Ben R. Atkinson

In this final CRJ post for my PGCHE course, I wanted to reflect back on my learning as a whole in both the EDU720 and EDU710 modules.

It was when completing a second self-evaluation against the UKPSF (something I also did back in Week 1 of the first EDU710 module) that I realised just how far I’d come over the course of this PGCHE. I now have a diverse collection of experiences which I can draw on in my future practice, including being able to plan modules more thoroughly, write an assessment and feedback strategy and defend this to a group of senior academics and, most importantly, understand the diverse way in which students learn – bringing me to the realisation that the student learning is far more important than what I am actually teaching.

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This week’s learning activities which focused on the challenging aspects of facilitating online learning environments proved to be very interesting and thought-provoking in a way I had not considered before. Obviously, with any teaching task, you think first about the LOs and the approach to teaching, as well as the way students learn and the accessibility of learning for all students. But, in some cases, particularly with a fully online course, there are additional elements that require much consideration. Most paramount among these is how you will deal with any challenging events or behaviour in an environment where teaching is delivered fully online.

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This week’s topic of ‘Choosing Technology for Online Learning’ was particularly interesting to me, as in my current institution, the University of Lincoln, I am the Digital Education Developer (Learning Technologist) for the College of Arts. As such, I felt there was a lot I could bring to the discussion around the choice of learning technologies, however this did mean that I sometimes found it hard to navigate a path between the knowledge of learning tech that I already had and the exploration of new tools and platforms.

Thinking firstly about the learning technologies we use on a day-to-day basis, I decided to frame my response around the core tools that we support at Lincoln. The approach that we take at the institution involves have a ‘core’ suite of tools which are supported by the University and further outer rings of tools which can be used but may not be directly supported. Information on the core tools is available on our LALT blog. As such, I focused on technologies for video (Panopto), collaboration on the web (Collaborate Ultra), marking and assessment (Turnitin) and live audience response (Poll Everywhere). My own list of tools received some good responses from my peers, with Carols Garde-Martin taking forward Poll Everywhere as a tool to pilot later in the week and both Graham and Jill pointing out that the list was ‘useful stuff to know’ (Dunn, 2019). It was interesting to see what other colleagues suggested in this forum, particularly the use of Minecraft for Education which James C recommended (James C, 2019). I knew of the platform as a game, but was not aware that Microsoft had developed a version for education which has a specific application within the creative arts. I must admit, I did download the software and had a go – but I’m afraid I just couldn’t get my head around it. Perhaps this is one technology where the students are best leading the way. Finally for this section, I found Federica’s list late in the week when reviewing the forum and have to say it is a fantastic resource covering a full range of learning technologies that could be applied to any form of teaching and learning practice (Orandini, 2019). This list is a collection of all the ideas suggested by students on the module and it proves just how many varied approaches to technology there are and how useful they can be to pedagogic practice within higher education.

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In Week 3 of this EDU720 module, we’ve moved on to focus on how we might design our flipped classroom activities which will form part of the first assessment. The contributions from my peers along with the outlined guidance for the first assessment, have both proved really useful when it came to planning my own flipped learning activity.

On the weekly form where we shared our thoughts on what makes a good flipped classroom experience, there was some in-depth debate under my post which focused on the equal opportunities for all learners. I had highlighted this along with ‘the task’ and how it ‘aligns to the LOs’ for the wider module. Under equal opportunities I talked about Katie Gimbar’s point about allowing students who miss out on the flipped activity, to catch up in class (Gimbar, 2011). Feedback on this idea, Ben James felt that Gimbar’s approach was perhaps not the most successful, suggesting that the idea of ‘making those people watch the content while others broke into groups, it felt like you’d only be reinforcing those boundaries between the people who are left behind and the people who are doing well’ (Evans James, 2019). This debate continued with Paul suggesting ‘it did appear as if there were boundaries of ‘them’ and ‘us’ still appearing’, before going on to pose the question ‘If these learners continue with their lack of engagement, what happens?’ (Clements, 2019). This debate was really interesting and useful in my own planning and it was key to me changing my approach to the students who might not engage with the material, concluding that it is perhaps ‘better to consider the type of activity rather than how different groups of learners might move ahead or fall behind’ (Atkinson-Foster, 2019). This lead to me focusing on video as a resource in the flipped classroom, something we’ve had a lot of success with at Lincoln, particularly when students record their own presentations at home, as opposed to giving them in class.

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The focus of the second week of study on the EDU720 module was the idea of ‘flipping the classroom’ a well-known blended learning approach which turns the traditional teaching model on its head and provides more time in class for discussion, with students having completed certain reading/watching/ listening tasks at home in preparation for the module.

I have a good understanding of flipped learning and its approach, given that I am a Learning Technologist and I support a number of academics across the College of Arts at the University of Lincoln with employing this technique in their teaching. There are a number of examples which I can draw upon from my own experience, and I expressed these in the first discussion task where we were required to explain our own understanding and experience of flipped learning. In this way, I think I engaged well with the task of the week – to gain an understanding of how the flipped classroom approach works.

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