This year Mobile/Technologies Week will run from 23rd to 27th November and once again the Library and Technology Enhanced Learning have come together to provide staff and students at the University of Sussex with a great programme of events around the use of mobile devices and technologies to support teaching, learning and research. This year we have broadened out the programme to include examples of innovative use of technologies at Sussex, with input from our students and academics. See the Mobile/Technologies Week webpages for information and booking details for each of the following events. Anyone with a twitter account can also join in online throughout the week using the #sussexmtw hashtag. Read more ›
Mobile/Technologies Week 2015 @SussexUni #sussexmtw
Digital skills through the TELescope
flickr photo by meenaghd shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license
‘Digital skills’ are frequently referred to both inside and outside of higher education. What are they and how can we judge if we are digitally skilled or not? We turn to the Jisc framework, originally developed by the work of Beetham and Sharpe (2010), to help answer the question of digital literacy. Read more ›
Technology Enhanced Learning Innovation Scheme
The TEL Innovation Scheme gives staff the opportunity to develop or experiment with new tools, resources or teaching approaches with the potential to inform practice in their School or disciplinary area. Participation also demonstrates a commitment to enhancement of the student experience.
In 2014/15 the Scheme awarded six grants covering a range of developments from physical computing to gamification. All of the selection criteria and proposal information can be found on the TEL website. One of these is that the proposal must “clearly demonstrate what is innovative about the proposed project and how it will enhance the student experience” Read more ›
Learning through finding, choosing, sorting and sharing
flickr photo by catspyjamasnz shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license
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.
In this post I will be suggesting that ‘content curation’ activities that involve ‘sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme’ can be used to develop critical thinking and digital capabilities. Learners involved in content curation go beyond searching for information to evaluating what they find, sharing with peers and commenting on their discoveries. It can also be the beginning of a Personal/Professional Learning Network (PLN) that will sustain someone throughout their career. We should not forget, however, that curation also has another important role to play in the field of digital preservation. This is generally referred to as ‘digital curation’ which ‘involves maintaining, preserving and adding value to digital research data throughout its lifecycle’ (Digital Curation Centre). It is becoming increasingly important to think about how materials which are ‘born digital’ can be preserved against a backdrop of redundant formats and disappearing platforms. Read more ›
Lunch and learn: New TEL Seminar Series
Following on from last year’s inaugural series of Technology Enhanced Learning seminars hosted here at the University of Sussex, we’re delighted to kick-off the academic year with a new season of seminars featuring a fantastic line-up of speakers who are leading figures in the fields of:
- learning technology,
- social media,
- and innovative teaching practice.
In our last series of seminars attendees enjoyed talks around the themes of flipped learning, open education and gamification. The autumn programme has been developed in response to feedback and in line with emerging trends in the sector. Topics include learning analytics, social media in academia and assessment and feedback. Read more ›
Online or offline…you choose: TEL’s staff development workshops
flickr photo by GotCredit shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Following the success of last year’s staff development offering and the online bitesize courses we piloted over the summer, the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) team have expanded our professional development programme for 2015-16 to include both online and offline courses and sessions.
Summer success
The online bitesize courses that TEL delivered sought to develop skills in different technological areas, which could be utilised both inside and outside of academia. The original idea was to run these courses as a pilot to gauge interest, needs and requirements. However, the response we received from university staff was overwhelming with over 100 individual staff members signing up for the courses and incredibly positive feedback from participants. Read more ›
Learning together: Technology enhanced collaboration.
Peer learning and small group activities have long been staples of higher education – and with good reason. Working together develops students’ understanding of the topic alongside teamwork skills which are so important for employability and lifelong learning. Professionals across a wide range of disciplines now work together online and students can benefit from exploring digital collaboration as part of group work. Read more ›
Threshold Standards for Moodle: A Learning Technologist’s tale
An Unexpected Journey….
Over the summer months Sussex TEL have been in their various Hobbit holes focussing a lot of time on implementing school-level standards for Study Direct, Sussex’s virtual learning environment (VLE) that’s built on the Moodle platform.
This endeavour began this time last year when the TEL team discussed individual needs and requirements with representatives from each school. During these discussions, one issue that was consistently raised was the inconsistency amongst Study Direct sites. So, with a large task in our hands and commitment in our hearts we began our arduous and unexpected journey… Read more ›
This work by Educational Enhancement, University of Sussex is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/tel/.