5 Tips for Multimedia Enhanced Teaching and Learning

Image source: https://pixabay.com/en/social-media-interaction-abstract-1233873/ CC0 Public Domain. Free for commercial use. No attribution required.

Image source: CC0 Public Domain. Free for commercial use. No attribution required.

There is an updated version of this post.

How can we use multimedia content to make learning more effective? The traditional approach to teaching in higher education tends to limit learners to reading texts, listening to lectures and discussing ideas in seminars. However, we learn better, and are more interested in learning tasks, when information is presented in diverse ways – so why not try something different?  Read more ›

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Posted in Learning Design, Technology Enhanced Learning

Understanding Creative Commons Licences

As members of a University, we all enjoy a fair amount of freedom to reuse and distribute copyrighted material to our colleagues and students, under the framework of our Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) and Educational Recording Agency (ERA) licensing agreements.

Specific exceptions to copyright even allow us to copy works not covered by CLA, NLA and ERA, within certain limits.

However, whilst under these exceptions we might, for example, be able to use a copyright image to directly illustrate an educational point, we don’t have carte blanche to use it in a more general illustrative way within our teaching materials: a Bleddyn Butcher photograph of Nick Cave might justifiably be used to examine the iconography within images of popular musicians, but using it as the background to a presentation slide titled “looking to the future” would probably be seen as a breach 1 Read more ›

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Posted in Technology Enhanced Learning

How to overcome barriers when using tech in your teaching

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flickr photo by frankieleon shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Today we are looking at the barriers that can exist for some when using technology in teaching.

The use of technology in lectures and seminars can help to engage students, create opportunities for flipped learning and make resources more accessible and inclusive.

Below we consider three common technology fears and how to overcome them.  Read more ›

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Posted in Digital scholarship, Technology Enhanced Learning

Working together online

Collaborative working online is an important skill for students and staff. This post looks at some of the tools which can be used to accomplish tasks together online and capturewhy it is important to introduce students to them.

Digital skills

You may have seen media coverage earlier this year of a ‘Digital skills crisis’. This followed two reports on digital skills in the UK; the Digital skills crisis Second Report of Session 2016–17 (House of Commons Science and Technology Committee) and Digital Skills for the UK Economy by ECORYS. The former reported that ‘almost 90% of new jobs require digital skills to some degree, with 72% of employers stating that they are unwilling to interview candidates who do not have basic IT skills’ (page 7) and the latter recommended that in order to address this need we ‘Ensure that digital skills are learned pervasively at all stages of education and training’ (page 5).

There are a range of possible models or frameworks for what are variously called digital skills or digital capabilities (for more on this see the slides from Jane Secker’s recent TEL seminar). 
Read more ›

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Posted in Digital scholarship, Learning Design, Technology Enhanced Learning

Enhance your PowerPoint presentations with Office Mix

office-mixThis week we are going to tell you about Office Mix – the much publicised add-on from Microsoft.

Office Mix is a free add-on for Microsoft PowerPoint that enables you to transform your slideshows into interactive presentations.

The additional features that Office Mix brings to PowerPoint allow for interactive elements such as quizzes and polls to be added, creating a far more engaging presentation within a tool that many people are already very familiar with. You can use Office Mix to create a new presentation or adapt existing presentations that you already have saved.  Read more ›

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Posted in Technology Enhanced Learning

Learn about Learning Technology at Sussex

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Learning and sharing information with others is an effective way to contribute and further personal and collective knowledge in any given field of study.

Last week the Sussex TEL blog looked at various ways of learning about learning technology, with a focus on various groups and channels outside of the university. The following blog post will look at opportunities which exist at the University of Sussex where staff can get involved in learning and sharing ideas on campus for technology enhanced learning.  Read more ›

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Learning about Learning Technology

learning technology

flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Learning technology is an exciting and fast moving field.

Whether you’re an academic interested in increasing engagement in lectures or a student looking for ways to improve your approach to studying, the development of your digital capabilities will be increasingly instrumental to your success.

Learning Technology

What are learning technologies and how do we learn about them? I was given pause to reflect on this in a recent interview I gave for our new podcast series Teaching with Tech when asked how I came to work in this area. Read more ›

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What’s in your pocket?

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Image from Pexels

Today we are pulling out our pockets and looking at our phones and asking, what are the most popular apps that we use in the TEL team?

In alphabetical order, starting with Tab.  Read more ›

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Posted in App review, Technology Enhanced Learning

About our blog

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.

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