Ben R. Atkinson

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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During this Week 7 Reading Week of the EDU720 module, I was able to put my free time to good use in working towards the first assessment task to deliver my flipped learning activity with students and write up the required evaluation for submission. I was pleased that my delivery of the flipped learning activity fell during the reading week, as it meant I could devote much more time to the activity and the associated evaluation.

When devising and running my flipped learning activity, I took a lot from the approach of Aaron Sams and the idea of project-based learning, which I’ve called Flipped Learning 2.0. Aaron suggests the assessment ‘is not the dessert, it is the main course’ (Aaron Sams – Flipped Classroom: The Next Step, 2015) which I think is a great quote and one that both conveniently summarises many of the issues with assessment and feedback in teaching and learning (namely that they are not embedded into the module at an early stage) and provides solutions. It’s something that MacDonald touches on also when she suggests the most important point for students to understand when engaging in flipped learning, is ‘what it is they are expected to learn, how they are expected to get there and in what timescale’ (Macdonald, 2006).

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Week 6 of this EDU720 module, opened up with a discussion about our thoughts on how best to evaluate our flipped classroom activities. For me, there were three key points that should be considered in any evaluation – if the approach solved the original problem it was introduced for, if the students found the approach useful and, in my specific case, how well the project-based element fitted into the overall activity.

There has been a lot of discussion on the forums more generally throughout the last few weeks, about whether flipped learning activities actually improve the work that students and the amount that they are learning. As we’ve experienced, these kinds of activities are usually introduced to solve a problem or re-image a specific part of a course, so it’s very important to consider whether the activity actually resolved the problem for which it was introduced. Jill’s response on this week’s forum sums this up nicely, as although she enjoyed running the activity and found it useful, she suggests that ‘would probably not introduce a flipped classroom approach, as the most fundamental reason to do so is to free up seminar time, which is not an objective of my type of course’ (Dunn, 2019). Another idea I raised in my suggested evaluation points, was that of how to establish if the flipped learning activity directly impacted upon the assessment (given I wanted to introduce a project-based approach) – evaluating this would be a much longer process and beyond the bounds of evaluating the flipped activity alone. This was something Paul picked up on suggesting that ‘this is part of evaluating the alignment of this approach into the overall module’ (Roger, 2019) and that a positive response to the flipped learning activity should, in theory, ‘feed thru to an improvement in the summative assessment’ (Roger, 2019).

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In week one we will be engaging in a flipped learning activity. This final podcast introduces the third artist we will look at, 2010s businesswoman and country music icon, Taylor Swift. The podcast gives a brief overview of her life and career with reference to the themes we will be exploring throughout this module.

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