Motivation strategies for online engagement – reflections from the last Academy Forum in Semester One

For the last Academy Forum in Semester One we chose one of the most common topics raised by teaching staff; how to motivate students, particularly when it comes to online learning?

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The first part of the session was a general discussion which started from reflection on when we feel most motivated and it revealed factors such as:

  • When there is external pressure (deadline) 
  • When it is enjoyable
  • When it involves other people 
  • When the tasks are not that difficult, important or multifaceted
  • When you receive positive feedback

Attendees also shared their strategies for keeping themselves motivated:

  • Switching between tasks
  • Breaking big projects into smaller tasks
  • Asking yourself why do you need to do it?
  • Completing a smaller, manageable task and using the ‘success high’ and motivation that comes with it to work on something else
  • Complaining less about having to do it and just getting on with it
  • Using lists and being able to cross things off
  • Setting realistic targets 
  • Looking after yourself (trying to see work in perspective)

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Why and how to help students to reflect on their learning?

In the next Academy Forum this year we explored the why and how of helping students to reflect on their learning. Our discussion started from the attempt to define what reflection is.  Using the polling software we gathered initial thoughts from the attendees which touched upon different aspects of reflection including learning, challenging assumptions, noticing, evaluating and thinking about an action.

What is reflection? learning, self-actualisation, challenging assumptions, developing, thinking about an action, mindfulness, evaluating, noticing, thinking, making sense, pondering, process, evaluating

“Put simply, reflection is about maximising deep and minimising surface approaches to learning.” (Hinett, 2002 as cited in Philip, 2006, p. 37). Students who adopt a more surface approach to learning and students who have little interest in the topic are more likely to view any assessment as a means to an end. However, students who adopt a deep approach, committed to understanding the topic, and those who take the time to think about feedback are much more likely to improve their future performance. The difference between the two approaches (surface and deep) is that the ‘deep’ learner reflects on experience. Reflection is also a way of getting students to realise that learning is about drawing on life experiences, not just something that takes place in the lecture theatre. It helps students to think about what, why and how they learn and to understand that this impacts on how well they do (Philip, 2006).

As reiterated by Race (2002 as cited in Philip, 2006, p.37): “Reflection deepens learning. The act of reflecting is one which causes us to make sense of what we’ve learned, why we learned it, and how that particular increment of learning took place. Moreover, reflection is about linking one increment of learning to the wider perspective of learning – heading towards seeing the bigger picture. Reflection is equally useful when our learning has been unsuccessful – in such cases indeed reflection can often give us insights into what may have gone wrong with our learning, and how on a future occasion we might avoid now-known pitfalls. Most of all, however, it is increasingly recognised that reflection is an important transferable skill, and is much valued by all around us, in employment, as well as in life in general.”

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Using Podcasts for Teaching

The second Academy Forum session this year focused on creating podcasts in Panopto. The discussion emphasised podcasts’ unique potential for facilitating a sense of connection. Usually based on informal monologues, interviews and discussions podcasts provide their users with opportunities to listen in to unconstructed reflections and conversations. As explained by Street (2014) audio storytelling creates a ‘partnership between imagination and memory’ triggering a unique and personal reaction to it (as cited in McHugh, 2014, p.143). Podcasts can provide us with company; unlike with videos or written texts, we can listen to them during other daily activities.

These unique properties of podcasts hold great potential for its use in education. University of Cambridge created a collection of short podcasts from various subject areas. Podcasts are also used by individual educators, Ian Wilson, a Senior Lecturer in Education at York St John University Ian Wilson created a series of podcasts aimed at supporting learners on placements. His podcast focused on providing students with instructions on what the students should be doing the following week, answering any of their questions and providing some motivational advice. Although podcasting may not necessarily be the best solution for delivering the key learning material, as discussed during the Academy Forum session, it can complement your current teaching practice by fostering reflection, increasing learner’s engagement and foster a sense of community.

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Academy Forums 2020/21


The Academy Forum provides a platform for sharing good practice in learning and teaching. The Forum is open to members of the University community: teaching staff, postgraduate tutors, support staff, and students are all welcome. All forums will be held online for the year 2020/21 and you can click here to book your place.

The Academy Forums for the year 2020/21 are:

07.10.2020 (14:00-15:30): Creating a Learning and Teaching Community

19.10.2020 (11:00-12:30): Creating Podcasts in Panopto

19.11.2020 (10:00-11:30): Why and how to help students to reflect on their learning?

30.11.2020 (14:00-15:30): Motivation strategies for Online Learning Engagement

27.01.2021 (15:00-16:30): How can I plan online and in person activities?

19.02.2021 (10:00-11:30): How can I make my teaching more inclusive?

We hope that you will be able to attend these forums. Please contact us with any questions (lteu@aber.ac.uk).

Additional Distance Learning Forum

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Following feedback, we have added an additional Distance Learning Forum.

Supervising at a Distance

Date: 11.03.2020

Time: 14:00-15:30

Location: E3, E-learning Training Room

This forum is an opportunity to discuss to the good practice happening around the university on a variety of distance learning schemes and modules.  For those of you who are already supervising at a distance, we hope you will be able to bring your expertise and knowledge to those who are newer to this process. 

Book your place online: https://stafftraining.bis.aber.ac.uk/sd/list_courses.php

 

Mini Conference: Group Work and Group Assessment, Monday 16 December, 10.30am

Mini Conference Programme

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On Monday 16th December, at 10.30am, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit will be hosting this year’s Academy Mini Conference.

The Mini Conference is a smaller version of our Annual Learning and Teaching Conference which allows us to pull together a series of presentations and workshops around a particular learning and teaching topic.

This year the Mini Conference has the theme of Group Work and Group Assessment.

We’re excited to confirm our programme:

  • Professor John Traxler, Professor of Digital Learning, University of Wolverhampton: Working (Groups) in the Digital Age
  • Dr Jennifer Wood & Roberta Sartoni (Modern Langauges): Group Work as an Active-Learning Tool in Translation Classes
  • Janet Roland & John Harrington (Student Support Services): Supporting students who find group work challenging
  • Dr Gareth Llŷr Evans (Theatre, Film and Television Studies): Prosesau Creadigol Agored ac Asesu Grwpiau Bach
  • Dr Ian Archer (Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit): Learning Environments and your personality preferences
  • Mary Jacob (Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit): Designing and Assessing Group Work

We hope that you’ll be able to join us for this event. Places at the Mini Conference are limited so please book your place via this booking page.

 

Mini Conference Keynote: Working (Groups) in the Digital Age

The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce Professor John Traxler as the keynote speaker at our forthcoming Mini Conference.

The mini conference will focus on Group Work and Group Assessment and will be held on Monday 16th December, 10:30am-4pm in B.03, Visualisation Centre.

You can book onto the event online.

Mini Conference Keynote: Working (Groups) in the Digital Age

Since the turn of the century, we have seen digital technologies evolve from being expensive, fragile, scarce, puny and difficult, often just institutional, to being powerful, ubiquitous, pervasive, easy, cheap and robust, now personal and social. In this time, they have changed the nature of the commodities, assets, transactions and organisation that constitute our economic lives; have challenged the certainties of political issues, affiliations and processes; in languages, we have seen the emergence of new vocabularies, genres and dialects; they have fuelled moral panics and catalysed new forms of harm, affront and misdemeanour.

Furthermore, they have given students the means and opportunities to generate, share, transform, discuss and access ideas, images, identities and information and in doing so have the potential to threaten the established professions, institutions and forms of education, to shift the ownership and control of what is known, who knows it and how it gets to be known.

This then is the world that graduates enter, the world of work transformed and un-work undefined. Universities take them from the structures and security of the school to worlds with neither. How can pedagogic formats like assessment and groupwork support this transition?

Mini Conference: Inclusive Education Summary: Part 2

This is the second blogpost documenting this year’s Mini Conference on Inclusive Education that was recently hosted by the E-learning Group. For an overview of the first half, please see this blogpost.

The second half of the conference began with Neil MacKintosh and Meirion Roberts from the IBERS BioInnovation Wales scheme discussing widening access to their modules. Recently, the team have sought to address high level and technical skills shortages in bio-based businesses, including AgriFood. One of the aims of the programme is to look into ways to engage graduates with a distance learning course who are currently working in industry but might not have time to undertake a postgraduate degree. It’s hoped that the scheme will increase productivity in Wales by emphasising the reciprocal relationship between industry and research. The BioInnovation Wales scheme works closely with industry partners to provide a flexible route for those in work to gain postgraduate qualifications. Neil gave an introduction to the scheme before passing onto his colleague, Meirion Roberts. Meirion is an associate lecturer at the BioInnovation Wales whose job it is to provide a bilingual learning experience for the postgraduate distance learning modules. The BioInnovation courses are solely delivered online using Blackboard with a whole host of different learning materials. Students registered on the course currently have access to the resources in both Welsh and English. One of the first tasks for Meirion when he started work with the BioInnovation unit was to create a bilingual course interface, course materials, and lectures. These modules use forums on Blackboard as a mode of assessment. One of the challenges that faces the bilingual delivery of these modules is how to moderate and facilitate bilingual forums. Following a discussion between attendees, it was felt that one way forward would be to encourage those posting on the forums to post their responses in both Welsh and English rather than responses in Welsh having to be translated into English. If the precedence was set to post in both languages then it was felt that this would be a more inclusive approach for creating a bilingual learning environment. If you would like to find out more about using assessed forums, we’ve got some information on grading the discussion board

After this presentation, Mary Jacob, lecturer in Learning and Teaching in CDSAP, and Nicky Cashman, accessibility advisor, at Student Support Services offered a demonstration on Creating Inclusive and Accessible Learning materials. The aim of the presentation was to give attendees some practical tips on creating more accessible resources for students, including items that can be downloaded from the Virtual Learning Environment. Giving some context, 16% of the Aberystwyth Student Population have disclosed a disability, which is slightly higher than a sector average of 12%. Mary and Nicky spoke through the following topics:

  • Microsoft Accessibility Checker – a tool that is built into Word
  • Using styles in Word to make the structure of your material clear to students
  • How you can best convert your Word document into a PDF file
  • Which colours might be most appropriate to use

Mary and Nicky also shared with attendees a resource created by the University of Hull on designing content for diverse learners. This resource is available online.  In addition to this, attendees were also given a handout of The Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, produced by CAST. Mary also maintains a Trello board which hosts lots of useful resources to learning and teaching activities. There’s a card on the Trello board specifically dedicated to Creating Accessible Learning Materials under the Projects/ areas of interest.

The final presentation was delivered by Dr Jennifer Wood from the Modern Languages Department. Dr Wood teaches Spanish and reflected on her use of Blackboard Tests in her teaching. The aim of these tests is to check the understanding of students learning Spanish outside of the classroom. Using Blackboard Tests allows Dr Wood to free up her face to face lessons and contact time with her students. Before using the online tests, precious time in teaching sessions was given over to in class assessments. Dr Wood also gave an additional context to the presentation by discussing Foreign Language Anxiety and how Blackboard Tests can help combat this through their ability to be taken (and retaken) at a time that suits the learner in an environment that they feel comfortable in. One of the advantages of using Blackboard tests is that once you’ve built it, you can export, import and redeploy in a different module. In addition to this, tests can be marked automatically and feedback given to the learner upon completion of the test. Depending on the learning need, tests can be either formative or summative and can link directly to the grade centre. Counter balancing these advantages to using tests, there may also be some challenges. Tests can take time to build and create. They can, however, be created any time that suits you and can be imported and deployed into the module that you require the test for.  The trade off, however, is that you will have a resource that can be used year upon year. If you notice that a question is wrong, you can reallocate marks, change the grades or edit the question for all those who have taken the test. There are many types of questions that can be used in Blackboard quizzes. See the full list of question types that are available for Blackboard tests (please note, that depending on the type of question you select, depends on whether it can be marked automatically or not). There’s further guidance on tests on our FAQs. The E-learning Group are always happy to work with our academic colleagues to help you design, create and deploy your tests. We have a great deal of expertise in this area.  

This year’s Mini Conference had our highest attendance yet. Next year, we might have to look at switching rooms. If you would like to suggest a topic for next year’s Mini Conference then please get in touch with us. A reminder as well that we’ve currently got our Call for Proposals open for this year’s Academy Mini Conference. You can submit a proposal by going to this online form. We’d like to thank all of presenters for giving up their time and sharing their practices with all the attendees.

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Mini Conference: Inclusive Education Summary: Part 1

On the 10th April, the E-learning Group welcomed 26 staff members from across the University to this year’s Mini Conference. The theme for this year’s Mini Conference was Inclusive Education and the six presentations ranged from practical guides for creating accessible documents through to working with neurodiverse students. Over the course of the afternoon, there were six presentations. Given the breadth of topics under discussion, this summary will be split into two parts, with part 1 reflecting on the first three presentations. A summary of the final three presentations will be provided in our next blogpost.

The conference opened with a recorded presentation delivered by Dr Rob Grieve. Dr Grieve is a senior lecturer in Physiotherapy at the University of the West of England, Bristol. In addition to his academic research, Dr Grieve also runs workshops called Stand Up and Be Heard. The Stand Up and Be Heard workshops focused on assisting students who had a fear of public speaking which affected assessments that included presentation elements. Dr Grieve underpinned his presentation with research conducted by Marinho et al (2017) which identified that in a sample of 1,135 undergraduate students, 64% of them reported a fear of public speaking and 89% of them would have liked additional guidance and support on public speaking from their institutions. Closing his presentation, Dr Grieve identified strategies for staff that would help to support students with public speaking and assessed presentations. He suggests that:

  1. Recognise and acknowledge the fear of public speaking that many students have in required module presentation assessments and in general
  2. Apart from our subject teaching role, we can support students (or refer on) […] to reduce their public speaking fear
  3. Presentations and public speaking are transferable life skills, enhance employability and are not only used for assessment

Dr Grieve also noted that presentations do not have to be perfect. The key message to pass onto students is to be themselves in their presentations and to be authentic. The workshops that Rob ran were very successful for students, especially for those who were going on to give presentation assessments. You can find out more about the workshops online.

Presentation from Rob Grieve

Following on from Dr Grieve’s presentation, Dr Debra Croft gave us a presentation on the work that the Centre for Widening Participation and Social Inclusion have done around embedding Core Skills in their curriculum at Summer University. The Core Skills module is delivered primarily in Week 1 of the course and is a module in and of itself. The aim of the module is to equip students with the study and life skills that they will need over the rest of the Summer School and beyond. Given the time constraints of the Summer University programme, it’s not possible to embed the core skills in the subject specific curriculum so all students need to take the Core Skills module.

The team completely re-designed the module in 2016-17 based on the feedback that was given by students and staff and low satisfaction score. Following their redesign, the Core Skills module increased its satisfaction to 80% in 2016, high 80s% in 2017 before receiving a 94% satisfaction rate in 2018. The success of the module was attributed to the changes that were made by the teaching team. The biggest difference in 2018 for this module was the change in the delivery of the module. Closed Facebook groups were used to communicate with various students, as well as making full use of Blackboard and Turnitin for assignments. The Core Skills Module emphasised inclusivity and learning differences, which allowed tutors to build  requirements into their teaching. Assessments are standardised and designed to be inclusive from the beginning which means that everyone does the same assessment. They also use Blackboard quizzes which are marked automatically for training and IT skills. More information on the work of the Centre for Widening Participation and Social Inclusion is available their webpages.

The third and final session in this half of the conference was delivered by Janet Roland and Caroline White from Student Support and Career Services. Their presentation, Teaching for Everyone: Neurodiversity and Inclusive Practices, equipped attendees with practical skills for creating learning and teaching activities for neurodiverse students. The workshop started with an ice breaker exercise. In pairs, participants had to label themselves A and B. A’s were first asked to talk about their last holiday to B’s for 1 minute. Following this, B’s were asked to tell A’s about their last holiday but they weren’t allowed to use any word that contained the letter ‘E’. Participants were then given an envelope containing terms of neurodiverse behaviour and their characteristics. Attendees then had to match the label to the characteristics. This presentation gave participants the chance to think about the various neurodiverse profiles and strategies in which a more inclusive learning experience can be created. 

References

Marinho, ACF., de Madeiros, AM., Gama, AC and Teixeira, LC. 2017. Fear of Public Speaking: Perception of College Students and Correlates. Journal of Voice. 31: 1. DOI: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2015.12.012.

 

Call for Proposals – Group Work and Group Assessment

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The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit are pleased to announce that the first of this year’s Academy Mini Conferences will be held on Monday 16th December 2019. This Mini Conference will explore the advantageous and complex nature of group work, in and out of the classroom, and as a mode of assessment.

We are looking for expressions of interest from members of the University to give presentations, demonstrations, workshops and discussions on their how they approach group teaching. If you would like to submit a proposal to this year’s mini-conference, please fill in this online form before Monday 18th November. 

Potential topics might include (but aren’t limited to):

  • Group assessment design and marking (including peer marking)
  • Approaches to embedding group work into teaching (large and small teaching)
  • Use of technology in group work
  • Managing and supporting different group dynamics

You can register to attend the Mini Conference by clicking on this link. If you have any queries, please email lteu@aber.ac.uk.