Exploring The Keep – valuable resources for teaching and research

Posted on by Kitty Horne

Recently the TEL team went to visit The Keep and were hugely impressed with the range of resources available to students, teaching and research staff and the public. Here we talk to Fiona Courage, Special Collections Manager & Mass Observation Curator at the University of Sussex, exploring the many ways in which The Keep can be used to enhance learning experiences and develop research skills as well as the ways in which TEL will be working with The Keep in the future.

Tell us about The Keep

The Keep is many things but at its most basic level it’s a building which has been created to house the archival and rare book collections of the University of Sussex, the archival collections of East Sussex Record Office and the collections from the Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton and Hove. Opened in 2013, the building is designed to house archives and rare books in the correct environmental conditions and has been created to be completely accessible. Read more ›

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Encouraging student engagement through interactive lectures

Posted on by Kitty Horne
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flickr photo by teddy-rised shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

With large lecture sizes there is always the risk that some students may become disengaged. Bringing interactivity to the lecture setting through the use of mobile student response systems can contribute towards solving this problem and, used effectively, can encourage higher levels of student engagement.

A study by Voelkel and Bennett (2013) from the University of Liverpool highlights the positive effect that the introduction of mobile response system had upon students’ enjoyment, engagement and attendance on four undergraduate modules. Read more ›

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Posted in Polling tools, Technology Enhanced Learning

Reflective practice goes digital

Posted on by Anne Hole
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flickr photo by Wagner Machado Carlos Lemes shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Reflective practice for academics in Higher Education is not a new idea, in fact reflection is encouraged in most professional fields and is a habit that students should be developing as part of their wider digital capabilities.

Unfortunately, reflection can easily be overlooked when time is short. If digital tools can make it easier to quickly capture thoughts and ideas across a range of media, then there can be huge benefits for learning and professional development. Read more ›

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Windows 10: has a sleeping giant awoken?

Posted on by Nicholas Botfield
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flickr photo by ToddABishop shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Readers of our blog may notice that many of our technology-focussed posts relate to either applications that can be used on Apple and Android devices, or online resources. We haven’t, up until now, referred to the operating system that 61% of you probably use every day…Microsoft Windows.

Whilst this omission may seem an oversight, it hasn’t been without good reason. As a team, we focus on emerging technologies that can assist either teachers or learners, and Windows hasn’t delivered specifically in this area recently. Read more ›

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Periscope: live broadcasting for teaching and learning

Posted on by Sally Burr
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flickr photo by Jim Makos shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license

Have you heard of Periscope, the live broadcasting app described by its creators as ‘the closest thing to teleportation’? 

This new, free app enables easy broadcasting directly from your smartphone – no additional equipment required. You can also view live broadcasts from all over the world.

Try Periscope

Owned by Twitter, Periscope has signed up over 10 million people in the last four months. Read more ›

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Posted in Technology Enhanced Learning

Digital resources for Arts and Humanities

Posted on by Anne Hole
Bodleian Library

flickr photo by Leonieke Aalders shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Things are changing in Arts and Humanities. Researchers are increasingly working with digital materials and using new tools in traditional research locations. Reading itself has been transformed by digital devices. So how can you make the most of digital tools and resources for teaching and learning in the Arts and Humanities?

Being a digital academic

There is a wide range of ways to use, or get involved with, digital tools and resources. For example Professor Tim Hitchcock (Digital History, HAHP) writes about using Twitter and blogs to make academic practice public and publishes his own blog while Dr. Lynne Murphy (Linguistics, English) has recently received a US grant to help write a book based on her very successful blog ‘Separated by a Common Language’. Read more ›

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Effective Online Quiz Design

Posted on by David Walker
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flickr photo by Harald Groven shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

In last week’s blog post Pete Sparkes shared some different approaches to help Moodle users rapidly create quizzes for use in course sites, overcoming some of the perceived usability challenges associated with the Quiz activity.

In this article I want to focus on the effectiveness of the questions within the quizzes we create, an aspect of the process that I’m sure anyone who has previously created an online quiz will appreciate is challenging and anything but rapid. Read more ›

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Posted in Study Direct, Technology Enhanced Learning

Rapid quiz creation for Moodle

Posted on by Pete Sparkes
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flickr photo by sea turtle shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Online quizzes can be used as an effective tool to help assess student knowledge, elicit feedback and add variety in learning. A common criticism of the quiz activity in Moodle is that it can seem cumbersome and time-consuming. Tutors navigate and click through multiple pages, menus and boxes on forms in order to create a single question. However, for those of you that would prefer to simply type your questions into a single document to be imported into a quiz in Moodle, I offer some potential solutions.

In this article, I will review three simple methods designed to speed up quiz question creation in Study Direct.  For readers who are not members of the University of Sussex, Study Direct is the name of our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) which is built on Moodle (version 1.9). The two terms may be used interchangeably throughout this post. Read more ›

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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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