We’re taking hyflex (hybrid flexible) here as teaching online and campus students at the same seminar at the same time, equivalently. Introduction It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to teach campus and online students in live seminars at the same time. Early writing about this sets out a vision of inclusion. Students …
In online learning, what role should we give to caring? If you’d like to join us, here’s what we’re discussing (in order of priority). The best place to start we could find were Caring in Education and Maha Bali’s Pedagogy of Care Covid-19 Edition. For a rather denser but rewarding review of research in the …
Covid-19 has accelerated a move to online assessment. Where there is a will to hold those assessments as unseen examinations under controlled conditions, online invigilation – also known as remote proctoring – becomes a possibility. What is remote invigilation (aka remote proctoring)? In 2020 SURF (Netherlands organisation to support technologies in education and research) updated …
A discussion of recent publications about camera use during webinars. With a large amount of university teaching needing to take place online, webinars are now more popular than ever before. Most webinar platforms enable those participating to stream their videos for all or a part of each session. The option for anonymity or invisibility is …
It’s so hard to escape from the pressures of university exams! We’ll be looking at arguments around whether using technology can reduce or increase this stress for students and staff. Join us for a discussion of recent publications about digital solutions for high-stakes exams. If you only read one thing – make it The future …
Introduction For many learning technologists a major part of the role is communicating research evidence to educators and fund holders. But have you ever searched the literature on something – voting systems, lecture capture, audio feedback, for example – and found yourself caught between a bunch of articles which are hard to synthesise, or a …
Learning analytics: the good, the bad and the ugly
How beneficial, realistic and ethical are learning analytics?
Learning Analytics is defined as the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs. (Definition from the 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge). We’ll be discussing how beneficial, realistic and ethical such practices are, drawing on …
What can cognitive psychology and neuroscience tell us about learning?
Answers to this question can be found in the work of Daniel T Willingham
According to Wikipedia Daniel T Willingham: [did] research [in the 1990s and 2000s] focused on the brain mechanisms supporting learning, the question of whether different forms of memory are independent of one another and how these hypothetical systems might interact. Willingham is known as a proponent of the use of scientific knowledge in classroom teaching and in education policy. He …
Computer Non Grata
In 2014 Mueller and Oppenheimer published a paper finding that longhand was better for learning than typing. This year a paper replicated the research, arriving at different findings.
The good news is that keyboards enable students to take a large volume of notes. These function as external storage beyond what students could simply remember, and when students are selective about the notes they make, the act of note-making can be generative, leading to deep, elaborative processing. Which brings us to the bad news. …
Points of Learning Need
When and why do people try to learn something? What are these points of learning need?
Whilst many of us who work in elearning are highly attuned to how people like to learn and what, even, helps them to learn, we often fail to understand when and why they chose to try to learn something in the first instance. In this London eLearning Reading Group session, Toby Harris (Solution Architect at …