M25 Learning Technology Group July 2016 Meeting

On the 20th July, the M25 Learning Technology Group met at the University of Westminster on Regents Street, the first one hosted by Westminister (see the timeline of meetings , courtesy of Matt Lingard).The afternoon had presentations on Digital Literacy, User Experience and Flow in the redesign of Moodle, Open Badges, Learning Spaces and Learning Analytics.

The first presentation was on the digital literacies entitled personal learning environments by Caroline Kuhn, a maths teacher and PhD student at Bath Spa University. Caroline discussed how students know about how to use technology but not always for learning and referred to the work of JISC’s Helen Beetham amongst others. See her slides below.

Next to present was Janina Dewitz, Innovations Officer, UCL’s Digital Education team who talked about #LearnHack. A hack is a space to create, develop things, usually software but also ideas and concepts. The event on Saturday 4th June, in partnership with OU’s Learning Innovations team was a chance for students and staff to work together to solve problems.  You can find out more about the event on the OU’s Learning Innovation LearnHack web page and the tweet below.

The topic of Open Badges from University of Westminster’s Yanna Nedelcheva, Senior Educational Technologist, who discussed the use of Open Badge Factory, due to its easy administration of open badges to accredit the extra curricula activities in courses at Westminster. Some modules at Westminster use gamification and open badges to accredit this learning. Will other universities also try this approach, has your university done so?

After a short break due to some technical difficulties with the Podium connections, Leonard Houx, Senior Instructional Designer, Cass Executive Education (based at City’s Cass Business School) discussed the topic of flow in the redesign of Moodle for the online programmes that Cass are developing. You can see a short video demonstrating the theme, that Leonard has presented.

The afternoon continued with Kris Roger, Senior Learning Technologist, discussing the research that LSE have been doing with regards to Learning Spaces, a topic of great debate in many higher educational institutions. He highlighted the approach to the research design, using grounded theory to evaluate their impact and involving key stakeholders in the process of their design. You can read more of what LSE are doing in Learning Spaces on their website.

Following Kris’s presentation, Paul Bailey from JISC, presented about Learning Analytics and the challenges faced by institutions to get their data accurate to leverage the benefits of Learning Analytics for their staff and students. You can see Paul’s slides below.

Thank you to Westminster, Colin Loughlin and Kris Roger for hosting the event. See more tweets and links via this storify. We hope you enjoyed this brief post on a very varied afternoon of talks. There will be a Panopto recording which will be added to this post when it’s available.
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