Session 2 - Increasing Contribution

First up was University of Huddersfield discussing the contributing student approach and ways to do it online. Or at least, that was what it was supposed to be. The first 8 of 15 minutes were spent explaining that race is a human construct and how students react to being taught about race. The end of the session discussed that getting students to contribute online was good as students could work through materials at own pace and aggressive or emotional outbursts could be handled better (given the extra time). I had to ask in the question time what they had actually given the students online as that was not discussed. It turns out there were videos, articles and websites set up earlier for the students to explore, a shared blog to discuss reactions to them, and a private reflective blog. Lastly there was a wiki which used the jigsaw approach. In general this was not a bad session, but I feel a bit more focus on the technology and the interventions made would've been better than the length of discussion around "this is my subject explained to you"

Second session was about using wikis in group work to facilitate producing student e-resources. First half of the session was about the different staff development resources they had created - which was mostly a lot of case studies about the different ways of using Blackboard to achieve different results (an admirable goal I think). They said these resources would be helpful in getting new folks on board that didn't normally look at their resources, but I would've liked to know how those resources were going to do that. Then they went into one case study in detail, which was the main focus of the session (though only got half the time). Students had to use the wiki to create a seminar presentation on a topic, and had to include new case studies and articles the tutor had not found. Problems included students not editing each others' work, students needing support with the technology, and typical group work problems. The wikis were most popular with groups that couldn't meet often. One of the positive outcomes of using wikis was that students used the library's e-resources more. However, I asked if they thought this was more down to the task design of requiring sources the tutor had not provided or the use of wikis, and they said they thought it was mostly the task design but possibly due to the fact that they were creating something online too.

Session 3 - Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry - Very new college (2000) that did a 7-year review of their VLE use to improve it. They are very small, so they don't even have courses on Blackboard, but just use the "course" feature to categorise their resources (One is Biochemistry, another is Patient Care) - and they fill those "courses" with lots of learning materials. All students can access all the materials. I guess they don't take advantage of non-content features like grades, discussion, blogs, etc. Pretty much the opposite to the way I would want to promote Blackboard use, but seemed to work for them.

Session 4 - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - A look at online peer review. Students found giving peer feedback very useful, was more useful when tutors helped validate feedback. Used the TurnItIn peer review tool - 10 different courses examined, lots of different practice in them. In general, the results were pretty much what I expected - peer feedback = good, but teaching the students how to give useful feedback is necessary.