Friday 28 August 2015

Seeds for Solutions, How does the past inform the future? Innovation projects from 2007/08 #KATS2015

Project Title: Effective Communication for SPIRE Students
Project Leader(s): Sherilyn MacGregor

Project Aims:
  • Initiate conversations with colleagues about how we support and encourage effective communication in students’ work. 
  • Produce a set of common resources on basic writing, referencing and study skills for use by teaching staff in SPIRE. 
  • Inspire, enable and boost confidence of students; make effective communication an attainable goal.

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Effective Communication for SPIRE Students by Sherilyn MacGregor, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


Project Title: Project Zero
Project Leader(s): Diego Garro


An introduction to project work at University level


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Project Zero by Diego Garro, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Friday 21 August 2015

Seeds for Solutions, How does the past inform the future? Innovation projects from 2004/05 #KATS2015

Project Title: Web Based Assessment and Support
Project Leader(s): Doug Quinney


Web Based Assessment and Support - Presentation Slides

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Web Based Assessment and Support by Douglas Quinney, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


Project Title: Developing Interprofessional Reusable Learning Objects
Project Leader(s): Cath Bucher

The purpose of the project will be to host a workshop for staff from a range of professional groupings in the Faculty of Health to give them experience of developing content for standalone web based reusable learning objects (RLOs). These RLOs can then be used by a variety of disciplines in their teaching with the possibility of some RLOs being generic to other disciplines outside of the Faculty of Health.

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Developing Interprofessional Reusable Learning Objects by Cath Bucher, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Project Title: Formative vs Summative Assessment of Skills-based Group Projects
Project Leader(s): Anthony Curtis

The aim of this project is to evaluate and develop the assessment of an existing skills-based group project in terms of its timing and effectiveness in supporting such tasks, and to produce a model that can be applied throughout science and healthcare education.

The objectives of this project are:
  • Evaluate the skills-based group task within the context of existing Keele degree programmes with a view to applying it in more flexible, creative learning environments
  • Identify areas for improvement in relation to feedback, particularly the balance and timing of formative vs. summative assessment and the use of feed-forward
  • Assess the impact of expansion of the project to include different cohorts of students from various discipline backgrounds with respect to the type, appropriateness and level of feedback given
  • Disseminate the results of the project to the Keele academic community via the Keele Learning & Teaching Committee and active engagement with the Higher Education Academy and the FDTL4 FAST (Formative Assessment in Science Teaching) network
The proposal will further the University’s Learning & Teaching Strategy primarily, though not exclusively, through the development of student engagement with the principle aspects contained within the Employability Skills guidelines. It will also encourage the development of key, transferable skills, the implementation of basic inter-professional/inter-disciplinary learning, and develop a methodology that will encourage innovative, multidisciplinary teaching. Students will clearly benefit from this project, as is reflected in their engagement with other group-based work and the increased interest in industrial placements within the current Chemistry and Medicinal Chemistry cohorts.

One key aspect of the proposed work is that it will provide valuable, innovative course materials and a model that will be deployed in the proposed Pharmacy programme.

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Formative vs Summative Assessment of Skills-based Group Projects by Anthony Curtis, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Friday 14 August 2015

Seeds for Solutions, How does the past inform the future? Innovation projects from 2004/05 #KATS2015

Project Title: Development of a Digital Video Technique within a Student-led E-Learning System
Project Leader(s): Nigel Mountney and Stuart Egan

This project aims to develop a learning and teaching system that employs the medium of digital video in order to demonstrate the behaviour of various natural physical processes that have hitherto been difficult to describe and explain using more traditional teaching methods. At the heart of the proposed learning facility will be a database of video clips that will provide students with a dynamic, exciting and innovative learning experience. These will be integrated within an interactive, student-driven learning environment through the development of a dedicated, web-based front-end interface, interactive aspects of which will be further developed using the Java Applets – a programming tool used for the development of dynamic html systems. These resources will be presented as a series of e-learning practical exercises designed to develop independent learning skills in students, especially those operating in large teaching group settings.

A fundamental objective of this project will be to shoot, collate and edit a series of video clips that portray earth science and geographical phenomena and to integrate them with a variety of other digital media types including photos, animations and computer model simulations in order to produce a dynamic and innovative set of graphical learning resources. Implicit in this process will be the distillation of ‘raw’ data into a refined and integrated end-product designed specifically to help understand complex dynamic processes and to help students solve 3D problems that are common in branches of earth sciences such as stratigraphy. The video footage and related resources will be delivered as a series of practical-based exercises. Resource delivery will be undertaken by academic staff in lectures or in practical classes, or may be initiated by students via download from an intranet (Fig. 1), Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or through use of menu-driven interactive DVD video disks (Fig. 2). A further objective of this project will be to encourage students to make use of digital video recording equipment within a series of physical experiments conducted during practical laboratory classes in order to record results that would otherwise not be discernable from standard observations.

The past three years have seen a revolution in semi-professional digital video editing, mainly because digital video cameras have become affordable and desktop PC’s have become sufficiently powerful to be able to capture and edit digital video footage at near broadcast quality. Only now are the capabilities of this exciting new medium starting to be employed within taught courses to enhance the student learning experience. The power of digital video lies in the ability to precisely edit footage and mix video with still images, captions, audio overdubs, computer simulations and virtually any other type of digital media. This allows difficult concepts to be explained and illustrated in a manner that has hitherto not been possible.

Development of a Digital Video Technique - Final Report

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Development of a Digital Video Technique within a Student-led E-Learning System by Nigel Mountney and Stuart Egan, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


Project Title: Clinical Case-based Simulator
Project Leader(s): Colin Melville and Douglas Quinney

The aim of this proposal is to promote clinical by ensuring adequate coverage of core material. The limited duration and opportunistic nature of current practice makes this challenging. This proposal outlines the development of core clinical cases to assist the learner to develop clear archetypes of typical cases which will be delivered through IT using existing software, though the platform may need modifications to deliver some of the materials suggested below.

Software has already been developed to allow mathematicians to generate vast numbers of mathematical problems for learners to practice on. From what is known about brain function at the level of cognitive neuroscience, in particular the structure of the brain as a massively parallel-processing neural network, it is essential that learners are exposed to multiple examples to develop these clear archetypes. This software also gives specific, instantaneous feedback and explanations to students.

To our knowledge such software has not been used extensively in the medical field. Our proposal is therefore to generate randomly variation in cases within plausible limits, so that learners are presented with a case spectrum similar to that seen in clinical practice.

The importance of formative assessment is clear from many publications. It influences student motivation, identifies a starting place for instruction, clarifies learning goals, influences students learning strategies and skills, their ability to retain and apply learning and their self-perception concerning self-efficacy, and describes student achievements.

Assessment enhances learning if it encourages intrinsic motivation, builds confidence, gives a sense of ownership and control, provides detailed feedback, enhances strategic awareness, and encourages collaboration between students. Of particular importance is feedback, which should be specific, rapid and communicate clear and high expectations of students.

Our hypothesis is that provision of such a facility for students should result in a rapid measurable improvement in diagnostic skills for specific knowledge domains. The effectiveness of the resource will be evaluated carefully in a pilot group of students. This strategy may well be of interest to others at Keele who wish to integrate IT into their own teaching and learning programmes as the university moves towards a VLE.

Clinical Case-based Simulator - Presentation Slides

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Clinical Case-based Simulator by Colin Melville and Douglas Quinney, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Friday 7 August 2015

Using Google forms and docs to improve engagement and feedback, by Mark Davys

The approach taken
The Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) is designed to enable graduates with non-law degrees complete the academic stage of professional qualification and to be able to progress to the vocational stage of training to be a solicitor or barrister in England and Wales. At Keele, GDL students take some modules alongside undergraduates who have already been studying law for one or two years, so the pre-semester 1 English Legal Systems and Legal Method (ELSLM) module introduces GDL students to the law and gives them an opportunity to begin to practise some of the legal skills that they will need to successfully complete the programme.

Various skills and tools for legal research are introduced during the ELSLM module. Until 2014-15, the module also included a ‘Skills Exercise’ introduced and completed in a single day. Students were given a series of tasks to complete before returning to class for a plenary session. Whilst reflecting on this format, the teaching team identified a number of weaknesses, including: (1) some students finished quickly, and were left waiting for the plenary session to start, whilst other students would have benefited from having more time to complete the exercise; and (2) feedback in the plenary session tended to be general, rather than specific (whilst students could usefully reflect on their experience afterwards, there was not time to check individual work and give specific feedback within the day allocated for the exercise).

It was decided, therefore: (1) to issue the Skills Exercise in the form of a Google Document on the KLE at the beginning of week 2 of the 4 week teaching programme; and (2) to require students to complete a Study Skills Assessment at their convenience on Thursday or Friday of week 3 of the programme.

The Assessment was prepared using Google Forms and released by posting a link on the KLE. Some questions were multiple choice; others required text of varying length. Some questions asked students to repeat the information they had discovered as part of the Exercise; others required them to analyse or process this information to reach an answer.

After the assessment was completed, each student was sent an electronic copy of a document containing their answers, suggested answers and some general feedback. Reflection on this feedback formed part of a later teaching session.

The advantages
(1) Students were able to spend as long as they needed on the exercise, where they wished. It was, therefore, closer to what they would experience when undertaking research as part of a substantive module or after their GDL.

(2) Students were required to reflect on the information they had gathered and consider how to use it, rather than just record it.

(3) The use of Google Forms enabled individual student responses to be conveniently recorded, read and accessed by staff and the individual students themselves.

(4) Presenting the students with their answers alongside suggested answers and general feedback enabled informed reflection by students and staff before the feedback session.

The disadvantages
Neither Google Forms nor Google Sheets (used to automatically compile the answers) support discrete use of italics. Italics are used in a specific way when citing case names, so this meant that it was not possible to conveniently model or test this aspect of referencing.

Key recommendations
The information gathered by the Google Forms that students submit is compiled into designated Google (spread-) Sheet. With very small cohorts the information could simply be cut and pasted from the Sheet to provide individual feedback to individual students. In most cases, however, it will be better to use some sort of automatic ‘mail-merge’ into a standard template. This requires a Google Add-on, such as ‘autoCrat’. When using autoCrat, a little care needs to be taken to ensure that the names of the merge fields are sufficiently short and discrete (the full text of the questions tends to be too long for this purpose), but otherwise it is relatively easy to set up and deploy.

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Using Google forms and docs to improve engagement and feedback by Mark Davys, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Seeds for Solutions, How does the past inform the future? Innovation projects from 2003/04 #KATS2015

Project Title: Validating the Methods of Assessment used During the Dissertation Phase of Postgraduate Management Courses in CHPM
Project Leader(s): Jean Robson and Sarah Derret


Project Aim:
  • To evaluate the quality of student (independent) learning in CHPM
  • to improve guidance for supervisors of MBA students
  • To develop reliable & acceptable dissertation marking schemes
Purpose:
  • Improve the fit between output and purpose for the dissertation component in all seven CHPM master’s programmes.

Validating the Methods of Assessment - Final Report

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Validating the Methods of Assessment used During the Dissertation Phase of Postgraduate Management Courses in CHPM by Jean Robson and Sarah Derret, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


Project Title: Meeting the Needs of New Groups to HE - A Staff Development Package
Project Leader(s): Sarah Hatfield and Peter Haycock

A staff-training package will be developed to provide comprehensive information about the issues affecting WP students. This will be designed to be applicable specifically to all academic and support staff involved with the academic training or pastoral support of this student group, enabling them to take an informed approach. The relevant departments should then be able to give WP students a more positive learning experience and reduce their drop-out rates. It is intended that the training package will be made available to all current and new academic and support staff through the TLHEP and KKP programmes. This has been discussed with the TLHEP co-ordinator and the Staff Development Unit within Human Resources.

The primary intended outcome is a high quality training package that will educate staff with regard to the WP students. Staff who successfully complete the package will have:

  • increased understanding of why WP students are different from their peers, the difficulties that they face in reaching HE, and how best to ensure that they have a positive HE experience and do not drop out;
  • increased pastoral awareness and the ability to develop support systems in a manner applicable to WP students; and
  • knowledge of the diverse range of learning styles adopted by WP students and how to adapt teaching styles to match these, in order to maximise the chances of a WP student being successful in HE.

Meeting the Needs of New Groups to HE - Final Report

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Meeting the Needs of New Groups to HE - A Staff Development Package by Sarah Hatfield and Peter Haycock, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


Project Title: An Interactive Whiteboard for Problem Based Learning
Project Leader(s): Paula Roberts, Mike Mahon and Stephen Bostock


Project Aim:
To help learning by students creating a shared, electronic, editable record of the PBL process

An Interactive Whiteboard for Problem Based Learning - Presentation Slides

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An Interactive Whiteboard for Problem Based Learning by Paula Roberts, Mike Mahon and Stephen Bostock, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.