H807 Week 2, Case 4 – Swansea

Cost saving, Resource efficiency,

Swansea University, Collaborative Teaching and Videoconferencing

A really nice idea of combining three small departments to offer more choice to students by sharing the teaching load using video conferencing, without the need for travel on the part of the teachers or the students.

Students retain their on campus community whilst widening their community of practice.

The schools benefit from a richer broader course provision without having to employ more specialists.

Was this innovative?

It was innovative as it combined three different HEIs in an open way, it saved a huge amount of time which a collaboration like this would have traditional taken a lot of time up of each member of the teaching team. Students were given more choice hence enhancing the student’s learning experience.

H807 Week 2, Case 3

Recruitment, Retention, Skills and Employability, Student Achievement,

University of Hull, Delivery of MA in Legislative Studies Online

Excellent example of widening the market place, making the course more accessible to people, enabling a niche course to take place in the first place by offering it entirely online with no (or few) restrictions for participants.

I was surprised by the size of the cohorts though, a course would never go ahead with only 4-6 participants at WBS, but maybe this is different.  The time and resource investment in making the course online surely could not be cost effective with this number.

The good thing here is the the dept as strategy behind it, enabling the innovation.  The Department can increase it’s student numbres and incomes, without adding pressure to physical resources.

The course was wholly work based related too, which made the learning and work seem more integrated.

Was this case innovative?

The course was innovative as it was one of the view of it’s type, the change of delivery mechanism enabled more people to take part in the course and widening the breadth of experience within it.

H807 Week 2 – Case Review 2

Recruitment, Retention, Achievement, Cost Savings, Efficiency,

Leeds Met: Use of summative computer assisted assessment

This case has a similar rationale and outcome as the Exeter case. Largers numbers of students, greater diversity of needs. However the use of e-assessment for 5 summative assessments throughout the course is progressive and innovative.  Huge time savings for academic staff and more timely feedback for students.

Negative – finding a venue for summative tests to take place big enough, and wouldn’t work for DL students as wouldn’t you need exam conditions? How do other people use summative online tests for off campus students?

Was this innovative?

The JISC guide refers to recruitment, retention, achievement, cost savings and efficiency as ways this case was innovative.

As with the Exeter case, the innovation occured by taking the existing practice into an online environment where tests could be applied more often, with quicker feedback and less academic time.

H807 Week 2- Case review 1

University of Exeter; Online Economics Texts

Recruitment, Retention, Reinforcing learning,  Cost Savings, Efficiency

My views on this are:

• that this is a good example of how the course reacted to increases in student numbers and diversity of needs, speeding up feedback and providing more opportunties for feedback without increasing staff workload.
• This innovation seemed to resolve  a problem with dealing with non-engagement.
• I liked that the teaching team didn’t fret about losing the opportunity for discussion, at this level (Yr 1) discussion isn’t that vital  – it’s later that indepth discussion is more relevant in this type of course

Why was this innovative?

It was a change that pushed boundaries, used technology in a way that hadn’t been before to resolve the problem of increased numbers and students not engaging with the current structure but I would not say that it was innovative from a pedagogical view as continuous testing/feedback has been around a long time, technology has just enabled us to speed the process up and scale it up.

The JISC guide says that it is innovative because it contributed to recruitment and retention issues, it helped reinforce learning and it saved costs/increased efficiencies.

How to categorise innovation in elearning?

We’re having an interesting discussion on ways to categorise innovation in elearning.

The course team asked us to place some terms/concepts that are linked to elearning on a grid of

Formal v Informal; New v Existing. I found this hard to do as many of the concepts are existing in the classroom but just don’t use online technologies.

Christopher Nelson suggested another continuum could be Pedagogy v Andragogy; he defines these as

“Pedagogy being able forcing children to sit in a classroom and learn, whether they want it or not.

Andragogy being where adults (well, 16+) decide they want to know more about a specific subject and provide their own motivation and interest.”

Nelson, C. (2009) “eLearning concepts and themes activity” H807-10B, week 2 tutor group forum (13 February 2010)

Which made me think of Sfard’s Participation v acquisition as another category (see my  blog post 23 February 2009