Due to a lengthier upgrade process than usual this year, IS&T need further time to do testing on the Blackboard upgrade. As a result we have had to move the upgrade from its usual date in early July to be the weekend of 5-7 August. The upgrade will start at the end of the day…
A guest post by Roberta E Taylor on the Assessment Journey Programme (AJP) blog has just been published and describes her experience of replacing a 4000 word essay-based assessment with a short screencast. Roberta describes the background to the assessment, the approach taken to introduce students to screencasting concepts and techniques and the creative skills that…
Jisc’s Summer of Student Innovation programme awards money and mentoring opportunities to students with either an idea about how technology could improve study or general student life, or a completed product that they would like to pilot within an educational setting. The participants work in small teams to implement their proposed project and, in addition to…
Google has just added a new feature to Google Docs that should make it much easier to create ebooks for use on tablets, phones, Kindle-style devices, PCs and laptops. Google has added the option to export documents in the ePub format, which is the international standard for ebooks and so is supported by most software and…
Each year, the New Media Consortium (NMC) works with a panel of academics and technologists to identify developing trends in technology-supported pedagogy that are likely to have significant impact on learning and teaching over the next five years, challenges to technology adoption and trends accelerating technology adoption. The 2016 Higher Education edition was published online last week,…
The 2015 edition of the Open University’s annual Innovating Pedagogy report has recently been published. Once again, the report offers overviews of a variety of new and emerging teaching approaches and pedagogies, along with information on technologies that are being use to support them. As usual, the report includes 10 pedagogies, their potential impact, and…
Last year, in the run up to the Christmas break, Regent’s University London ran a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) focused on mobile apps that can help support teaching and learning on tablets and smartphones. On each day of the ’12 Apps of Christmas’ MOOC, an app was introduced, along with some ideas for how…
James Coope of the Venture Matrix has recently posted some interesting information about the way that students in ACES, D&S and SBS have been using online videoconferencing to work with organisations and individuals around the world on real life projects as part of their assessment activities. Assessments and activities of this type help students to develop vital…
In 2013, SHU undertook a research project to look into the ways that students use their past feedback when working on subsequent assessments. The full report of the findings from the project, ‘Making Connections’, was published a while ago, and today a paper drawing together these findings with examples of relevant technological interventions was published in Research in Learning Technology. The…
With the start of the new academic year being upon us, don’t forget to make your Blackbaord sites available so that your students can access them. To check if a site is available, just log in to shuspace and look at the list of your Blackboard sites. If ‘(unavailable to students)’ appears next to the name of…