Reflection: An Approach to Teaching and Learning

Reflection is an approach that encourages deep thinking by an individual about their existing knowledge and capabilities, how it has been supported or challenged by new learning and experience, and the identification of strengths to promote and weaknesses/limitations to address. While most people have an instinctive reflective process that we use to learn from our actions, a…

Case Study: Enhancing Employability Skills through Electronic Portfolios

This case study outlines the way in which a tutor has used PebblePad and Blackboard to support students in developing their employability skills and reflective capability. When applying for graduate employment, nursing students are required to write personal statements outlining the skills and experience that makes them suitable for the position. The quality of these statements…

Critiquing: An Approach to Teaching and Learning

Critiquing is an approach that encourages students to consider their own work by drawing comparisons with the work of their peers. Traditionally, students will submit their work to be critiqued by fellow students and perform their own critique on the work of one or more peers. Through this process the students get feedback on their work from their fellow students and,…

Contemporary Approaches to Teaching – Panel Q & A response

This is the second in a series of articles following our recent event Contemporary Approaches to Teaching –December 10th responding to questions raised by participants. While the panel was able to respond to some of the questions on the day, there wasn’t time to address them all.  To enable all questions to receive a response we…

What is an Electronic Voting System (EVS)?

This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms used in e-learning (view other articles in the series).  We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective. An ‘Electronic Voting System’ (EVS) is a system that allows presenters to ask multiple…

Why Use Audio?

What is it? In this sense, Audio refers to sound recordings that are shared with students in some way, typically through Blackboard. The recordings could be speech, music, ambient sounds, etc. or a mix of these. Uses for Audio There are many uses for audio in Learning, Teaching and Assessment, both by students and staff. These…

New in Blackboard: Inline Grading

This article is part of a series of articles explaining the new features and changes that will be introduced as part of the Blackboard upgrade scheduled for 26-28 July 2013. The Inline Grading tool will allow you to view, provide feedback on, and grade student-submitted assignment files without leaving the Grade Assignment page (i.e. the…

Hiding grades from students – best practice

We recommend that you hide grades from students during the marking process. This means that when you upload grades and feedback to a student that they can’t immediately see their results. This helps facilitate second marking practices, where grades and feedback may get adjusted before they are given to students. Also when marks and feedback…