At our first School Teaching and Learning Community of Practice event 2017, we enjoyed a presentation from Hannah Cook of the Faculty eLearning Team on how to use on-line communication tools more effectively.
This was an eye opener for many of us. We learnt some great tips and tricks for using Blackboard (our institutional VLE) and other on-line communication tools (like padlet and wordpress) to improve how we communicate, both with each other, and more importantly with our students.
Hannah’s presentation is available here Using online communications tools more effectively . Its well worth a look if you are struggling to communicate effectively, yet efficiently, to often very large cohorts of students.
Just over two years ago I was asked to take on the role of Academic Lead for eLearning within the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering at The University of Manchester. We are a large school (120 academic staff) covering a number of engineering and management disciplines. In common with many academic departments, this has resulted in a somewhat silo mentality; long, often deserted corridors, and staff only communicating with their immediate research and teaching colleagues. My sense at that time was that there was plenty of eLearning expertise within the School, but that this expertise existed in small pockets of excellence, which were isolated and often unaware of each other.
If this sounds like a familiar picture, then read the story of how we used a Community Practice to connect, encourage and strengthen our eLearning practices within the School, which has just been published on the Higher Education Academy Learning and Teaching Blog – Putting the Community into eLearning
This semester I came back from a refreshing and highly productive six month sabbatical to a maelstrom of teaching activity and my first proper management role within my department. As is often the case within academia, the role was new and ill-defined. It involves enhancing teaching quality (whatever that means) across 40 undergraduate and postgraduate units delivered by 18 academics . Three months in, I wanted to share some reflections on how I am adapting to my new management responsibilities.
In my view, management responsibilities in academia are akin to a medieval game of football. There are few rules, many hundreds of players, several often conflicting objectives, and pretty ineffective levers of control. So, here are some strategies for playing the game…..
My colleague Dr Susie Riley at The University of Manchester has deepened students’ understanding of some of the core concepts within aerospace engineering by getting 1st year students to produce short videos of the four main forces that act on an aircraft – lift, thrust, drag and gravity- and how they interact to get and keep an aricraft airborne. The results are impressive, especially when some of the students hadn’t heard of elevators before the course.
Another colleague Dr Martin Gillie (@martin_gillie) teaching Structures to 1st year civil engineering students at The University of Manchester was pleased to receive this particularly creative coursework submission .
It came in response to a coursework brief that asked students to ” identify study and research the behaviour and design of an existing structure. Present your findings on a maximum of two sides of A4 or equivalent (e.g. 1 side of A3, or a short video or any other means of communication)…”
Such student generated content can be a powerful tool for learning, and the content created can be reused or repurposed for future cohorts.
Additional Material posted 3rd April 2017
Dr Keith Brown at The University of Bath posted these instructions on a quick and simple method of generating short videos armed with nothing more than powerpoint, a storyboard, a USB microphone and a mobile phone camera. Its well worth a read and I will definitely be doing a bit of experimenting with this over the summer. My thanks go to Keith (@KeithBrownBath) for allowing me to share his work.
Here’s a little light reading from Manuela Saragosa of the BBC on the topic of uncertainty, although it still contains some essential truths about how we respond to uncertainties that we face.
1. that we humans are not that good at dealing with uncertainty
2. that we suffer from “ambiguity aversion” – a desire to know what the risks are and what options we have
3. that we prefer risks with numbers attached, rather than open ended uncertainties even when those numbers may themselves be laden with uncertainty or even unreliable.
At our first School Teaching and Learning Community of Practice event 2017, we enjoyed a presentation from Hannah Cook of the Faculty eLearning Team on how to use on-line communication tools more effectively.
