Portsmouth Business School eLearning Team

1. PBS Learning News Achieving the right blend! The DCQE eLearning Centre 1 12 Issue 5 – Spring 2009 Workshop Programme & Useful Links Engaging Learners When Henry Ford introduced the ‘Just In Time’ method of manufacturing cars in 1923, it signalled a step change in the way parts were bought by Ford from a range of suppliers. These satellite companies, used to providing goods in bulk, suddenly found themselves having to re-stock Ford as and when Ford was about to run out of those parts. By changing the management of stock from supply ‘push’ to demand ‘pull’, Ford were able to use the capital previously tied up on warehouse shelves to finance product development. Without careful design of learning objects, a VLE can mirror the principles of supply ‘push’. PowerPoint slides alone will not ignite a student’s desire to learn! If this is all the site contains, then it will be a fairly sterile place, and won’t get used by students already engaging with Facebook and other Web 2.0 tools.Sites like Facebook can be a barrier to learning though, as students at local universities (inc. the UoP) have found. See the article at: http://tinyurl.com/csaybw. One use of a VLE is to protect students from the ‘fire hydrant’ of the internet, and to focus their lines of enquiry onto relevant study materials and links. Lecture slides can be added to with case studies as PDFs and links to streaming video, which complement inbuilt VLE features like discussion boards, blogs and internal email. If assessments or assignments are incorporated within the VLE, students will use the site, perhaps more because they have to than because the site is necessarily a font of learning or a community of practice. Well designed and interesting learning objects can help to build interest in a site though. To create the educational equivalent of demand ‘pull’ requires staff-student interaction, two way feedback, and a continually changing but professionally supported online ‘classroom’, that also leverages the community building facilities of embedded Web 2.0 sites like Twitter. It requires assessments to be split up into smaller chunks, allowing early feedback to direct learning, and to encourage students of all learning styles. Build this living entity and students will become involved, and keen to find out ‘what’s coming next’. Want your own customisable manual covering how to use the Victory VLE? Please follow the link http://www.elearning.port.ac.uk/api/customManual/ What other services can the DCQE eLearning Centre offer to academics? Editorial help with copy editing and proof reading, artwork creation and DTP, advice on printing of single page flyers to 400 page volumes, media production, script writing, location filming, TV studio production, video editing and colour correction, graphic design and animation, audio recording, media streaming, and video. Email the eTeam! david.starkey@port.ac.uk rachel.short@port.ac.uk elearn@port.ac.uk Portsmouth Business School eLearning Team http://www.port.ac.uk/departments/services/dcqe/eLearningCentre/eLearning/

2. PBS eTeam: Message & Theme The PBS Learning Resource Library 11 2 Useful Books for Short Loan from BT 0.06 ELC Message http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/ Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series) - Rena M. Palloff; Paperback - £24.99: 978-0787988258. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms: - Will Richardson; Paperback - £14.24: 978-1412959728. Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community (Online Teaching and Learning Series (OTL)) - Rena M. Palloff; Paperback - £16.14: 978-0787976149. 75 e-learning Activities: 75 Activities, Tips, and Resources - Ryan Watkins; Hardcover£44.63: 978-0787975852. The E-learning Handbook: Social Networking for Higher Education: Resources for Higher Education - Robin Mason; Paperback - £23.74: 978-0415426077. Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines - D. Randy Garrison; Hardcover - £22.09: 978-0787987701. e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning - Ruth Colvin Clark; Hardcover - £25.89: 978-0787986834. Preparing for Blended E-Learning: Understanding Blended and Online Learning (Connecting with E-learning) - Allison Littlejohn; Paperback - £21.84: 978-0415403610. The Online Learning Idea Book: 95 Proven Ways to Enhance Technology-based and Blended Learning - Patti Shank; Paperback - £22.09: 978-0787981686. E-Learning: the Key Concepts (Routledge Key Guides) - Robin Mason; Paperback Condition: New - £14.24: 978-0415373074. Challenging E Learning in the University: A Literacies Perspective (Society for Research Into Higher Education) - £27.54: 978-0335220878. Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversational Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies - £19.99: 978-0415256797. Better Than Bullet Points: Creating Engaging eLearning with PowerPoint£28.89: 978-0787992453. Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning£19.99: 978-0415408745. Supporting Students in Open and Distance Learning (Open & Flexible Learning) (Paperback) - £21.84: 978-0749437404. Evaluation in Distance Education and E-learning (Paperback) - £21.85: 978-1593858728. Delivering E-learning: A Complete Strategy for Design, Application and Assessment (Hardcover) - £19.25: 978-0749453978. David Starkey: PBS eLearning Coordinator We continue to support the creation of Victory sites, with focus now on arranging for units at levels 2 and 3 to have a presence. Mandy McCartney joins the eTeam at the end of April to help us with this, and we hope to have another member of the team joining us in August. We also aim to provide additional support for academics wanting to enrich their sites. Rachel and I will soon be offering training in the use of a number of software tools that make the creation of ‘learning objects’ easier to do – see page 3. Learning objects can be created from scratch using Flash, or by writing web page code. For many however, the simpler the task of content authoring the better, so on pages 4 to 6 I have described new software that makes the creation of Flash-based objects that can each be embedded into Victory. ‘Xerte’ is a powerful tool because it allows users to create pages with text, images, video, audio, formative click to choose or drag ‘n drop quizzes, transcript reading, and a whole range of other facilities, all of which can be reached from an intuitive and attractive interface. If you want to download Xerte and associated toolkit, you can do so from the link in the box above. We intend to support colleagues who want to make video, screencasts, podcasts, composite PDF documents, and enhanced PowerPoint presentations, and will be providing more detail about courses soon. Details of this quarter’s workshops being run by the DCQE eLearning Centre are provided on the back cover as usual. We are also on Twitter with ‘eteamnews’ (see page 7), will be launching ‘PBS eLearning’ pages on Staff Essentials, and a Victory good practice site ‘PBS MediaLab’in May. We also have a second Twitter site on the way ‘Pedagogic’ which will discuss the pedagogies of learning in the digital age. Twitter is a good way to create communities of practice. While ‘eteamnews’ is for staff reference, students can follow Twitter postings associated with a unit or course – learning in a way they are used to. Pages 8 to 10 discuss an extension of Kolb’s Learning Cycle that attempts to show how different electronic changes the way students undertake their learning. Without guidance and feedback, students using web-based resources can fail to complete the learning cycle. It is our job to facilitate the two way feedback, reflection and adaptation of taught materials that can fire learners with a thirst to find out more about a subject. The theory examines a ‘Conversational Framework’ (after Ramsden, & Laurillard). http://www.port.ac.uk/staffessentials/departments/faculties/businessschool/

3. Rethinking University Teaching in the Digital Age – C PBS eTeam: Training & Media Development http://www.twitter.com/eteamnews 7 3 3 10 New eTeam Training Services Available Towards a Learning Community The VLE: A Richer Constructed Environment? Out of the box, ‘Victory’, as we all affectionately call our VLE (WebCT Vista), has proved something of an own goal for defenders of online learning. It’s retro interface, combined with our in-house server problems, have hidden some of the positive impact that a good VLE can have on the student learning experience. By focussing on the development of learning objects, such as those that can be produced by Wimba Create, Camtasia Studio, Adobe Presenter, Captivate and Acrobat Pro Extended, and Xerte, we can embed into Victory high quality learning materials that can offer some of the learning experiences described on page 8. (It is for this reason that the eTeam is gearing up to help colleagues produce these objects, through training). These learning objects can be used with any VLE, including the inevitable future replacement for Victory, as time moves on. By making use of discussion boards and blogs, both inside and outside Victory (web-based materials can always be made and hosted outside Victory and linked into it, as many colleagues already do quite successfully). Rachel Short: PBS Online Course Developer Despite there having been some issues with our virtual learning environment, we have made good progress in creating and developing both Victory sites and content in this academic year. Staff training has consisted of PBS 1-2-1 and group sessions, in addition to those provided by the eLearning centre. The eTeam is now expanding our training offering beyond Victory. A brief description of future PBS sessions is detailed below. See also ‘Building Learning Objects’, pages 4 and 5. Enhancing the Online Experience It is also quite possible to have an online lecture that is interactive, communicative and allows application sharing and whiteboarding, through the use of a live ‘Wimba Classroom’. Students and academic can conference live, making use of sidebar instant messaging, and video conferencing. Sessions can be archived and accessed again by those who missed a session, or want to hear the content again. Without lecture capture, this is not true of traditional one-to-many lectures. Some people consider playing back a lecture warts and all less than useful, but for students it can be a useful revision tool – and they are after all – our paying clients. Tools like Camtasia Studio can record anything that can appear on a computer screen, and associated audio, and provide a menu-driven Flash object that can include quizzes, callouts, hotspots etc. The eTeam is available for bespoke training sessions for groups of up to 30, or on a 1-2-1 basis. If you are a new member of staff, please contact me at rachel.short@port.ac.uk, or the DCQE eLearning Centre at elearn@port.ac.uk, to arrange a training session in the use of our VLE. Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful tool that is often underestimated. It can be used to enhance presentations with sound and to embed objects / video. The Wimba Collaboration Suite offers live classroom & webinar facilities, voice authoring and commenting tools, most of which are integrated within our VLE. Turnitin focuses on plagiarism-detection. It allows students to submit work online and get a report back that points out likely plagiarism. It has been adopted by PBS and is governed by the Data Protection policy. SafeAssign is Blackboard’s alternative and is also undergoing a trial within DCQE. Building a Learning Community Pedagogy suggests that online environments that involve students in themed activities, that include business scenarios, simulations, interactive learning objects, feedback enabled by smaller and more regular formative assessments, seminars, video or audio messages and email, can assist students to complete a full learning cycle. This requires a significantly larger effort from academics than preparing PowerPoint slides alone. However, while face-to-face lectures have value as ‘scene setters’, they have greater value when most taught content is online, students pre-read it before each session. Then lectures can be used for discussion, and to answer student questions.

4. Building Learning Objects using Xerte Rethinking University Teaching in the Digital Age – B 9 4 Using Xerte to enhance a VLE Media and the Learning Experience What is Xerte and what can it do for our students? Xerte is software that facilitates the creation of a Flash object that can be embedded in websites, or SCORM’d as a package of media files and flash interface into a VLE. Xerte’s comprehensive range of page templates allows a non-technical user to link media (images, audio files, videos, web pages, and maps) to one package that can be previewed by clicking the ‘Play’ button, and published as Flash for distribution to users. By choosing templates that fit your media, and by allowing the media to be linked via a largely text configuration page, an attractive learning object can be created that has its own navigation. This can be embedded in one page of a VLE, and the normal VLE sub-menus can be hidden. In the case of Victory, this can only be a good thing! Choosing the Media Format for Deeper Learning Different media and teaching methods produce different types of learning experience, and Laurillard analysed the media types below to identify how completely each can complete a learning cycle. In fact, the constructed environment should not include just one of these media formats, but a balanced range of them for best results. ‘Defending’ the Lecture as a Learning Experience Lectures have been accepted as a legitimate way of ‘delivering’ knowledge in universities for over 800 years, but if we were starting afresh today, and aimed to convey complex ideas to large groups, it is unlikely that we would choose ‘one to many’ lectures as an effective vehicle. Lectures rely on the academic knowing the capabilities of their students, and the students already having a similar background and understanding of the subject. In the era of ever increasing class sizes and government targets for access to university education, this is unlikely to be true, and some students will fall behind. So we have tutoring systems to correct these problems – but how much better it would be to provide such a varied constructed environment that students of all learning styles would find sufficient inspiration in it to achieve that deeper learning. So what of the inspirational lecture? I have certainly witnessed a few as a student, and even given a few, but ‘a few’ is a pertinent term. For smaller cohorts or groups, it is possible to allow students to ask questions, and good lecturers can change direction seamlessly, feeding off the points they make to enhance the clarity of the lecture theme. Larger cohorts make this difficult. For those new to lecturing and with less than perfect recall, the idea of straying from the bulleted structure PowerPoint provides may not be an option if the lecture is not to become disjointed. However, a rich constructed environment will reduce the focus on content delivery, and increase student enquiry.  This page includes a video synchronised with text boxes that appear at a moment suitable to what is showing in the video at that point. Further example follow on pages 5 and 6. Follow the demo link in the box below or the sample, at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/play_264 See the Xerte toolkit demo: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~cczjrt/menuDemo/

5. Rethinking University Teaching in the Digital Age – A Xerte Navigation Explained 5 8 Create Media  Link it to Xerte  Publish Completing the Learning Cycle Many Navigation Options – Highly Configurable – Flash 9 on Promoting Student Engagement with Different Media Dianna Laurillard*, in ‘Rethinking University Teaching: A framework for the effective use of learning technologies’ (2008), extends the Kolb Learning Cycle to show how various technologies impact on student learning. As a baseline, the diagram below shows how the student’s understanding of what is required of them, and how they might interpret it based on academic feedback, enables a completed journey around the learning cycle. The academic also changes the nature of the assessment based on student feedback and ‘how well an assessment went’. The teacher’s constructed environment is therefore a dynamic thing – and not a static container for a set of bullet pointed lecture slides. At least it isn’t if students are to achieve the deeper learning we want them to! Learning should be an iterative process, but achieving this with cohorts in the several hundred can be a challenge. Additionally, if a novel, fun element can be introduced to study, then students are more likely to get involved with the task.  Para Key to Menu A –Table of contents B – Go back one page C – Page 3 of 7 D – Go forward one page A nice tabbed menu in a few clicks! A B C D *Dianna Laurillard is Professor of Educational Technology and Pro Vice Chancellor for Learning Technologies and Teaching at the Open University.

6. Templates for Learning: The Xerte Toolkit http://www.twitter.com/eteamnews 7 6 Sample pages created using Xerte The eTeam on Twitter Discuss Pedagogy! Check out our other site: www.twitter.com/pedagogic