Academic Technology news and updates

This was a rather strange event at the Edgbaston Cricket ground in Birmingham. There was no formal agenda and the invited attendees were asked to come up with their own discussion points to which the JISC team listened and took notes but did not participate themselves. These are the notes that Sarah Davies from the JISC shared with attendees after the event:

• Improving student attainment using TEL: We noted the importance of giving students many ways to answer the question “how well am I doing?”, and providing real-world assessments.
• Touch screen kiosks and their uses: We recognised the importance and challenges of kiosks and location-aware technology for supporting students within our physical estates, and the need to share good practice in this area.
• Have we embedded TEL into the learning and teaching strategy too soon? We concluded that how you operationalise your strategy is more important than where TEL sits in it – change management, stakeholder engagement and staff digital capabilities are key.
• How to grow a digital culture: We emphasised the importance of focusing on our users and their real-world problems and working from there, within a culture that recognises people’s attitudes and beliefs and allows for failure.
• Understanding data (x2): We noted that data is most useful when it is collected purposefully, given a clear context, and meaningfully analysed. To achieve this, staff data literacy, including critical data analysis, needs to be improved.
• How to change perceptions of TEL: We recognised that peer to peer sharing of practice is important, which is facilitated by focusing on pedagogy and teaching approaches rather than the technology. Students can be engaged around digital skills, and as co-creators of technological approaches.
• Retention and learning analytics: We explored the conditions under which learning analytics can best support retention, and noted that the data needs context, and that analytics has to be linked to conversations with the student’s (rather than the university’s) best interests at heart.
• Academic integrity in a world of technology enhance learning: We discussed the challenges posed by TEL in identity and verification and the opportunities to work on trust & identity and developing professional exams while working on links with cyber security.
• Collecting and understanding feedback: We discussed new ways of collecting feedback through approaching students in everyday situations, rewards, motivation, ideas forum, or community forum. We concluded that better engagement of students and staff was required along with better communications between the two.
• Using TEL to enhance the student learning community: We discussed professional versus social identity and the ambiguous grey area in between. We noted we should learn from our own virtual learning communities and encourage students to build / access these while training students to utilise social spaces for learning opportunities and to form links with professionals.
• Supporting academics to use TEL well: We questioned how to raise academic expectations and how to share good practice and enable peer support, concluding we should offer digital inductions as part of CPD along with local champions at school level.
• Learning technology, what do we use and how do we use it: We concluded that everyone is generally satisfied with tools in use but noted students feel as with infrastructure there is a big inconsistency in how tools are used by lecturers and report inbox overload and irrelevant notifications.
• Can classrooms change teaching? We considered whether we could remove barriers to learning through room design and whether learning from social learning spaces should feed through into classrooms. We concluded that controlled pilots should be run, worked out with time tabling teams and a variety of different types of spaces need to be tested.

JISC will take these insights to a two-day future planning workshop to explore these issues further and to see what they can deliver in 2018 and subsequently.