AI and education – notes from reading group

Will Higher Ed Keep AI in Check? (notes from Chrysanthi Tseloudi)

In this article, Frederick Singer argues that whether the future of AI in education is a positive or a dystopian one depends not on a decision to use or not use AI, but on retaining control over how it is used.

The author starts by mentioning a few examples of how AI is/ may be used outside of education – both risky and useful. They then move on to AI’s use in educational contexts, with examples including using an AI chat bot for students’ queries regarding enrolment and financial issues, as well as AI powered video transcription that can help accessibility. The area they identify has the most potential for both risk and benefit is AI helping educators address individual students’ needs and indicating when intervention is needed; there are concerns about data privacy and achieving the opposite results, if educators lose control.

The final example they mention is using AI in the admissions process, to sidestep human biases and help identify promising applicants, but without automatically rejecting students that are not identified as promising by the AI tool.

I think this is something to be cautious about. Using AI for assessment – whether for admission, to mark activities, progress, etc – certainly has potential, but AI is not free of human biases. In fact, there have been several examples where they are full of them. The article Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses and Cathy O’Neil’s Ted talk The era of blind faith in big data must end report that AI algorithms can be racist and sexist, because they rely on datasets that contain biases already; e.g. a dataset of successful people is essentially a dataset of past human opinions of who can be successful, and human opinions are biased –  if e.g. only a specific group of people have been culturally allowed to be successful, a person that doesn’t belong to that category will not be seen by AI as equally (or more) promising as those who do belong to it. AI algorithms can be obscure, it is not necessarily obvious what they are picking up on to make their judgements and so it’s important to be vigilant and for the scientists who make them to implement ways to counteract potential discriminations arising from it.

It’s not hard to see how this could apply in educational contexts. For example, algorithms that use datasets from disciplines that are currently more male dominated might rank women as less likely to succeed, and algorithms that have been trained with data that consists overwhelmingly of students of a specific nationality and very few internationals might mark international students’ work lower. There are probably ways to prevent this, but awareness of potential bias is needed for this to be done. All this considered, educators seeing AI as a tool that is free of bias would be rather worrying. Understanding the potential issues there is key in retaining control.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Change Higher Education (notes from Michael Marcinkowski)

For this meeting, I read ‘How Artificial Intelligence Can Change Higher Education,’ a profile of Sebastian Thrun. The article detailed Thrun’s involvement with the popularization of massive open online courses and the founding of his company, Udacity. Developed out of Thrun’s background working at Google in the field of artificial intelligence, Udacity looks to approach the question of education as a matter of scale: how can digital systems be used to vast numbers of people all over the world. For Thrun, the challenge for education is how it can be possible to develop student mastery of a subject through online interactions, while at the same time widening the pathways for participation in higher education.

The article, unfortunately, focused most on the parallels between Thrun’s work in education and in his involvement with the development of autonomous vehicles, highlighting the potential that artificial intelligence technologies have for both, while avoiding any discussion of the particulars of how this transformational vision might be achieved.

Nevertheless, the article still opened up some interesting concerns around questions of scale and how best of approach the question of how education might function at a scale larger than as traditionally conceived. At the heart of this question is the role that autonomous systems might have in helping to manage this kind of large scale educational system. That is, at what point and for what tasks is it appropriate to take human educators out of the loop or to place them in further remove from the student. In particular, areas such as the monitoring of student well-being and one-on-one tutoring came out as areas ripe for both innovation and controversy.

While it was disappointing that the article largely avoided the actual issues of the uses of artificial intelligence in education, it did offer an unplanned for lesson about AI in education. Like in the hype surrounding self-driving cars, the promises for a new educational paradigm that were put forward in this 2012 article still seem far off. While the mythos of the Silicon Valley innovator might cast Thrun as a rebel who is singularly able to see the true path forward for education, most of his propositions for education, when they were not pie-in-sky fantasies, repeated well worn opinions present throughout the history of education.

Suggested reading

Digital Accessibility Events for 2019/20

The Digital Education Office are hosting a series of events focusing on Digital Accessibility. AbilityNet are running four sessions on individual accessibility needs. Speakers will share their lived experience of various conditions and impairments and discuss how these influence the way they access and consume digital content.

They will share their professional experience as Accessibility and Assistive Technology Professionals in supporting Disabled Learners in the context of accessing digital platforms and content.

The sessions will engage participants by developing their understanding of potential pitfalls when creating digital content and will include easy to consume guidance on creating accessible content for all audiences. Additional support videos and guidance will be provided after the events.

With new legislation requiring the University to ensure that all content published on websites, intranets or mobile apps is accessible, these talks offer a chance to learn how to improve the materials and content you create to support students learning.

 

You can find out more and book tickets for the individual sessions via the following links:

Digital Accessibility and Sight Impairment 30th October 2pm – 4pm

Digital Accessibility and Mental Health 13th November 2pm – 4pm

Digital Accessibility and Physical Impairment 4th December 2pm – 4pm

Digital Accessibility and Neurodiversity 15th December 2pm – 4pm

 

 

Writing down my thoughts of ALTc 2019

The ALT Conference this year was held in Edinburgh. It was my first experience of ALTc and I was pretty excited about heading up to Scotland. Getting off the tram in the city centre on the Monday evening with Edinburgh Castle illuminated in lights was pretty amazing 

The conference was held in the University’s McEwan Hall. The building was incredible, as was the auditorium inside. Sat within the hall you couldn’t help but look up at the beautiful windows and artistry that covered the walls. Luckily not too distracting to keep me from listening in on the keynotes talks. 

McEwan Hall

McEwan Hall

The list of workshops and talks over the three days was huge, so I took some great advice from my colleague, and steered away from my usual subjects. I took away a huge amount from these three days in Edinburgh, but I’ll mention the three keys areas that stood out for me. 

Going back to basics

 

A large area for discussion throughout the conference was the idea of taking learning back to basics. Working within the learning technology field, there is often the assumption that we must always look for new and exciting technology that we can filter into our teaching. This can often mean the pedagogical side of the discussion or project can get lost within the technology.  

Jesse Stommel’s keynote also talked about how some tools are ‘problematic to the core’. There were times in the talk where he was quite critical of certain tools we use. However, being critical is not always a bad thing and it leads us on to really think about the tools we are using and decide whether they are beneficial to our students, staff and our own learning. 

It wasn’t however all doom and gloom, and I sat in on several talks that were using technology quite simply, but to great effect. 

Here be Dragons: Dispelling Myths around BYOD Digital Examinations: Claudia Cox 

This was a great short presentation on the use of digital exams at Brunel University. It was good to see a simple approach being taken to an area that could cause quite a lot of disturbance and resistance within a University. They broke down their projects into three areas; infrastructure, technical support, and training. Tackling these challenges in this way allowed the team to put more thought into their projects and focus on their objectives and outcomes. I liked how research even went into how different noises would affect students e.g. keyboard tapping.  Digital exams can seem quite a challenge to take on, and albeit a student who managed to guess a password hours before an exam started, Claudia relayed how smooth and simple the process was, and how the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Under the right circumstances and with the right support, BYOD can allow for students to feel happier and calmer when undertaking exams. 

Creativity through video in Heriot-Watt Online: James Igoe and Mari Cruz Garcia 

A great talk on how video can enhance and improve learning and teaching in an online course. This session looked how simple approaches can be of great value to an online course and allow the students to feel more engaged. The team here were using Lumen5 to create short and snappy videos that they could get out to users in record time. It took a step back from high level video production and focused on getting the information over to the student. 

Another part of this talk I found interesting was their use of lightboard technology. This maybe doesn’t fall quite under the ‘back to basics’ theme but I’ve been informed by a colleague there are certain DIY hacks to create this mirrored effect of presenting on a much simpler level – something I’m keen to try! 

Inside McEwan Hall

Inside McEwan Hall

Working with our students in higher education. 

 

“Trust students. Ask them how they learn and what challenges they face. Believe them” Jesse Stommel 

I’ve always been an advocate for understanding the importance of listening to student’s views, but this was a theme I felt cropped up a lot within the conference. In Jesse Stommel’s keynote he reminded us that we need to trust our students and learn from them. They are the epi-centre of our institutions and should be taken into the equation more when we think about course design and how we want to teach. 

Ollie Bray also talked about this on the final day of the conference; 

“We hear a lot about learning from our students, but less about learning with them. If we want young learners to be creative, we need children and adults working together in co-creative learning teams.   Despite the rhetoric that AI will “solve” education, solving complex problems comes down to people, pedagogy and leadership. 

A few talks I went to really related to this: 

Designing a new digital arts curriculum where technology inspires new stories, new experiences and new realities: Paul Proctor and Jacqueline Butler 

This was an interesting talk looking at co-creating courses across different disciplines for the new School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. As well as speaking about how they wanted to bring academics and practitioners together to collaborate in one bespoke place, they also talked about how they tackled and questioned the different roles that made up their team who were working on the project. Involvement from all areas of the institution was monumental to the success of the task in hand. 

The new curriculum was being created through a series of short developmental ‘curriculum design sprints’, involving students, alumni, staff, external industry partners, international colleagues and partners from the creative, tech and business worlds. Again, a great way to work with our students and a simple approach on keeping objectives compact and achievable. 

How user experience research is shaping the changes to our Virtual Learning Environment: Paul Smyth, Duncan Stephen, Karen Howie 

A quick mention of this talk which I thoroughly enjoyed. The team used feedback from several surveys to highlight the inconsistencies and frustrations that were coming out of the use of VLEs for students. They embarked on a project to make these courses more accessible and relevant. Again, they took a simple approach and focused on six work streams: templates, checklists, training and support, terminology and automation. 

What stood out for me was the involvement of staff as well as students in their project, and how much research and testing went into the development process. They described some of their results as ‘surprising and enlightening’ and went on to discuss how considering different users allowed them to make significant changes to all areas of the VLE, not just the front end. Everyone’s experience was important. 

Edinburgh in the sun

Edinburgh in the sun

#femedtech

 

This was one of my favourite talks, and the FemEdTech team had a positive and enlightening presence throughout the conference. Helen Beetham was a captivating and engaging speaker, and opened my eyes to a subject that I have often thought about, but never knew was so widely talked about. We focused and reflected on four main areas: 

  • Learning technology as a gendered work, looking at how different roles are valued and rewarded. 
  • Learning technology and education opportunity. This looked at the use of digital systems in education in relation to the participation rates and outcomes of women learners. 
  • Feminist pedagogies. 
  • Feminist epistemologies. 

An interesting talk that focused on inclusivity and bringing people together to discuss why or if feminism should hold a perspective with the area of learning technology. This is their twitter account @femedtech if you wanted to find out more. 

ALTc was a great opportunity for me to meet people working in the same area as me and made me aware that there are so many different directions and opportunities to take when thinking about working within learning technology. I still think being a learning technologist at Edinburgh Zoo may be one of the best jobs going. It was a great couple of days and sparked my motivation for putting in a proposal in the future and making more time for research. 

Thanks also to Lorna Campbell for her great write up of the Keynote talks. Reading this made a lot more sense than the notes I took! 

Edinburgh in the rain

Rainy Edinburgh

A few notes from our TurningPoint Lunch and Learn event

Matthew Moss from Turning Technologies was in Bristol on Tuesday to talk to us and a number of academics about TurningPoint. This is a polling software, or student response system (SRS), that we use and manage at the University of Bristol.

As well as taking us through the basics of creating and running a TurningPoint session, and informing us that this is the software used on ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’, Matt also spoke to us about some of the uses which are not as widely adopted at the University. These included: 

  • Private messaging between student and teacher
  • The ability to make polled questions anonymous as you run a session
  • Anywhere Polling – this allows you to run a poll while on any website (or other app) 
  • The ability to reserve 10 session IDs to have as your own
  • Conditional branching in polling
  • The use of word clouds
  • Using the TurningPoint app
  • The use of reporting
  • TurningPoint Web
  • Using Hot Spots in TurningPoint Web
  • Question banks
  • Self-paced polling. 

We hope to run another of these ‘lunch and learn’ sessions in the new year, and would be keen to hear from members of staff who would be happy to talk about the work they are doing with student response systems.

If you would like to find out more, or are interested in getting a licence to use TurningPoint, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk. You can also find out more by going to our website. 

We also have a SRS Yammer Group which you are welcome to join. 

Tiddlywinks of teaching – materials from Playful Learning 19

Chrysanthi and I ran a session at the Playful Learning conference, play testing a game we have developed to help consider issues around accessibility and inclusivity. The title of our session was The Tiddlywinks of Teaching.

A first draft of the materials, all Creative Commons licenced, is now available for anyone who is interested: Tiddlywinks of Teaching materials (zip, 3MB).

We will post more about the game when time allows!

Playful Learning Conference 2019

On the 10th-12th of July I went to the Playful Learning Conference with Suzi Wells, to learn about different approaches to play in adult education and to present our own game.

It was a very lively conference. To the untrained eye, some moments of it looked like a bunch of adults had gone slightly mad and decided to go back to kindergarten to play with balloons and play dough and run around. To a more experienced observer, the attendants were learning about how others use play for learning, and using collaborative, playful ways to:

  • describe the academic writing process

This is our team’s description. The queen bee gives the question. The small bee then goes away to think about it and interpret the question and plans how to answer it. It looks for flowers/ materials to read and then does the research, gathering what it needs to create their work. It then edits it and presents the result in a nice format.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • explore barriers and solutions to being more playful in work and education

According to our team, the most important barriers to play are expectations, limited time and resources. Solutions are to give time and space for playfulness and innovation, change mindsets and normalise play in learning, and get to a point where people trust and believe in it.

 

  • solve the gender pay gap in Higher Education using one of 2 rapidly taught ethical theories.

Our team decided to use the theory of deontology to solve the gender pay gap in HE. There should be an equal amount of men and women in all kinds of posts, an equal amount performing all kinds of tasks, equal opportunities for promotion. For this to work properly, men and women should also do an equal amount of housework, spend an equal amount of time with their children, do an equal amount of emotional labour.

All genders should be included in this absolute equality, including those that do not identify as men or women (percentage arbitrarily chosen and subject to change to appropriately reflect society).

 

Our own session went better than we could have expected. All our room’s tables were full, and people were engaged with playing our game (working title: The Tiddlywinks of Teaching).

Attendants playing our game that helps think about inclusivity and accessibility when designing learning innovations.

 

They seemed to enjoy it and gave us very useful feedback. I would have been happy to keep talking to the participants about it for another hour. Also, I was very pleased to see some admittedly very happy faces when we told them they could take sets of cards with them!

A few things stood out for me at this conference:

  1. The vast majority of playful activities were physical, not digital.
  2. For many people engaging in playful learning, play = creativity. There were many sessions and activities where different creative processes – physical or digital – were used/ suggested to learn either about play itself, or as a tool to engage with different topics.
  3. Escape rooms have become quite popular in the area of playful learning. Their potential to help practice and enhance communication and teamwork skills, as well as to help in team building are easy to see. Their potential to learn domain-specific skills, not so much yet.
  4. Conferences such as this, that allow for more hands on sessions are an amazing way to playtest and get feedback for learning games. I am sure that our own game will greatly improve as a result of our session.

Playful Learning 19: mega games, promoting play, and wellbeing

It’s a week since I returned from my three days in leafy Leicester at the Playful Learning conference. It’s an event I have watched from a distance with envy in previous years, so I was very excited to be able to attend, and to play-test a game Chrysanthi Tseloudi and I developed around accessibility and inclusivity.

Some highlights and useful takeaways:

  • Mega games – Darren Green and Liz Cable ran a Climate Crisis mega game: a simulation of negotiations between countries around reducing carbon emissions. This session was for about 20 people but would have scaled well for much larger numbers. It was fascinating and absorbing. You would need some caution about what lessons students would take away – if you asked me what I learnt I’d have to say: China are key to solving the crisis but impossible to work with (which is obviously down to the way the players interpreted their roles) and I’m too gullible (which sadly is not). Even so, I can see real possibilities for this.
  • Promoting play in HE – I love the sound of the University of Winchester’s festival of play and creativity. At Bristol we have our Learning Games Lunches a few times a year but a festival allows so much more scope to innovate, play test, and to take ideas directly to and from the students.
  • Play for all – There were differing views around whether play had to be voluntary or not, which is obviously an important issue if you are trying to incorporate play within HE, and particularly within the taught curriculum. Reflecting on the kinds of sessions at the conference that worked well for me, and those that didn’t quite, I’m increasingly persuaded that you can only invite people to play and you can’t require them. Maybe providing choice within a set of playful options, so that people retain a sense of ownership or control, would be enough.

I was expecting – hoping I suppose – the conference would introduce me to new game mechanics for use in teaching, and maybe some facilitation ideas. In the end, the more significant focus for me was around wellbeing. It can be too easy to feel invisible and without agency, not part of anything. At Playful Learning everything was very active and collaborative. For three solid days I felt both seen and heard (a phrase which sounds rather corny to my ears but I can’t think of a more accurate one to describe the feeling). Being so connected was hard work at times but a very positive experience.

The idea of play as an indicator of wellbeing was introduced in by Alison James in her keynote. She mentioned that animals who are sick or scared can’t play. I now wonder how much play can promote or amplify wellbeing. Can behaving in a playful way sometimes trick you into being more well? I’m reminded of the work of Clowns Without Borders, taking laughter to children who you might imagine couldn’t benefit.

By the time Friday morning came and it was our turn to present, my feeling was that we were addressing a room of supportive friends. Not people who would never criticise, we got some very useful criticism, but friends all the same. This building of community and connection – both for students and staff – is a key thing that playfulness and games could bring to universities.

(Yellow-team-lego photo shamelessly stolen from @malcolmmurray – but myself and two mysterious strangers (or people whose names I have forgotten) built the thing so I’m hoping that’s ok.)

 

 

I

Digital Examinations Forum

Yesterday I attended the Digital Examinations Forum at the University of Bath which was an extremely useful day.  The event was very well-attended and we had the opportunity to hear from and discuss with colleagues from a range of institutions who are well advanced in the journey of implementing digital examinations.  Mostly for me the day re-emphasised some key points, summarised as follows, with a couple of related photos below:

  1. Have an assessment policy which specifically mentions appropriate use of digital, but emphasise the opportunities digital offers to do assessment differently and better, not just digitising existing practice or restricting yourselves to MCQs.  For example incorporate video into questions, use authentic case studies in digital format,  produce a mini piece of coursework under exam conditions, and there were lots more ideas
  2. Keep developing staff understanding of assessment, ensuring alignment with learning outcomes and activities
  3. Marking online is different to marking on paper. Allow colleagues time, space and support to get used to this.
  4. Standard processes help, but maintain flexibility in the approach – there will be no one tool/approach which meets all requirements
  5. Some things may just not be appropriate to digitise
  6. Educational leadership is needed at all levels to support this change
  7. It costs!  eg building / kitting out space, IT infrastructure (including for BYOD), support eg training for invigilators 

Finally a couple of other items of interest: there was plenty of encouraging feedback about the Inspera platform, and I hadn’t previously come across the work by Martin Bush and Lucia Otoyo from London South Bank on reducing the need for guesswork in multiple choice tests. There are some examples here: https://quizslides.co.uk/home , and a journal article from Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education.

Astrid Birgitte Eggen from University of Agder on assessment policy

Anja Sisarica from Inspera on the need for flexibility in marking tools

Curriculum theories – notes from reading group

Thanks to Sarah Davies for setting us some fascinating reading!

Connected curriculum chapter 1 (notes from Chris Adams)

The connected curriculum is a piece of work by Dilly Fung from UCL. It is an explicit attempt to outline how departments in research-intensive universities can develop excellent teaching by integrating their research into it; the ‘connected’ part of the title is the link between research and teaching. At it’s heart is the idea that the predominant mode of learning for undergraduates should be active enquiry, but that rather than students discovering for themselves things which are well-established, they should be discovering things at the boundaries of what is known, just like researchers do.

It has six strands:

  • Students connect with researchers and with the institution’s research. Or, in other words, the research work of he department is explicitly built into the curriculum
  • A throughline of research activity is built into each programme. Properly design the curriculum so that research strands run though it, and it builds stepwise on what has come before.
  • Students make connections across subjects and out to the world. Interdisciplinarity! Real world relevance.
  • Students connect academic learning with workplace learning. Not only should we be teaching them transferable skills for a world of rapid technological change, but we need to tell them that too.
  • Students learn to produce outputs – assessments directed at an audience. Don’t just test them with exams
  • Students connect with each other, across phases and with alumni. This will create a sense of community and belonging.

This last point is then expanded upon. Fung posits that the curriculum is not just a list of what should be learned, but is the whole experience as lived by the student. Viewing the curriculum as a narrow set of learning outcomes does not product the kind of people that society needs, but is a consequence of the audit culture that pervades higher education nowadays. Not all audit is bad – the days when ‘academic freedom’ gave people tenure and the freedom to teach terribly and not do any research are disappearing, and peer-review is an integral part of the university system – but in order to address complex global challenges we need a values based curriculum ‘defined as the development of new understandings and practices, through dialogue and human relationships, which make an impact for good in the world.’

I liked it sufficiently to buy the whole book. It addresses a lot of issues that I see in my own department – the separation of research from teaching, and the over-reliance on exams, and the lack of community, for example.

Connected curriculum chapter 2 (notes from Suzi Wells)

As mentioned in chapter 1, the core proposition is that the curriculum should be ‘research-based’ – ie most student learning “should reflect the kinds of active, critical and analytic enquiry undertaken by researchers”.

Fung gives a this useful definition of what that means in practice. Students should:

  • Generate new knowledge through data gathering and analysis
  • Disseminate their findings
  • Refine their understanding through feedback on the dissemination

All of it seems fairly uncontroversial in theory and tends to reflect current practice, or at least what we aspire to in current practice. There’s some discussion of the differences in what research means to different disciplines, and how that filters through into assessment of students, and potentially some useful studies on just how effective this all is.

Fung mentions the Boyer Commission (US 1998) and its proposed academic bill of rights, including (for research intensive institutions): “expectation of and opportunity for work with talented senior researchers to help and guide the student’s efforts”. Given increasing student numbers, this is possibly a less realistic expectation to meaningfully meet than it once was.

There’s some useful discussion about what is needed to make research-based-teaching work.

I was particularly interested in the idea that providing opportunity for this form of learning isn’t everything. Socio-economic factors mean that students may have differing beliefs about their own agency. Fung cites Baxter-Magdola (2004) on the importance of students having ‘self-authorship’ which includes ‘belief in oneself as possessing the capacity to create new knowledge’ and ‘the ability to play a part within knowledge-building communities’. You can’t assume all students arrive with the same level of this, and this will affect their ability to participate.

This part of the chapter also talks about the importance of not just sending students off “into the unknown to fend for themselves” – imagine a forest of ivory towers – but to give them support & structure. Activities need to be framed within human interactions (including peer support).

Towards the end there is a nod to it being anglo-centric – African and Asian educational philosophy and practice may be different – but little detail is given.

How Emotion Matters in Four Key Relationships in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education” (notes from Roger Gardner)

This is a 2016 article by Kathleen Quinlan, who is now Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education and Reader in Higher Education at University of Kent, but was working at Oxford when this was written.

She writes that while historically there has been less focus on Bloom’s affective domain than the cognitive, recently interest in the relation of emotions to learning has been growing although it is still under-researched. The article comes out of a review of the existing literature and conversations with teachers at the National University of Singapore in August 2014.

The paper focusses on four relationships: students with the subject matter, teachers, their peers and what she calls “their developing selves”. For each section Quinlan includes a summary of implications for teaching practice, which provide some very useful suggestions, ranging from simple things such as encouraging students to introduce each other when starting activities to help foster peer relationships, to advocating further research and exploration into when it is appropriate and educationally beneficial for teachers to express emotions and when not.

Quinlan says “discussions about intangibles such as emotions and relationships are often sidelined”, but it now seems essential to prioritise this if we are to support student wellbeing, and this paper provides some helpful prompts and suggestions for reflection and developing our practice.  If you are short of time I recommend looking at the bullet point “implications for practice”.

What is “significant learning”? (notes from Chrysanthi Tseloudi)

In this piece, Dr. Fink talks about the Taxonomy of Significant Learning; a taxonomy that refers to new kinds of learning that go beyond the cognitive learning that Bloom’s taxonomy addresses. The taxonomy of significant learning – where significant learning occurs when there is a lasting change in the learner that is important in their life – is not hierarchical, but relational and interactive. It includes six categories of learning:

Foundational knowledge: the ability to remember and understand specific information as well as ideas and perspectives, providing the basis for other kinds of learning.

Application: learning to engage in a new kind of action (intellectual, physical, social, etc) and develop skills that allow the learner to act on other kinds of learning, making them useful.

Intergration: learning to see, understand, and make new connections between different things, people, ideas, realms of ideas or realms of life. This gives learners new (especially intellectual) power.

Human Dimension: learning about the human significance of things they are learning – understanding something about themselves or others, getting a new vision of who they want to become, understanding the social implications of things they have learned or how to better interact with others.

Caring: developing new feelings, interests, values and/ or caring more about something that before; caring about something feeds the learner’s energy to learn about it and make it a part of their lives.

Learning how to learn: learning about the learning process; how to learn more efficiently, how to learn about a specific method or in a specific way, which enables the learner to keep on learning in the future with increasing effectiveness.

The author notes that each kind of learning is related to the others and achieving one kind helps achieve the others. The more kinds of learning involved, the more significant is the learning that occurs – with the most significant kind being the one that encompasses all six categories of the taxonomy.

Education Principles: Designing learning and assessment in the digital age (notes from Naomi Beckett)

This short paper is part of a guide written by Jisc. It covers what Education Principles are and why they are such a vital characteristic of any strategy. Coming from someone unspecialised in this area it was an interesting read to understand how principles can bring staff together to engage and develop different education strategies. The guide talks about how principles can ‘provide a common language, and reference point for evaluating change’.

The paper talks about having a benchmark in which everyone can check their progress. I like this idea. So often projects become too big and the ideas and values are lost on what was first decided as a team. Having a set of principles is a way to bring everything back together and is a useful way to enable a wide variety of staff to engage with each other. The guide mentions how having these principles means there is a ‘common agreement on what is fundamentally important.’

Having these principles developed at the beginning of a project puts the important ideas and values into motion and is a place to look back to when problems arise. Principles should be action oriented, and not state the obvious. Developing them in this way allows for a range of staff members to bring in different ideas and think about how they want to communicate their own message.

I also followed up by reading ‘Why use assessment and feedback principles?’ from Strathclyde’s Re-Engineering Assessment Practices (REAP) project.

Suggested reading

Deep linking for External users

A couple of years ago I created a simple tool to generate Deep Links into specific content areas of Blackboard courses or organisations. This works well for the majority of our Blackboard users who authenticate via Single Sign On.

Unfortunately this tool falls down when links are accessed by users with an ‘External’ account, typically students and staff outside of the university who need access to a course but do not have University accounts. Some work I’m currently supporting requires an easy way to signpost both UoB and External users from a website into related areas of a Blackboard course, so I’ve updated the tool to create an External User variant:

External Users Blackboard Deep Link Tool.

It’s quite niche, but I thought I’d share it in case it’s of use to University staff.