Friday 1 June 2018

Seeds for Solutions: Innovation Projects from 2016/17

Project Title: 'Lets meet at basecamp': A mobile app designed to increase group cohesion and student satisfaction in collaborative learning projects
Project Leader(s): Grant Bosworth and Donna Berry


Many modules involve elements of group work aimed at enhancing certain employability skills. However, students often cite difficulties regarding communication with, and contributions made by, other group members. The aim of our teaching innovation project is to tailor a project management app to better engage students and facilitate collaborative learning. The app creatively combines the features students desire from social media (instant message, notifications on progress) with required components for academic work (transparent scheduling, equitable workload distribution and file sharing). Any improvements in the student learning experience will be evaluated from questionnaire responses, compared to responses from a control group.

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Project Title: Introducing undergraduate students to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles' theory and practice
Project Leader(s): Alex Nobajas


Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have become increasingly popular and feature regularly on the news, both for positive and negative reasons. However controversial, their use has proven to be successful in a myriad of applications which go from disaster management to agricultural surveying. Nonetheless, due to a lack of courses offering UAV training there is a current shortage of professionals capable of performing missions with UAVs satisfactorily, something this project aims to mitigate by introducing UAV training as part of the university offering. This will be achieved by developing new teaching materials and activities involving UAVs.

Introduction to UAVs - Final Project Report

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Project Title: The pedagogic potential of Turnitin's originality reports
Project Leader(s): Nicholas Seager and Ben Anderson


This project explores the educational potential of Turnitin’s originality reports, as used by students, guided by educators. The project’s foci are: (1) the implications of shifting from a detection-based to a prevention-based approach to academic misconduct with the aid of software; (2) using the instant and ongoing formative feedback that originality reports can provide to develop students’ academic skills (referencing, writing, finding and using sources). To these ends, the investigators will measure Humanities’ students’ take-up of access to the originality reports, the nature of how they use them (and how they might), and staff and student perceptions of the reports.

The Pedagogic Potential - Final Project Report

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