On this show I had the opportunity to chat to Dawn Green, Development Co-ordinator at the Karten Network. Dawn also chairs the technology steering group, which meets to support the work of Natspec and the TechAbility service. More details of which can be found below.
I didn’t have long with Dawn, so this provides a brief overview of the work of the Karten Network. I strongly encourage you to find out more about the network and the great work that results in their investments.
Note: This was during a lunch break, so there is some background noise, apologies for that.
Specialism-based learning (SBL) is an approach to curriculum design. SBL works by giving each student a specialism or focus, which is distinct from the specialisms of their student peers. They are then expected to apply the theories being explored on the module to their specialism. In a SBL module:
Students choose or are given a specialism
There is a check in place to ensure they can apply the topics you cover to the specialism
There are learning activities that promote:
Sharing of specialist knowledge between peers
Confidence in students’ own disciplinary expertise
Cross-fertilisation of ideas
There is an assessment method that allows them to apply topics to their chosen specialism
At Sussex, it is an approach that we have seen adopted within Linguistics, Geography and Psychology, but it is relevant to teaching across the arts and humanities, sciences and social sciences, despite variations in teaching and assessment practices.
Examples
SBL in English Literature
SBL in Organic Chemistry
Students choose or are given a specialism
Students adopted a book
Students adopt a molecule
Check topics can be applied to the specialism
Gender, race, colonialism, power
Molecular structures, chemical properties, physical properties, experimental methods, separation techniques
Learning activities Teaching method
Lectures, seminars, group quizzes, video presentations and tutor and peer reviews of essays
Lectures, seminars, experimental practicals, group quizzes, video presentations, peer reviews of draft reports
Assessment method
Portfolio including essay, presentation & peer reviews
Portfolio including reports, video presentation, peer reviews and experimental practical reflections
So what technological tips can we offer you that can facilitate a specialism-based learning module?
Tip 1. Develop criticality within students
In an SBL module it is important that you set up opportunities for students to become critical learners, assessing the concepts that you are delivering to them and the extent to which they find them useful to understand their specialism. For example, in an SBL chemistry module where a student’s specialism is an organic module and the weekly topic is the separation techniques, the student will be expected to identify the techniques that are used to separate their molecule from the mixtures in which it is found. Some of the concepts may be more relevant to some specialisms than others, but students will be expected to give an account to how it was useful to their particular specialism or why it was not.
In order to do this it is recommended that the students keep a weekly journal where they record how they have applied the topic to their specialism. There are many tools available for the students to use (see some options in ‘Digital tools for reflective practice’). Alternatively, if you wish to comment on the students’ reflections you can use the Assignment feature in your virtual learning environment (VLE) to set up a weekly submission point.
Tip 2. Develop resourcefulness within students
Apart from understanding the concepts you deliver through your teaching, an SBL module expects students to do additional research on their specialism. A record of additional research can be kept in an online journal like one suggested above. Additionally, in order to organise one’s thought while accumulating knowledge on your specialism, SBL teaching recommends using mind mapping software. Mind mapping can be done on paper, but the advantage of using an online tools is that you can add links to websites, documents, images, podcasts and videos. OneNote has mind mapping features as does Padlet and Mindview is powerful mind mapping software that all students and staff have access to at the University of Sussex.
Tip 3. Develop students’ confidence in their own expertise
One of the key strengths of SBL teaching is that it builds confidence in students, ownership of their knowledge and lets them gain an affiliation with the discipline because of the unique knowledge they each acquire about their specialism. However, in order for their confidence and sense of ownership to grow they need opportunities to share their specialised knowledge and to get feedback. Peer feedback often provides as much or more confidence than feedback from the tutor, who students feel will always have superior knowledge to them. It is therefore important to set up opportunities to share knowledge with each other. This can be through student presentations, seminar conversations, online discussions in your VLE or using a collaborative online tool that allows students to share links and ideas such as Padlet.
Tip 4. Facilitate sharing of specialist knowledge between peers
SBL is a perfect solution for tutors who recognise the learning potential of collaborative activities between peers and for peers to teach each other. Peer collaborations can be unpopular with students and staff alike because they can lead to collusion or plagiarism of another’s work. However, using SBL where each student being focuses on a different specialism the likelihood of collaborations being viewed as collusion is reduced and the risk of plagiarism is largely eliminated. Students can engage together on disciplinary topics and concepts, but ultimately it will be on their application of the concept to their specialism that will be assessed. This leads to a natural interest in each others’ work, which is related but different from their own, and peer work leads to the cross fertilisation of knowledge.
Often within an SBL module there will be a proportion of the contributory assessment dedicated to a student presentation. Presentations are motivational for students who want to deepen their understanding so that they look knowledgeable in front of their peers and can answer questions. However, presentations can be time-consuming in big cohorts but technologies are available that will allow students to record their presentations and post their videos to the tutor and their peers. FlipGrid is one such technology and can embedded into most VLEs. Alternatively, online presentations can be shared using your VLE discussions area.
SBL modules also often use peers to review each other’s draft essays. Again students cannot plagiarise as the application of concepts needs to be on their own specialism, but during the peer review exercise students will learn from each other and from their experience of reviewing. SBL usually expects the tutor to provide training and guidance to the students on how to leave reviews sensitively and usually the peer reviewers will meet face-to-face in order to maintain collegiality and good communication. The use of online tools is also helpful to allow students to share work and leave each other feedback. Options include Office 365, where Sussex University students and have staff have 1TB of space each, and Google Docs. Most VLEs also allow peer reviews and in Canvas, the Sussex University VLE, you can allow peer reviews within the set up of an Assignment tool.
Tip 5. Enable appropriate assessment methods
SBL lends itself to many assessment methods, but particularly those that allow students to include personal reflections on their learning and evidence of engagement in peer activities. At our University, the assessment type would most likely be a Portfolio, Project-based, or Essay.
In SBL a Portfolio or Project-based assessment might include an essay and presentation which focus on the student’s specialism and their application of the concepts introduced in the teaching. The submission may also include the reviews the students left for their peers, their reflective journals and any other contributions they made on the module. In our institution the submission point can be set to Canvas Online submission which allows multiple file uploads or the upload of a zip file containing a number of files.
An Essay assessment using the SBL method would also expect the student to focus their writing around their specialism. The tutor may require students to include reflections about their journal and/or presentation and/or peer review. In our institution the submission point can be set to Canvas Turnitin which will check for similarities with other pieces of work held in the Turnitin database.
Summary
SBL is a teaching method that encourages criticality, resourcefulness and communication amongst students as well as developing a sense of of expertise and strong affiliation with the discipline area. It is an approach which is aided by setting up learning environments and using technologies for peer-to-peer activities and using an assessment method which requires learners to incorporate their reflections throughout the module and focuses on the application of the concepts introduced in the teaching to their specialism.
Specialism-based learning events
‘Active Essay Writing: Risk taking and specialism based learning’ is on 8th March, 2pm-3pm, Essex House 133, University of Sussex More information and booking.
‘Implementing specialism-based learning: engaging and inspiring students’ is on 11th March 14:00-15:30, Pevensey 1 Room 2A2, University of Sussex. More information and booking.
One of the features that stands out about Canvas is the ability to connect other systems into the modules, extending them with additional activities and activities. Recently, our library colleagues have been working to provide just such an integration for the Library Subject Guides. We’re delighted to host a guest post from Chris Brown, explaining how to add Subject Guide content in any Sussex Canvas module:
Do you want your students to make the most of Library resources?
You can now embed Library Subject Guide resources in your Canvas modules, making it easier for students to find, access and use these materials from within your teaching sites.
Library Subject Guides list key resources such as specialist subject databases and digital archives. You can access video resources, such as Kanopy and online newspapers, while our A to Z resources range from ARTstor to Zotero.
In addition to Subject Guides, the Library also provides guides to other resources, including reference management software and theses and dissertations.
Here’s an example of the resources available on the American Studies Guide:
How to embed Library Subject Guides in Canvas
You can embed Library materials as a new “Page”, or as a new “Item” in Canvas.
To do this, simply add an “external tool” and select “Lib Apps Library Content”. You then choose which Library Subject Guide materials you want to embed. You can choose to embed a full guide, a single page from a guide, or an individual content box.
Watch this 3-minute screencast to see the process in action:
Once you have made your choices, the item will appear in your Canvas unit.
As with any Canvas resource, you can choose when to publish the item to students, and you can edit or remove the item at any time.
Please contact the Library if you would like one-to-one support for using this tool. We would also be delighted to discuss how Library Subject Guides can better meet your needs and those of your students. You can email us at library@sussex.ac.uk or use the contact page on the Library website.
Our thanks to Chris for this post. If you are interested in learning more about the external tools you can add into Canvas, to extend the learning and teaching options available to you and your students, please get in touch via tel@sussex.ac.uk. We’d be delighted to hear from you.
Would you like to provide immersive, accessible and innovative learning and assessment experiences for your students? During the months of February and March, Technology Enhanced Learning will be offering a range of professional development opportunities for staff on these themes.
The themes align with the University’s continued efforts to improve assessment and feedback practices; strategic ambitions to establish the university as leaders in digital innovation and the recent EU directive to ensure university compliance with web accessibility standards.
Our programme includes interactive workshops and bite-sized webinars facilitated by learning technologists, as well as seminars delivered by guest speakers. All events are free to attend for University of Sussex staff, details of events and booking information are available on the Technology Enhanced Learning website.
What’s next?
We are in the process of organising additional sessions on these themes to run during April and May. This programme is set to be announced close to the start of April. Please subscribe to our blog (menu on the right-hand side) to receive email updates.
If you (or your department) would like more bespoke training on any aspects of technology enhanced learning which are not covered by our programme then please get in touch with tel@sussex.ac.uk
The recent cold weather and news of rail disruption has got the Sussex TEL Team thinking how technology and our online study platform Canvas in particular can help to minimise the impact of weather on teaching and learning.
Using Canvas and taking tips from distance and flipped-learning practices it is possible to introduce online elements to reduce the time lost as a result of these events when they do occur.
Canvas brings with it a range of new communication tools that can help you to facilitate learning online when you can’t be face-to-face.
Here are five tools and practices which can help to prepare you and your students for the unforeseen.
Canvas Announcements
Unfortunately our rail service doesn’t always help us to get to work on time. While you are trapped on a rail platform, watching the clock tick down before a lecture it’s important to let people know. Canvas provides a new route to get the message out through Canvas Announcements. The Canvas Teacher App makes this process simple. Find the module in question, select ‘Announcements’, then the ‘+’ icon to add an announcement. Give it a title, type your message, send and the process is complete. See TEL’s Canvas Announcements guidance for more details.
Screencasting presentations
While trapped at home in bad weather, why not record a screencast of your lecture and share it with your students? Canvas enables you to record a talk to camera via the Record/Upload Media link in the Canvas Page editor.
Often it is better to support your presentation with slides or other visuals and there are many different tools available to record your screen and voice together. You can record narrations for your slides directly in PowerPoint. Other simple options include Chrome browser extensions such as Loom or Screencastify. For Mac users with the latest Mojave OS, CMD+SHIFT+5 brings up a menu from which you can video capture your screen. You can then embed the resulting .mov file in Canvas.
One step further would be to take a flipped approach. Creating online presentations and making them available in advance can help to free-up time in class to consolidate the learning through more hands-on activities. It also means you have a ready resource for students to access when you can’t be there.
Canvas Conferences / Big Blue Button
If a screencast takes too much away from the immediacy of the classroom, you could take the discussion online. Canvas Conferences (Big Blue Button) is an excellent option for conducting a virtual classroom activity or webinar with your students. We have been using this tool ourselves for our series of TEL webinars with very positive feedback.
This tool provides a scalable option for you to present and talk through slides while taking questions through the Conferences text chat box. This Moderator Guide provides an overview of how Conferences works. You can find further information in the TEL Guide to Canvas Conferences.
Canvas Discussions
Disruption caused by weather can mean it is hard to get everyone together at the same time. In such a case, using a discussion forum can be a good alternative to Conferences. Running a discussion over a period of a day or a week, rather than an hour.
If all else fails Canvas still provides a place to share slides, handouts and reading with your students.
Also worth a mention, the University of Sussex’s box.com service provides another option for sharing files with your students. You can sync your files to multiple computers both at home and work as well as selecting files and folders to share with others. One neat feature is the option to host your videos on box.com. Upload a video to box.net and you can share it via a link from Canvas or via email. Please see the ITS guidance on box.com for more information.
While it may not be possible to guard against all that the heavens (and local rail services) may throw at us, these tools give us at least the opportunity to be a bit more prepared.
If you would like to discuss any of these options or want more help and information please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk
‘Students have access to unprecedented amounts of information online and need to move beyond consumption to more critical, organised and productive use of digital materials, tools and platforms.’
That was the opening sentence of our blog post on Learning through finding, choosing, sorting and sharing published in 2015. Since then, the need to develop critical skills has become even more important, so this post will look again at this topic and suggest some current digital tools and strategies to help.
Creating or Curating?
Increasingly students are being encouraged to create digital artefacts as part of their learning, whether that is by blogging, podcasting, creating video etc. which is great for developing digital capability. However, curating content which involves ‘sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme’ (http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/) can be very useful for developing critical thinking alongside digital capabilities.
Part of the curation process is identifying which tools work for your context and which sources are useful. For example, Twitter is useful for finding relevant material and discussions, LinkedIn offers opportunities to get involved in subject-specific communities and RSS readers such as Feedly or Inoreader allow you to keep up with many blogs easily and share content.
When using any of these tools the first step is choosing who to ‘follow’. It is important to critically ‘curate’ people/institutions so that relevant, reliable information is surfaced in a timely and usable format. For example, Twitter lists allow you to organise content from accounts you don’t necessarily ‘follow’ which can help with managing the flow of content.
When you choose particular items to be collected and shared you are making a judgment about their relevance or usefulness in a particular context. Often tutors will want students to explain their reasons for choosing items and most of the tools for capturing online content to save and/or share also allow for adding comments.
Digital note-making tools such as OneNote or social bookmarking tools like Diigo could be used for collecting, sorting and sharing, but other platforms are more focused on content curation, combining collecting, sorting, annotating and sharing functions.
There are now more options, and two in particular are worth exploring in more detail.
Padlet
Padlet can be thought of as a virtual wall where users can post content and comments. Most types of digital content can be added to a Padlet (directly or as a web link) and there are many options for layout, commenting and collaboration. The University of Sussex has a Padlet Backpack licence and you can read more about Padlet on the TEL website.
Here is an example of a Padlet where I have collected some interesting news reports and blog posts around various aspects of immersive technology. In this case I have added the options to add a response in the form of a ‘thumbs-up’ or ‘thumbs-down’ but other options are available. I could also have chosen to allow comments.
Students could each have their own Padlet or collaborate in groups. Padlets can also be embedded in a Page or a Discussion in Canvas for students to share their collections.
Wakelet
Wakelet is a fairly new tool that many people began using to collate tweets when Storify was closed. You can now use it to collect a wide range of digital content such as:
a website
tweets (selected by searching for a hashtag or user)
a YouTube video
an image
links to content you have already used in Wakelet
a PDF
some text of your own, including some simple formatting and weblinks.
Screenshot of one possible display of resources in Wakelet
With a range display options, all of which can be embedded in Canvas or shared by a link Wakelet is very versatile and visually appealing. Wakelet is developing quickly and there is a new feature which allows multiple contributors to a collection (though this feature is still in Beta so may not be robust yet). There are no built-in commenting features at the moment, so if allowing other students to respond to curated material is important then Padlet might be a better choice.
How can I get started with content curation activities?
The first thing to consider is what will best fit with the learning outcomes of your particular module. If a curating task would be useful, then which tool(s) you want to use will depend on the activity. For example:
If the aim is to identify a list of possible web resources around a topic then students could collect and share bookmarks using Diigo. Here is a Diigo Outliner (list) I made.
If more multimedia materials are to be collected then students could use Padlet or Wakelet, either individually or as a group.
If responding to, or commenting on, each other’s collections is important then Padlet might be best option.
If you would like to explore further how you and your students could use curation for learning, help using any of the tools mentioned here or how to embed them in a Canvas module, please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk
In this episode of the TEL:US podcast, Kitty Horne and I chat to René Moolenaar about his experiences of teaching one of the universities first online distance learning modules. We talk about the ways in which he builds community, promotes peer interaction and how simple tools available in Canvas help him to do this.
I also introduce two new features of the podcast; Shortcut of the Show and App of the Show. I’m a big fan of little wins that keyboard shortcuts can give. They are not the most exciting thing to talk about, so I’ve added reverb…
Please let us know if you have any feedback about the podcast, likewise if you want to get involved or have a contender for Shortcut of the Show.
Early reports suggest that Canvas, our new online study platform at Sussex, has been well received by students, particularly first years. One of the strengths of Canvas is that students find it easier to stay on top of their studies as a result of notifications keeping them abreast of upcoming events and deadlines.
Interestingly, almost half of students have changed their Canvas dashboard to the List view. The List view displays all current module activities with deadlines displayed in chronological order. The Dashboard loads to display the current date, and previous and future dates can be viewed by scrolling up and down the page. In contrast to our students, most tutors still have their dashboard set to use the Card view, which displays a complete list of the modules for which they have a role and is more appropriate for their use of the system.
List view on Dashboard
Anecdotally, students have found the most challenging part of Canvas to be the inconsistency between modules. Many tutors have created a home page and have a reduced module navigation menu showing only the links that they are using in their teaching, whilst other tutors have kept the default Units page for their front page and have left the module navigation menu in case students find it useful.
Templates
In order to increase consistency between modules, Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) have been asked by some School Directors of Teaching and Learning and Department Heads to create Canvas templates for their school so students get a similar experience in each of their Canvas modules and it is easier for them to find relevant information and learning materials.
Templates on a range of devices
Our Canvas templates focus on good principles and practices based around three key areas:
Digital pedagogy. The templates are structured to support module curricula, and for tutors to incorporate topic-based activities and resources which advance the extent to which the students meet the module’s learning objectives.
Student experience. The templates are easy to navigate and adhere to the principle that less is often more. They keep the navigation elements to minimum, have a hierarchy of information which makes it easy to find things and have consistency within their design, structure and signposting.
Inclusivity. The templates are fully accessible and ensure access to materials is possible from different devices and different software including screen readers.
There are currently templates for the the Business School, the School of Engineering and Informatics, the School of English, School of Global Studies, the School Life Sciences, and the Social Work department – some of these just include a home page whilst others provide all the pages you would need for a complete module. Other schools, departments and areas of the University are also planning to introduce templates. You can see these on the Canvas School Templates page of the TEL website.
Some areas of the University have not gone down this route and for modules which have not got a set template, TEL have created three templates (so far!) that tutors can choose from to match their teaching style. You can see these on the TEL website.
The ‘intuitive’ template is the simplest and most brightly coloured and provides placeholder headings which inform the tutor what content to put where. You will be expected to drop text and files into the appropriate places.
The ‘weekly’ template allows the easiest navigation between week pages. It expects tutors to have set up their Talis Aspire reading lists by dividing the readings by week and provides folders for the tutors to organise their own files by week.
The ‘flipped learning’ template has been pre-populated with dates in the first three weeks of the Spring semester and for each week includes Units with preparatory materials including learning materials and “readiness” quiz questions, and reflective materials including a journal activity and a revisit to the “readiness” quiz questions to see if the students’ positions have change. The template has a timed release of materials.
All the templates are fully responsive and accessible and are designed to allow students an easy and consistent experience when using Canvas. They all work best when starting with an empty site but they all can be used when there is existing content.
We are the Educational Enhancement team at the University of Sussex. We publish posts each fortnight about the use of technology to support teaching and learning. Read more about us.
