Instructor view of adding per question feedback
Image below: Instructor view of question with saved feedback
Once students have submitted their tests and scores are posted, students can access the feedback. Students can access both overall feedback and question-specific feedback.
Image below: Student view of feedback added to an essay question
Student feedback remains visible to students regardless of release condition settings
Instructors may want to control access to course content using release conditions. This is helpful for providing custom learning paths through course content. The release conditions include an option to show or hide content to/from students before they meet release conditions. Blackboard have modified how these settings impact the students’ view of feedback from instructors. Now instructors can set release conditions without any impact to feedback to students.
In the past, when an instructor selected the option to hide content, students could view associated grades but not the feedback. Blackboard have corrected this to ensure that students can always review feedback.
Image below: Instructor view of release conditions settings with date/time release condition set in combination with Hide state in “When will content appear?”
Image below: Student gradebook view with display of student’s feedback and grade regardless of the release condition setting in the above image.
Persistent navigation for Learning Modules
To improve students’ navigation in a learning module, Blackboard have updated the navigation bar. Now the navigation bar is sticky and remains visible as students vertically scroll through content. Students no longer need to scroll back up to the top of content to access the navigation tools.
Image below: The navigation bar is always visible
Calculations changed from using BigDecimal to BigFraction
Instructors need a gradebook that supports diverse grading scenarios. Blackboard are changing the software library used to perform calculations in calculated columns and the overall course grade.
Example: A course contains 3 assignments worth 22 points each. The student scores 13/22 on the first assignment, 14/22 on the second assignment, and 15/22 on the third assignment. An instructor creates a calculated column to calculate the average of these assignments.
Using the new software library, BigFraction, the average will calculate as 14/22.
With the former software library, BigDecimal, the average would incorrectly calculate to 13.99/22. The new software library ensures calculations compute as expected.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Abril, D. (26/2/2024), I used AI work tools to do my job. Here’s how it went. Does AI save you time or create more work? We put Microsoft’s Copilot and Gemini for Google Workspace to the test., The Washington Post
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.
Subscribe to SEDA’s mailing list for email discussions about educational development and emerging teaching practices. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
Follow University of Birmingham’s Higher Education Futures institute HEFi on Twitter for daily posts with links to pedagogical literature and more. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
Join the #LTHEchat on Twitter Wednesday nights for one hour of lively discussion about learning and teaching in HE. I often find out about good resources for the Roundup from the chat.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.
