Educational Multimedia Group – 21 March 2017

The latest Educational Multimedia Group meeting ran on 21st March with a packed agenda and presentations from schools and professional services across City. The presentations covered an array of interesting multimedia use in learning and teaching.

Glass Screen Video for Teaching Marine Engineering

Matt Goral (Educational Technology Team, LEaD)

First up we had Matt talking about a project he had worked on with John Carlton, a Professor of Maritime Engineering, which included experimenting with the new glass screen in our digital production studio. John used the glass screen to explain mathematical concepts to his students. Evidence suggests that seeing a diagram, or an equation, being drawn is more powerful than seeing pre-made ones. Matt also suggested alternative methods of producing similar videos including using over-the-shoulder cameras, graphics tablets and Livescribe pens.

The video below shows the recording before and after the green screen was removed from behind the glass screen.  Participants noted that John was not writing backwards, but that the video had been flipped horizontally in post-production. Matt also suggested that asking presenters to wear black may be beneficial to allow the equations to stand out.

Creating Multimedia Resources with Powtoon

Dan Sansome (Learning Success, LEaD)

Dan used PowToon, an online tool, to produce engaging animations to communicate study skills tips to students. After interviewing City students for their study tips, he and other LEaD colleagues transcribed the interviews before scripting and and storyboarding animations. Images for the animation were sourced, and the audio edited before presenting a draft version for feedback. To find out more about the project, read Dan’s full blog post here.

Taking Aviation Education to New Heights with Adobe Connect

Ivan Sikora (School of Mathematics, Computer Science & Engineering) and Dom Pates (Educational Technology Team, LEaD)

Ivan and Dom spoke about their use of Adobe Connect, a web-conferencing tool available to City staff, to facilitate a guest lecture for Undergraduate Aviation students. An industry expert was beamed in from Auckland, New Zealand, to speak to students about aircraft testing, and gave students the opportunity to ask questions. Dom and Ivan used the PST (Pedagogy-Space-Technology) framework which is used to design and evaluate learning spaces, whether they be physical or digital.  The session ran twice and improvements were made for the second session, including increased student interactivity and splitting the lecture in two to aid attention and focus.  You can read more about this project here.

Creating Multimedia Resources for the Innovative Food Systems Teaching And Learning (IFSTAL) Programme

Rebecca Wells (School of Arts and Social Sciences)

Rebecca, a Teaching Fellow at City, spoke about the use of multimedia in the IFSTAL (Innovative Food Systems Teaching and Learning) programme. IFSTAL is an interactive training programme, designed to improve post-graduate level knowledge and understanding of the food system, comprising an educational network of universities and research centres. The challenge for those heading the programme is to bring together students and experts from these different organisations. The City IFSTAL team have taken advantage of Adobe Connect, to stream live lectures to the other institutions, and were the first to use our new digital production studio when it opened last year, to record interviews with City’s Food Policy experts to disseminate across the network.

Simulated Practice Video Project for Telecare and Telehealth

Lorna Rixon (School of Health Sciences)

Lorna spoke about an interesting simulated practice video project that she had completed with her colleague Shashi Hirani with support from LEaD. The project included creating several patient case studies in City TECS, a studio flat built at City to simulate a home environment. The flat includes several pieces of technology to help monitor and support patients with various conditions.

Six videos were created around aspects such as care of the elderly, diabetes and cognitive impairment in relation to these technologies. They were designed to help Nursing students think about how they might use these technologies for patients with long-term conditions, and how patients may react to including them in their healthcare. The scenarios included two actors, one of whom was a current Nursing student, and the other a professional actor.  Semi-structured scripts were used which outlined key points, and allowed for improvisation to add authenticity to the performances.

Lorna reported positive student feedback, with many saying that the videos helped aid their understanding of how the technology can help patients, as well as appreciating how the level of acceptability of the technology can vary amongst patients.  Below is a clip from the “Diabetes” video.

Thank you to all our presenters, and to those of you who came along to hear about their work.

How can I find out more, and join the group?

Presentation slides from the meeting, as well as all previous meetings, can be found on the Educational Multimedia Group Moodle page, along with a plethora of useful resources. This is a self-enrollable module, once you are enrolled you can consider yourself joined and will be informed of all future meetings.

I want to do the same/have an idea, or need some inspiration

If you would like to speak to one of the multimedia team about using these ideas in your learning and teaching, or about any other potential multimedia projects, then please email us at video@city.ac.uk.  You can also take advantage of our META (Multimedia-Enhanced Teaching Approaches) service if you are looking for ideas and inspiration on how to use multimedia in your teaching. Full details are here.

I’m already doing something great with multimedia and want to talk about it

Please contact me via email fariha.afgan.1@city.ac.uk to talk about presenting at a future meeting.