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 why 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).
This 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
flickr photo by betmari shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license
Giving and receiving feedback from peers is a great way to learn. After all, professionals do it all the time. Organising this type of activity during a seminar can be difficult, but there are now many online tools for sharing and annotating text. When student’s work is not text-based, however, something else is required.
Dr Chris Kiefer, Lecturer in Music Technology @luuma
Chris Kiefer (Media, Film and Music) is using MusicCircle, an online peer learning and peer feedback system that he was involved in developing as part of the EU PRAISE project. For this post, Anne Hole asked Chris about MusicCircle
‘MusicCircle was originally developed for musicians but could equally be applied to many other fields.’
Chris explains that ‘MusicCircle is a peer learning and peer feedback system. With the aim of enabling creative feedback…. It is a venue for people to share their work and provides an environment for constructive peer feedback between students.’
The key to the tool is its ‘social timeline’ which lets the users highlight a section of audio or video and add a comment – this can then be discussed with others. Although you can add brief comments to audio using SoundCloud or discuss YouTube videos, Chris argues that they do not allow for the sort of detailed feedback which will help students to improve their work.
Designed initially for musicians at Goldsmiths College, MusicCircle takes online the regular feedback sessions which encouraged students to provide constructive feedback to each other.
Chris believes that one of the strengths of MusicCircle is that it teaches students to both give and receive creative feedback. It can also ‘increase a sense of community around a course’.
Peer feedback is good for students because when we learn how to constructively give feedback we learn how to use feedback constructively in our own work.
The system has been developed and tested with various groups across the five European universities involved in the project and there is even a version that works with coding.
See the system demonstrated in this YouTube video –
At Sussex, Chris has begun using the system with music technology students on the ‘History and Practice of Electronic Music’ module. Students ‘make a 1-minute piece each week based on what they have been learning. They can share those pieces with each other – so they can access them not only within their seminar groups but across the cohort’. But Chris emphasises that this is not just an online activity – ‘It provides a mechanism for a session in class where we play each other’s music and discuss the music’ as well as letting learners ‘access the work out of class and continue the feedback’.
MusicCircle could be useful for anything that involves time-based media that people can give feedback on – videos of student work, interviews, presentations etc.
There has been some good feedback from users and Chris will be developing his use of MusicCircle with his students in 2016-17.
If you would like to discuss possible ways that MusicCircle could be used in your teaching at Sussex please contact Chris Kiefer who will be happy to talk to you.
To discuss other options for using technology to develop peer learning and feedback contact the TEL team tel@sussex.ac.uk.
flickr photo by “Caveman Chuck” Coker shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license
To start the new academic year, Technology Enhanced Learning have revamped our programme of staff development workshops with a brand new list of sessions for the Autumn term.
From ‘Learning by creating with smartphones’ to ‘Augmented reality and virtual reality in the classroom’ this range of workshops aims to provide you with the tools and ideas to help you make the most of technology in your teaching and prepare for the term ahead.
This term’s workshops pick up on themes that we have been hearing about across campus for example the implementation of the flipped learning approach or how to better engage international students. Below are three new workshops that we have picked out to tell you more about:Read more ›
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.
why it is important to introduce students to them.
