City University London staff are invited to participate in LEaD‘s annual Educational Technology and Learning Spaces survey (http://goo.gl/5R6aKz). This is your opportunity to feedback on and ultimately influence how educational technology and learning spaces are supported and implemented at City. Our aim is to find out more about the City staff experience of using educational technology and enhancements that may be required. The survey has four sections: educational technology support, staff experience of using Moodle, use of learning spaces and use of multimedia. It will take around 15-20 minutes to complete.
This survey is part of the evaluation of the impact of the Strategic Learning Environment (SLE) and has received ethics approval from the LEaD/LDC Board of Studies. Please see the Participant Information Sheet for more details.
The results of the 2013-14 survey have given the Educational Technology Team (ETT) and Education Research and Enterprise Services in Information Services greater insight into the staff experience and requirements. As a result we have made a number of changes and used these findings to guide our planning.
Here are some examples of how your input to last year’s survey impacted on our work:
Issues and Improvements
Staff expressed a need for ‘more on how to use better teaching strategies, technology for this’.
ETT are constantly developing our Educational Technology Guidance site and have added more resources around different teaching scenarios and more advanced techniques. LEaD also facilitate tailored workshops for staff to meet teaching requirements such as an event run for SMCSE staff this summer around classroom management techniques and teaching large cohorts of students. The Educational Vignettes blog has also been used to share timely support, guidance and ideas.
There was a concern from staff that there are fewer opportunities to develop school-based projects.
This is a major focus of our team’s work and this year we implemented a project process driven by school priorities that encompasses a range of work from institution wide educational technology implementations and evaluations, programme developments to smaller ad hoc projects. Find out more about ETT projects here.
Increase confidence in reliability of Moodle.
IS have improved Moodle’s underlying infrastructure and there were further improvements to performance with the upgrade to Moodle 2.6 in July this year. IS have also improved their monitoring tools to increase their ability to troubleshoot and identify issues before they lead to service outages. There have also been a number of improvements to Moodle that relate to other issues raised in the survey as a result of the upgrade, development work and results of continuing usability studies.
Increase staff confidence in the reliability of Moodle in running quizzes under exam conditions.
ETT have developed guidance and a checklist to support academic staff when developing summative quizzes on Moodle. Using educational technology for assessment and assignment submission are key areas of development for staff and a number of projects and processes will be undertaken this year on this theme between schools, LEaD and IS. For example, guidance on a peer assessment of group work activity used at Cass are now available on the Educational Technology Guidance site and a requirements gathering and evaluation activity will be carried out to make recommendations around peer assessment tools.
Staff expressed a desire to know more about how to create a screencast.
Screencasting guidance has been developed and is available on the Educational Technology Guidance site. Staff can also use Service Now to request further support or discuss their multimedia needs or course development ideas.
Details of the learning spaces aspect along with interview and focus group results will be shared in a separate update. The full survey report is available on request. For more information please do contact the Educational Technology Team.
Please note that the Educational Technology & Learning Spaces Survey (http://goo.gl/5R6aKz) is only available to City University London staff.
