- Raising awareness for City’s Flexible Learning Spaces
- ‘The Unlived Life’ event – Friday June 19th 2015
- Save the date: National University Mental Health & Wellbeing Day – Wednesday 18th of February
- Multimedia training opportunities
- Educational Multimedia Group
- Academic Learning Support Workshops – February-March 2015
- 7th Annual Learning @ City Conference – Call for Abstracts now open
- Moodle Upgrade 2015
Raising Awareness for City’s Flexible Learning Spaces
In the last year City has introduced a range of new flexible learning spaces, including swivel seat lecture theatres, and seminar rooms with flexible furniture for group work, with more new spaces set to arrive in Spring. For more details please click here. In order to broaden awareness of these flexible learning spaces and support staff to use them to their full potential, LEaD are offering a range of sessions during February, based around contemporary challenges in teaching:
Engaging Large Groups in Flexible Learning Spaces with Interactive Voting Tools
- Gain inspiration for innovative pedagogical practice within City’s teaching spaces according to learning aims and student needs.
- Discover classroom management strategies to lecture effectively to large groups.
- Learn how to ask students questions and set quizzes with City’s interactive online voting system – Poll Everywhere.
Please click on this link for session dates and to register.
Small Group Teaching in Flexible Learning Spaces
Lunch provided.
- Discover effective group work techniques for small group sessions
- Share best practice techniques with colleagues from across City
- Evaluate the usefulness of different small group techniques in your practice
Please click on this link for session dates and to register.
Extending Teaching Through Multimedia
- Discover different rich media approaches useful for extending teaching outside of the classroom, including flipped learning and lecture capture.
- Identify appropriate learning activities to build on lecture capture resources.
- Produce a short and simple screencast for delivering student feedback.
Please click on this link for session dates and to register. (Please note this session is full, so please tick ‘I cannot attend this day, please put me on a waiting list for the next session.’ You will be put on a waiting list).
More sessions will be available to book in the following months dependent on demand.
‘The Unlived Life’ – Friday June 19th 2015
A day to consider manifestations of frustration at University
Guest Speaker: Adam Phillips – Psychotherapist and Essayist, Author of Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Convened by Lynne Mark (Counselor) & Rebecca Lewis (Disability Co-ordinator)
Students come to Learning Success, the Student Counselling & Mental Health Service, and the Health Centre and let us know their frustrations.
We hear how circumstances, pressures, predicaments, dilemmas, conflicts, mistakes and regrets lead to a sense of unfulfilled potentials. Essays, exams, University experience, relationships, prospects for happiness are diverted or fall short. Hopes are unrealised.
We may recognise the student’s experience of the gap that separates desire from fulfilment – we may sympathise with their experience – we may share it.
We’re going to spend a day thinking about meanings and implications of the ‘unlived life’. We’ll consider our working lives within the University and the range of responses we may have to students who bring to us their requests for our help.
After the event, we will be posting a reflective piece on how the day went on the Educational Vignettes blog, so please check back for an overview of this event.
National University Mental Health & Wellbeing Day – Wednesday 18th of February
The Student Counselling and Mental Health Service (LEaD) is proud to announce the events planned to celebrate this National day. In partnership with the Universities Wellbeing initiative and Sodexo catering, there is something for everyone.
All week there will be a wellbeing theme to the catering outlets, and on Wednesday there will be exotic fruits for people to taste. You can access the full timetable of events here.
There are talks and workshops for both students and staff to participate in, and a wellbeing fair hosted in the Drysdale seating area with a Conversation café offering the opportunity to speak with people with lived experiences of mental health conditions.
There will be a quiz and a photo scavenger hunt with great prizes from SCMHS and Sodexo. We will have freebies to help you improve your wellbeing and the awesome Mindapples tree will take centre stage…
Between 10am and 1pm there will be the opportunity to have a Q&A with a member of the Counselling Team, to find out more about what University Counselling offers students.
The following teams and groups will have interactive stalls at the fair: Academic Learning Support; Bipolar UK, iCope, Storyheroes, the Health centre; the Student Mental Health Team, staff LGBT+, Nafsiyat, Student Counselling.
For more information follow us on @scmhcity #unimentalhealthday #Ichosetodisclose, email us on mentalhealth@city.ac.uk, look out for posters and flyers or look at our webpage.
Multimedia Training Opportunities
The Educational Technology Team is running a series of training courses around creating and using multimedia for teaching and learning. Please go to http://tinyurl.com/oeldy76 for full details and to book a place. We are happy to arrange group training sessions for department teams. We currently offer the following training courses:
Conference poster design using Adobe Photoshop Learn to create attractive, clear conference posters using Adobe Photoshop for a professional touch. This session will look at good effective poster design and give you a grounding in the basic features of Photoshop.
Creating video interviews and research presentations Learn to storyboard, compose and shoot that all-important video to publicise your research, interview or even just to address your students. This training course will enable you to take proper advantage of the video-making equipment available for loan by the MILL.
Tools for incorporating multimedia into teaching resources and learning activities A short session focusing on some of the tools available in Moodle to help you with creating screencasts, online lectures, clips from TV and radio, and enabling students to create their own video and audio assignments.
Loanable equipment and software available in our podcasting rooms Click here to view videos on how to use the cameras available for staff to loan from the MILL, and video guides on using the software available in our podcasting rooms.
Educational Multimedia Group
The first Educational Multimedia Group meeting ran on 10th February at our Mac lab in Goswell Place. Academic and professional services staff who had previously made use of our facilities were invited to this special interest group. We had a great turnout with over 20 members attending, with representation from every school.
We kicked-off the meeting by discussing what constitutes multimedia and the associated tools available to City staff. We also discussed the recent Educational Technology Staff Survey and identified solutions to some issues raised.
The Educational Technology Team presented two case studies of how video has been used to support distance learning in a Law programme and in engineering lab sessions, pointing out the necessity for careful planning to save time in production.
The latest innovations in wireless projection technologies (eBeam and Display Note) were discussed by the learning spaces team. We also explored the recent use of augmented reality, using the Aurasma app, for the purpose of student induction in the Department of Journalism. Additionally, consideration was given to the potential application of interactive video using the web-based software WireWax.
Lorna Saunder, from the School of Health Sciences, introduced the group to developments in the CityScape project, which seeks to create a virtual world using high quality video resources for the purpose of scenario-based learning.
It was great to have such lively discussion on these topics and to hear what ideas staff have for their future multimedia projects.
The group is open to all staff with an interest in creating or using multimedia resources for teaching and learning. If you would like to join the group and attend future meetings then please email video@city.ac.uk
Academic Learning Support Workshops – February-March 2015
A series of academic skills workshops will begin on February 24th and will be running over five weeks. These workshops will be open to all City University students, and each session will cover a self-contained topic.
Session updates will be posted on the Learning Success blog, and materials used in the sessions will be posted on the Academic Learning Support Moodle page.
The full timetable and further information for these workshops is accessible here.
7th Annual Learning @ City Conference – Is Learning for Everyone? Call for Abstracts now open (Friday, 20th of March closing date)
The Call for Abstracts for the annual Learning @ City Conference is now open.
The Conference will take place on Wednesday, June 3rd 2015 at the Hatton Conference Centre.
The overall theme for the conference focuses on inclusive learning, with a number of sub-themes spanning a wide range of topics under the Inclusivity in Learning umbrella.
Conference sub-themes include:
– Valuing diversity and promoting inclusivity
– Inclusivity across the student life-cycle
– Flexible learning for inclusion
– Building an inclusive learning community
– Concepts of inclusivity
We want you to share your practice, innovation and research in this area and we anticipate that this topical theme will provide excellent opportunities for discussion and debate.
Papers (30′ duration)
If presenting a paper, you will need to plan for a 20′ talk with a further 10′ for questions and discussion.
Posters (maximum A1 size)
Posters will be displayed throughout the duration of the Conference, with a dedicated Poster session during the drinks reception at the close of the day. Posters will also be published on the LEaD Conference website shortly after the event.
You can access further information for this event here. To submit your proposal, please click here.
Moodle Upgrade 2015
Information Services (IS) will be updating Moodle in June as part of the annual summer update. This will bring our Moodle up to the latest version (2.8). Our custom Moodle will contain tools and improvements informed by staff feedback from the Annual Educational Technology survey and by results from student usability testing.
After discussion at the Learning Environment Committee and consultation with the Heads of Academic Services in each of the Schools, the update has been set for Tuesday June 30th 2015 during the regular ‘at risk’ period from 7am-9am. Moodle will be unavailable for these 2 hours as the update is performed. This will be followed by a precautionary at-risk period (during which the system will be monitored closely for 48 hours.
Communications from IS and LEaD will follow later this month highlighting the forthcoming improvements to Moodle.