Engagement and monitoring – M25 winter meeting

On Tuesday 7 December, the winter meeting of the M25 ALT group took place via Zoom with the broad theme of monitoring and engagement, everything from proctoring through to wellbeing, defining what we mean by engagement and the ethical justification for monitoring.

Interesting to see how ‘check ins’ are being widely used. Just asking students ‘how are you’? These can be done in a variety of ways, via a VLE or even a poll at the start of a live session. Matt Jenner demo’d a potential way to enable this via a ‘no code’ web app development platform.

Lots of thought-provoking stuff as usual, but I was particularly interested in the item on feedback from Leonard Houx and Annora Eyt-Dessus from City’s Business School which drew on their experience in learning design and mentioned this new research on approach goals from Sims, Outhwaite and Bennett. The TaLIC team here at Goldsmiths had been having a conversation about retention and motivation earlier in the day – so this was all quite timely. The theory around achievement goals and the difference between mastery and performance goals is clearly something I need to read up on – possibly starting with this work of Hoyert and O’Dell.

Students’ judgement of what is good for their learning is often wrong (eg: writing what you know is more effective than repeated reading – but students prefer the latter approach). Feedback can correct this. Other useful takeaways – present knowledge gaps but not chasms and motivate with regular feedback, be it automated, peer or from a teacher. Provide walkthroughs of how you would solve the problem, vary the difficulty (differentiation) and provide definitions of vocabulary.

So in a nutshell –

Is your teaching too difficult to follow?
Are your students getting enough feedback?

Advertisement

Collaborating on module design using ABC via Teams

You may be familiar with UCL’s ABC workshops for rapid module and curriculum design. They’re an engaging and effective way to redesign a course or map one out from scratch. It’s based on Diana Laurillard’s conversational framework and uses cards to map out the learning journey of the student.

However, given the current situation, it isn’t feasible getting a module team to sit around a table and write on cards.

There are ways to do this online and something we’ve tried at Goldsmiths is using Teams and the built-in ‘planner’. A planner is a series of columns (called buckets for some reason) into which you can add task cards. With a little bit of tweaking you can make this look a little like the ABC cards.

Here’s a video that explains the approach:

There’s more here about ABC learning design from UCL

UCL’s ABC Seminar (14 June 2019)

I took myself and my impressive migraine along to UCL last week, hoping I’d be able to string a sentence together by the time I was up to speak. I used to work in their building in Torrington Place, so it was interesting to see how it had been refitted since my days. It’s also interesting at these events to see the different ‘brands’ in the Powerpoints, have to say I think the Goldsmiths one looks pretty good.

Branding

I digress.

The theme of the day was how people had taken UCL’s ABC approach and adapted it for their situation.

I first discovered the cards around 18 months ago when I received a pile of them from FutureLearn, then after attending an ABC workshop at UCL in 2018 I was a convert. We use them for MOOCs and are trying to roll out their use more widely. My colleage Mark created a set of ‘Goldsmiths’ cards and we have a simple A4 list of tools that support the different types of learning (we bring that out later).

At the event, Gill Ritchie from QMUL spoke about how they used it with their Academic Practice module, which has a similar aim to what we do at Goldsmiths. We run a PG Cert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education and we thought it would be interesting to see if we could create a 60 minute ‘mini ABC’ session. The PG Cert is available to anyone with a teaching role and students tend to be early career academics spread across departments. It would therefore be a great way to spread the word about ABC. They’re also a pretty smart bunch, so we wanted to make sure we weren’t wasting their time.

We decided to get them to create a fictitious, short course. The programme lead, Mary Claire Halvorson, came up with the inspired idea of a critical thinking course, something which was relevant across all departments and would get people talking.

We decided to compress the session down to 60 minutes, we showed them the Diana Laurillard video (shown below) and gave them a three minute lightning tour of ABC with a couple of examples on screen.

We then let them loose on their task.

Title: An introduction to critical thinking

• Imaginary stand-alone course
• 2 weeks – 4 hours a week
• Face to face, online or a blend of the two (your choice)

Aims

• To provide an overview of critical thinking
• To provide students with opportunities to practise critical thinking

We compressed the timings of the exercise as follows:

• Module tweet size description (5 mins)
• Fill in the 2 graphs (5 mins)
• Arrange the cards as sequences for each week (10 mins)
• Turn over cards and fill in details / tweak the order (15 mins)
• Identify assessment activities (5 mins)
• Redraw the graphs & take a photo (5 mins
• Pitch your design (2 minutes each)

Much to my relief, it was a roaring success! You could tell by the volume in the room that it was working.

After the session we put the finished designs on learn.gold.

ABC Cards

 

My colleague Mark and I were invited to re-run the exercise for our academic practice module. This is where we learned a valuable lesson – furniture. We didn’t realise the room had no tables, however the students improvised and sat on the floor and it still worked well.

Talking of lessons learned,  a few of the other speakers spoke of the need to have pre-ABC and post-ABC workshops, particularly where the learning outcomes are unclear or need revisiting – and that’s something we’ve found on occasions.

Converting the ABC cards to electronic forms was discussed, with some institutions using Excel. At Goldsmiths I created a Trello board to enable this. Trello is a web-based, light-touch project management system where you have cards arranged in columns. You can move them around, add text to them etc. It’s basically the ABC in vertical columns instead of horizontal rows.

Here’s the template:

An ABC template in Trello

The idea is people copy items from the ‘card deck’ and drag them to different columns as needed. Digital artefacts (images, docs) can be attached to cards so it’s a useful way to carry on designing and tweaking collaboratively.  I’ll share this (when I’ve worked out the best way to do it).

One thing I particularly liked was Clare Gormley’s presentation from Dublin City University. She outlined how they had mapped aspects of ABC to various institutional strategies, something I think we’ll try here at Goldsmiths.

All in all, an interesting and useful day and good to see colleagues from previous institutions I’ve worked at – hello UCL, UWL and SGUL! Thanks to Clive, Nataša, Janice and everyone concerned.

(Still have the migraine by the way).

 

Any technology is education technology – or is it?

I recently attended the M25 ALT meeting over at Imperial College in London which looked at those peripheral technologies that people are using – things not obviously designed to be ‘ed tech’. There was some lively debate.

You can read all about it on this collaboratively edited blog post: Any technology is education technology?

There was also a tour of some of the teaching spaces which had been refitted to make them more flexible – some pictures below:

Pop-up PCs at Imperial

Plectrum desks

Lecture seating that also enables group working

 

Open Education and the Connected Learning Curriculum at UCL

By Suzan Koseoglu, Academic Developer at TaLIC, Goldsmiths, University of London. 

University College London (UCL) held a fantastic afternoon symposium last week on Open Education at UCL. The symposium “explored different approaches to Open Education and how these are practiced by staff and students at UCL.” This was a well thought out event with speakers discussing many important issues such as the ethics of open data, policy and organisational frameworks for opening up HE, pedagogy, and student and staff experience.  

One interesting thing I learned at the symposium was UCL’s Connected Learning Curriculum (Fung, 2017), and how this pedagogical framework/vision gives directions and purpose to Open Educational Practices (OEP) at UCL. According to the UCL website, “Connected Learning Curriculum is at the core of UCL’s Education Strategy 2016-21 and UCL 2034, the university’s 20-year institutional strategy.” In connection with opening up UCL, one objective of the strategy is:

We will provide a distinctive digital  infrastructure to connect students with each other, with staff, with research and with the outside world to support networked, research-based and interdisciplinary education.

You can see the six dimensions of Connected Learning Framework below, from Leo Havemann and Jo Stroud’s presentation, “Open Educational Practices for a Connected Curriculum.”

What was interesting to see in Havemann’s talk and throughout the symposium was the intersection between Open Education and Connected Learning Curriculum in the form of open practice at UCL, such as opening up assignments and the use and production of Open Educational Resources (OERs). 

One example for this would be the collaborative and interdisciplinary Wikibooks writing project presented by  James Everest and a group of students: Guy Phillips, Constance Grave, Kseniia Panteleeva, and Andrei Andronic: 

Team of student writers presenting about their chapter written in the Wikibooks ‘Truth in the diagnosis of depression’. #UCLOpenEd a refreshing and engaged  example of contributing to knowledge rather than just passive learning. pic.twitter.com/2bHfVNiXmi

— Elizabeth E Charles (@ElizabethECharl) March 13, 2019

As Havemann and Stroud noted in their presentation, “Connected Curriculum and Open Education propose that students create assignments for real audiences, rather than traditional, ‘disposable’ assignments.” The Wikibooks project very clearly showed the audience (1) how educators can create assignments for real audiences, and (2) how designing an OER is not just about producing Open Access content. First, students and their teacher created a set of learning objects, which can be defined as “a collection of content items, practice items, and assessment items that are combined based on a single learning objective.” Some examples would be the sandboxes students worked on, their final wiki chapters, and the rubric James Everest used to assess this assignment. Second, students learned many valuable meta skills during this process such as “copyright, referencing and awareness of quality of resources/ sources to be used in academia,” open licences and media literacies, and “working collaboratively” with others. And I think they enjoyed the process and were happy to share their experiences with us.

UCL BASc students co-authored a wikibook ‘Issues in interdisciplinarity’ including chapters on the nature of evidence and truth in different disciplines, methods and subjects https://t.co/IRb9QlYrFA #UCLOpenEd

— TrabiMechanic (@TrabiMechanic) March 13, 2019

Really inspiring to hear UCL students reflecting so positively on engaging with #wikibooks #UCLOpened pic.twitter.com/qvUn1D17qh

— Lorna M. Campbell (@LornaMCampbell) March 13, 2019

The symposium also showed the audience how practice needs to be supported by policy and infrastructure, but more importantly by a clear pedagogical vision. UCL is doing a fantastic job with using the Connected Curriculum Framework as a roadmap for their open practices. It was inspiring to see on the day how institutional vision and pedagogy can lead to open practices that are meaningful for both students and teachers.

CSI Goldsmiths: Game-based learning for programming

 Dr Simon Katan (Computing) reports on his project of last year:

Having observed many under-practiced student programmers in my teaching career, the tell-tale signs are obvious: slow and error riddled typing, poor mouse control, unfamiliarity with cut and paste patterns, disorganised screen space, poor workflow. Compared to the required conceptual learning these skills might seem trivial.  However, my experience as a former music teacher tells me that fluency and conceptual learning are strongly interrelated.  Time and again I encounter students who are overwhelmed with theoretical learning before having achieved basic fluency. Concepts develop in fingers as well as heads.

Just as in music, developing fluency requires repetitive practice, and this is where things become difficult for us lecturers.  The burden of creating enough exercises and marking them places an upper limit on how much practice we can facilitate.  We also face the problem of how to motivate our students.

To address all this TaLIC funded me to create CSI Goldsmiths, a gamified programme of learning consisting of 24 film noir-themed code puzzles.  Students play the role of a police cadet rising through the ranks of the force by solving code crimes.

 

 

The puzzles are automatically marked.  Not only does this save a lot of work, it also allows the students to repeatedly improve attempts in response to automatic feedback.  In another feature the puzzles are varied slightly with each download.  Each variant presents the same problem but with the detail changed.  To improve their score students solve multiple variants of each puzzle.  They also have a dashboard to keep track of their progress.  The result is an environment which facilitates and motivates repetitive practice.

I tried all of this out last term with our cohort of 278 undergraduate students last term with some interesting results.  57% of students said they found the assignment difficult, whilst 58% of students scored above 60% on the assignment.  61% of students believed that they spent more time on this than other assignments, and the majority of students disliked the repetition.  However, the majority also agreed that the assignment had helped them – practice is always something of a bitter pill.  The real test for effectiveness will be in the students’ performance and fluency this term.

ABC Curriculum Design

By Dr. Debbie Custance, Academic Director of TaLIC and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

I seem to always be snowed under with work nowadays. So, when one of my TaLIC colleagues, Pete Roberts, asked whether I would like to attend a PG Cert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education session on ABC Curriculum Design, my first instinct was to say, “I would love to, but I am too busy.” However, I’d seen some of the feedback from the ABC sessions and I was intrigued to see what all the fuss was about. So, despite the little voice whispering that all I really doing was engaging in ‘productive procrastination,’ I went along. I am so glad that I did.

The ABC method was devised at UCL and is based on Prof Diana Laurillard’s Conversational Framework Model. This model identifies six different learning types:

• Acquisition
• Investigation
• Collaboration
• Discussion
• Practice
• Production

These are beautifully described in this short video.

In the PG Cert session, we were given sets of six types of cards each with one of the learning types printed on them. We were asked to use these to help us design a short two week course on critical thinking. We had to devise a tweet that advertised the course, map the balance of different activities and types of learning and create a storyboard, using the cards, to plan out the course. UCL have produced a great video that describes and shows an ABC session.

I think the aspect of the ABC session I took part in that surprised me most was just how useful it was to do this kind of planning in a group. Just the act of bringing colleagues together in one place to focus on curriculum design is useful. The ABC method offers a coherent structure, whilst the group discussion stimulated creativity and prompted innovation because working together was fun.

I would strongly encourage anyone who is planning a new module or programme or in the process of revising an existing set of teaching to consider contacting TaLIC talic@gold.ac.uk to ask them to host an ABC session for you and your colleagues.

Dr Deborah Custance

TEF Planning at the Senior Staff Residential

By Dr. Debbie Custance, Academic Director of TaLIC and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Once a year, Goldsmiths’ Senior Staff head off for a two-day residential in which they brainstorm, plan, share and network. I was invited to join them on the second day for a session on planning for the next Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF 2020).

We were assigned to tables of around 10 people and asked to discuss what we were currently working on and what we plan to go on to focus on in the future that is relevant to the TEF. Rather than providing a full account of our conversation, I thought that it would be more interesting to pick out a number of examples of good practice and novel ideas that emerged during the morning’s discussion.

Building Learning Communities

One aspect that emerged as a priority around my table was building learning communities. Staff were very concerned that their students report not feeling part of a community. Part of the problem is that many students commute to College and nearly all of them have to juggle their time between university and one or two part-time jobs. They come to class and have to rush away again. It is very hard to build a community under these circumstances.

The Department of Visual Cultures went so far as to move staff out of an office to share offices with colleagues so that they could free up space to create a common room. Staff and students now have a space within the department where they can gather informally outside of timetabled teaching. Visual Cultures also set aside £500 that students could bid for to conduct an activity or project that would enrich engagement. The winning bid this year was for a student-led festival. These are truly lovely initiatives, but it is difficult to measure their impact.

One of the problems faced by students is that university life, especially in London, can be lonely. It can be hard to meet people. I know that I would not have stuck out my university studies if I had not made a group of very close and supportive friends. In fact, when you are living away from you’re your friends become a substitute family – ‘framily’ in modern parlance. International students face the added challenge of adapting to an alien culture, so that finding a framily can be very difficult.

The Confucius Institute set up a learn.gold (this what we call Goldsmiths’ Virtual Learning Environment) area that is a language network site. Students who wish to learn and/or teach a language can meet through this site. It has been a tremendous success with a very high number of active users. The added benefit has been that students are making friends through the site. It has become as much a social network as a language one.

The language network has got me thinking – are there any other activities that we could facilitate in this way? Nearly every major city in the UK has a ‘Meet Up’ site: check out MeetUp London. Anyone can set up a MeetUp group based around an activity. There are walking groups, art groups, theatre groups, music groups, museum visitors groups, baking groups – in fact practically any activity you think of, there is a group for it. Perhaps we could set up a MeetUp Goldsmiths site or even a MeetUp University of London site? We could hire computer literate students to help set it up and manage it.

Liberating the Curricula

Another burning issue that emerged from our discussion was liberating the curricula. Several departments are working with students to explore decolonising the curricula. Media, Communications and Cultural Studies set up a staff-student working group. One of the results from this was that they added an item onto their module evaluation forms that asked about Liberating the Curriculum. They decided to pose the question so that was framed in a positive way, “How can the module be improved in this respect?” This moves the focus from what is wrong to how it can be put right.

The Music Department has also been discussing liberating the curricula with their student. They held an open forum on the subject. As a result, the department created a new staff role of Diversity and Representation Officer.

Student Wellbeing and Mental Health

Non-continuation was also an issue of great worry to many departments. The Department of Educational Studies is very vigilant in meeting with students who wish to interrupt or withdraw to find out exactly why and what can be done to help. They have identified mental health and financial issues as the main reasons that students drop out.

The Psychology Department agreed that anxiety and depression were at a worryingly high level amongst their students. They have come up with a highly novel way of addressing student wellbeing. They launched a Mindfulness and Magic project with their undergraduate first years. Students either learned mindfulness techniques (taught by a Psychology third year undergraduate who is a specialist in the area) or they taught each other how to perform magic tricks. The magic activity has the added advantage of building learning communities. Since it is the Psychology department, they have naturally collected data and should soon be able to report their findings.

I am from the Psychology Department and over the past two years, I have run a project with three student collaborators on the effect of mindfulness practice versus interacting with a dog on levels of anxiety and one’s perception of how much your university cares about you. We found positive effects for both dog interaction and mindfulness compared to students who received no intervention. However, the mindfulness condition showed longer-term positive effects. I gave the students in the mindfulness condition a five-minute podcast of a mindfulness meditation that they could take away and use afterwards. The attendees at the Away Day were surprised to learn that both the Student Union and the Accommodation Office offered dog interaction sessions during last year’s exam period. Based on my research, I suggest that we also offer mindfulness sessions with free podcasts for the students to take away so they can keep practicing.

I loved the fact that most of our discussion during the TEF session was not so much about the TEF, but about a genuine concern for student experience, rights and wellbeing. I don’t know if these initiatives will translate into improved NSS scores. With the continued SU recommendation for a boycott, I fear that we will not be able to detect positive effects through the standard metrics. Not being able to measure the results is disheartening, but it is clear that staff all across the college are working hard and constantly seeking ways to enhance their students’ experience.

Using Action Learning Sets with students, mentors within our partnership schools and the wider community within Goldsmiths

 

 

The approach we explored in our project was based upon Action Learning.  Action Learning is an approach to empowering the individual to address problems or issues that have arisen in their professional experience that was developed by Reg Revans and has been widely adopted by a range of organisations for a range of purposes. The action learning approach:

“…is a means of development, intellectual, emotional or physical that requires its subjects, through responsible involvement in some real, complex and stressful problem, to achieve intended change to improve their observable behaviour henceforth in the problem field.”(Revans 1982: 626–7)

 

It involves the individual in engaging in small group focussed, structured reflection. Some of the characteristics of Action Learning includes:

• a real problem that is important, critical, and usually complex;
• a diverse problem-solving team or “set”;
• a process that promotes curiosity, inquiry, and reflection;
• a requirement that talk be converted into action and, ultimately, a solution, and a commitment to learning.

 

Our project had three stages:

• The facilitation of Action Learning sets designed to support tutors from the PGCE Programme Team at Goldsmiths;
• To train staff in how to facilitate Action Learning sets to support others they work with;
• To broaden the learning arising from the Action Learning Sets to students, mentors within our partnership schools and the wider community within Goldsmiths.

The approach, as we interpreted it, initially fell within the “experiential school” that has learning at its heart and draws on Kolb’s (1984) learning cycle as its theoretical base.  This means that the starting point for learning is action with members of the learning set reflecting upon experience with the support of others, followed by further action, in order to change previous patterns. The overall goal of the Action Learning set is not to give advice but rather to question, with the aim of empowering the individual to generate their own solutions to the problem they have brought with them.

 

Revans, R. (1982) The Origin and Growth of Action Learning. Chartwell Bratt, Bromley.

 

Alison and Liz will be leading a Lunchtime Conversation on the topic, as part of the season of talk in the Autumn Term, 2018.  Further details in the Staff Learning Hub.

 

 

Reflections on the TaLIC Away Day

The Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre (TaLIC) had our first Away Day in two years on Monday 17^th September. Eight new staff have joined the team since January. The Away Day was a great opportunity to get to know each other better.  We didn’t actually go away or at least not very far. Rather than pay for a venue, we booked the Garden Room down through the archway beyond the back of the Whitehead Building. The Garden Room is such a lovely space. It is adjacent to an open green space that most people are not aware even exists.

“St James Hall Garden is a mindful space on campus where staff and students can take a break.” Source: https://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/places/st-james-hall-garden/

 

We completed a mixture of silly, fun and serious activities. For me the most inspiring discussion was raised by Suzan Koseoglu about Angela McRobbie’s characterisation of education as a public service rather than a customer service. It has made me think about what kind of service TaLIC is providing to Goldsmiths’ staff and, indirectly through our support of staff, students. It seems to me that our work with staff in some ways mirrors the most advanced methods of working with students. The most satisfying and advanced pedagogy involves a two-way process of co-creation with ‘student-researchers’ and ‘learning-professors’. TaLIC has certain skills and expertise, but we can’t simply deliver or impose this upon our colleagues. The only way that we can be of real use is enter a process of co-creation.

We all agreed that one of our most important functions is to create opportunities for thinking spaces for staff to come together from across the whole college and explore their practice. It can be so liberating to break out of the day-to-day routine and engage in blue sky thinking with one’s colleagues. The Away Day provided such an opportunity to the TaLIC team. We are now enthused to find ways of providing similar opportunities for our colleagues outside of TaLIC.

Dr Debbie Custance