I’ve written before about the Reflective Evaluation project. It is a two year European Commission funded project, now drawing to a close, which aimed to produce ICT based resources for facilitating self evaluation activities by teachers. Pretty challenging, huh?
At the outset the project coordinators had the idea that this could be done with a tool developed in Powerpoint. The rest of the partners were not so sure. For many of us Powerpoint had little appeal, in terms of its scriptability and attactivess for users. The coordinators, Ira and Gerald form the University of Flensburg, were fortunately flexible and open to new ideas.
Jen, Chris and myself designed a web 2.0 (ish) tool, allowing teachers and trainers to access and answer multimedia questions designed to stimulate reflection, to see and compare with the answers of others and to create their own tools.
OK, it doesn/t go as far as I would like but there are real challenges getting people for five different countries to share meanings and ideas, and pedagogic limitations in the European Commission demand that the questions should be available in each partner language.
But the best bit of the project has been the multimedia. Despite most partners being traditional academic researchers, with limited computer experience, by this weeks workshop all of them were working together, sharing in creating videos and other multi media artifacts. Its creative and great fun.
Want to have a look? Better still, want to create your own learning materials. All you have to do is go to www.refelctive-evaluation.eu and create yourself an account.
NB We are still editing the help videos so you will have to learn as you go. But if you would like more information please get in touch. And before you ask, of course it is Open Source.
Digital Literacy
A National Survey fin Wales in 2017-18 showed that 15% of adults (aged 16 and over) in Wales do not regularly use the internet. However, this figure is much higher (26%) amongst people with a limiting long-standing illness, disability or infirmity.
A new Welsh Government programme has been launched which will work with organisations across Wales, in order to help people increase their confidence using digital technology, with the aim of helping them improve and manage their health and well-being.
Digital Communities Wales: Digital Confidence, Health and Well-being, follows on from the initial Digital Communities Wales (DCW) programme which enabled 62,500 people to reap the benefits of going online in the last two years.
See here for more information
Zero Hours Contracts
Figures from the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency show that in total almost 11,500 people – both academics and support staff – working in universities on a standard basis were on a zero-hours contract in 2017-18, out of a total staff head count of about 430,000, reports the Times Higher Education. Zero-hours contract means the employer is not obliged to provide any minimum working hours
Separate figures that only look at the number of people who are employed on “atypical” academic contracts (such as people working on projects) show that 23 per cent of them, or just over 16,000, had a zero-hours contract.
Resistance decreases over time
Interesting research on student centered learning and student buy in, as picked up by an article in Inside Higher Ed. A new study published in PLOS ONE, called “Knowing Is Half the Battle: Assessments of Both Student Perception and Performance Are Necessary to Successfully Evaluate Curricular Transformation finds that student resistance to curriculum innovation decreases over time as it becomes the institutional norm, and that students increasingly link active learning to their learning gains over time
Postgrad pressure
Research published this year by Vitae and the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) and reported by the Guardian highlights the pressure on post graduate students.
“They might suffer anxiety about whether they deserve their place at university,” says Sally Wilson, who led IES’s contribution to the research. “Postgraduates can feel as though they are in a vacuum. They don’t know how to structure their time. Many felt they didn’t get support from their supervisor.”
Taught students tend to fare better than researchers – they enjoy more structure and contact, says Sian Duffin, student support manager at Arden University. But she believes anxiety is on the rise. “The pressure to gain distinction grades is immense,” she says. “Fear of failure can lead to perfectionism, anxiety and depression.”
Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.
We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.