The Screencast-Audio Myth

Mic image CC-BY Flickr user AV Hire London

I've seen endless amounts of blog posts and guides recently related to the importance of audio quality when recording screencasts or podcasts. They typically stress the importance of a high quality mic, which can end up costing over £100. I thought I'd write this short post to somewhat fly in the face of such advice, because fundamentally, I disagree with it. So I have 2 key reasons to highlight;

1) High quality mics are simply not required for 95% of screencasts or podcasts. I regularly record screencasts for both my students and for staff. In doing so, I tend to use either the built-in mic in my Macbook Pro, or the mic from my iPhone headphones. As I have these devices, the mic is essentially free. If you have a different brand laptop or smartphone, I'm sure the mics included will be equally sufficient. Unless you are producing something for TV, or other particularly high-stakes content, I wouldn't worry about professional equipment. Actually, experience and anecdotal evidence would suggest students prefer more relaxed video/audio from staff!

2) I have worked in an eLearning support capacity for a number of years now, where I/we encourage academic staff to engage with such approaches to enhance/benefit teaching and learning. I believe emphasising high quality mics has a negative impact on the take-up of such approaches, because academic staff will think they can't/shouldn't engage if they don't have the high quality mic. Now I'm sure the bloggers don't mean to discourage the average academic from pod/screencasting, and I'm sure they're trying to provide useful advice, I'm just concerned it has an unintended negative consequence.

Advice

I've created a lot of screencasts over the past few years, and I would really only insist on a couple of points for good practice related to screencasting. For me, far more important than having a high quality mic, is the process and environment for recording audio/video.

1) A structured and planned recording, using regular equipment is much better than an unstructured, unplanned recording using high quality equipment. Every time! So take a few minutes to prepare. If you can't script out exactly what you want to say in your screencast, at least have an outline or plan rather than improvising completely. Indeed a personal approach is important, but too many urms and erms can be off-putting (which often occur subconsciously as our brains try to catch up with our mouths).

2) Record in a quiet place - I'm not suggesting getting sound proof and insulated rooms, but just try to record in a quiet office - I've tried in the past, unsuccessfully, to record screencasts in an open plan office, when mid-way through the phone would ring or colleagues would burst into the office in full discussion. So of course, I'd have to start from scratch. Now, I have my own office so it's not such a difficulty, but I would always recommend finding a quiet room where you can have a bit of piece and quiet to record. Close the windows so traffic noise doesn't interfere, and crack on.

Screencast.com have a much more in-depth set of tips and good practice suggestions if you want to head over to their help pages.



This advice reminds me of what my 6th Form teachers used to say; 'Failing to prepare is preparing to fail'!



What do you think about  my comments above? Do you have any tips for recording screencasts?




This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Why MOOCs are not the future?

Power Searching with Google MOOC

I feel a tad self-conscious about putting my head above the parapit on this one, as I am talking against what many of my peers are 'bigging up', but what follows are some of my thoughts about MOOCs and why they are not the panacea their excitement might suggest....

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Any 'free' and/or 'open' education offering is a great thing. Self-learners can engage with MOOCs to develop themselves, and even without accreditation, a lot of people just love to learn. I'm one of them. However, when it comes to the crunch, many people want to know their investment reaps tangible rewards. Now I know a lot of people will say the reward is in the fuller and broader understanding of the topic areas under consideration, which might then influence practice and ultimately see career progression. To which I fully agree, however a lot of people want to see a piece of paper at the end so they can prove they have successfully completed the course of study. And with many of the MOOC business models in existence, that often means a cost (although there are examples of accreditation - see MITx).

I am fully committed to furthering my own knowledge, skills, etc, and always look to engage in opportunities to do so. To this end, I've tried to engage in MOOCs in the past, starting with the Siemens/Downes 'original' a few years ago. I found it difficult to dedicate so much time to it (even more so as employers are unlikely to allow teams of staff dedicated time to 'study' MOOCS). I found it difficult to maintain motivation for something I felt would have little impact. The same can be said for many of the other MOOCs around. I also quickly lost interest in the Udacity (CS101) 'Building a Search Engine' course. [Perhaps this says more about me than it does the MOOCs in question ;-) ] In fact the only one I have enjoyed and importantly, stuck with, is the 'Power Searching with Google' course recently.

I don't think I'm much different to many. Whilst in one hand, we hear of the Massive (capital M) participation figures, we hear less of the massive drop out figures - this Bostinno article suggests in one course, of 200,000 participants, 160,000 dropped out.). I wonder if this will prove a critical challenge for the MOOC going forward.

Other challenges

Along with the massive drop out figures, I think the current lack of sustainable business models might provide a key barrier to more institutions developing MOOCs. So to, is the problem of accreditation. I've already ranted about my rejection of the child-like metaphor of the Badge [ooh yippee, a badge. I want one Mummy ;-) ]. I've created my Mozilla Open Badge Backpack, but I just don't see how, as more and more badges are created/awarded, that they can be recognised by employers if there is no benchmarking (for want of a better word). I might create an activity to award a badge in advanced Javascript, but a) that doesn't mean you're actually any good at it, and b) is the badge equivalent to other Javascript badges? I don't think I'm alone in thinking this - whilst I was discussing MOOCs with one of my colleagues Catherine Wasiuk, she commented;

"I think that they are great for informal learning and maybe as a bit of a marketing tool for Universities. Not sure if I would want someone who has completed a MOOC in brain surgery to perform an operation on me though!!"

So what's your point of view on MOOCs? Great for personal development or the future of (online) education? I personally don't think they will be the death of education, but what do you think?


This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Academy-QTS ruling is not the end of teaching....

Classroom image | CC-BY | Flickr User Marlith

The recent government decision to allow academies to employ teachers without QTS status has caused quite a stir across the sector. Pretty much all of my Twitter stream is against this decision, and on the whole, so am I. Doug Belshaw's post (Is Michael Gove systematically dismantling English state education) pretty much sums up the view of the majority I think. However, I just want to provide an alternative view on this...

This excerpt is my comment on Doug's post...

My brother (BA & MA in History & American Studies) has worked as a TA for the last 5+ years (earning £12k ish) - passionate about teaching and helping kids. He works in a particularly challenging school in Liverpool (it might be an academy, but not 100% sure). Let's just say, it's not great. He's been hit by a flying chair recently when trying to stop a kid attacking a teacher. And yet he's still passionate about teaching when many of his QTS colleagues are not (which often gets him down). He has received a lot of great feedback about sessions he has run (and for some time was seconded to manage the behavioural unit).
For the last 3 years, he has been unsuccessful in applying to study a PGCE at various HEIs in the north west.
If this recent decision regarding QTS gives him the chance to step up (and get paid an average salary) then I'm all for it.

For those that haven't read Doug's post and all the comments, I go on to suggest that although the decision to employ non-QTS teachers has been made, it doesn't mean that a) they will, or b) standards of teaching will now suffer drastically as a result.

There is no threat here to the good teachers; the teachers who actually care. (On my cynical side), we all know of teachers who are in it for the pension - a job for life, and I'm pretty sure they have PGCEs. We need to be careful of thinking those with PGCEs are good teachers, and those that haven't couldn't possibly be (not that anybody has said otherwise).

So on the contrary, if it gives more people like my brother a chance to progress in a career he is passionate about, standards might actually improve. One thing I would hope though, is that Head Teachers are suddenly not going to settle for mediocrity in return for saving a few £££. I would actually suspect Heads will share the feelings of Doug and many others. After all, anybody who has chosen a career in Education (and even those who haven't) should be concerned about our education system.

I completely agree with Doug's response to my comment, in that there is a need for a solid understanding of pedagogy; An understanding of how children learn. @PaulHollins questions the degree of focus upon Pedagogy in many PGCEs - so I wonder if perhaps Gove's decision is in response to this? Does the PGCE currently support the development of new teachers to sufficiently provide the 'future of education', whatever that might be?

There's certainly enough talk about the future of education, so what is needed to achieve it?

Moving along, perhaps there is a compromise. Similar to many HEIs, maybe these academies could introduce probation requirements, for example, the completion of a PGCE (and the sponsorship to put new teachers through it). New teachers could also be coupled with a more experienced mentor, or supported through Peer Review? Learn lessons from what works and what doesn't in support of NQTs, and progress on from here?

Anyway, these are just some of my thoughts on the topic. I don't agree with Gove, and am certainly not trying to understand him, but just providing an alternative view. I'd like to see if others can see any potential positives from this change, or is it all bad?

@reedyreedles



This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Open Educational Practices and the Future of Open Learning

If you're one of the few regular readers of my blog, you will likely know I'm a big fan of all things Open, however I'm also a bit sceptical about Open Education being/becoming mainstream (which in my view, leads to problems around sustainability). Actually, I wrote a post a few months back questioning if the Open Content Movement is indeed Mainstreamed and Sustainable.

Now, I've been thinking about blogging on how I see the future of learning for some time, but I was prompted again this morning when reading a Grainne Conole chapter about Open Educational Practices (OEP), in Open Educational Resources and Change in Higher Education. For the record, OEPs are practices that support production, use and reuse of OERs (from policy to on-the-ground activities).

When I sit back and ponder what the world might be like in 15 years, with a gang of Mini-Me's running around (you might want to be careful if/when that happens by the way), I think about how their education might be different to mine, and what practices and skills (or Capacities as Doug Belshaw might suggest) they will need to do their homework (their learning/digital literacy toolkit, perhaps).

Now I'm not going out on a limb here and suggest robots and all that jazz, but over the years we have seen massive developments in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), moving from the Command Line Interface to Xerox, Apple Lisa, and the birth and development of the mouse to control a graphical user interface. Metaphors such as the desktop, folders and the recycle bin were revolutionary. Later, Apple changed the game again by really conquering touch interaction. 

In recent times, we've seen new interactions with things like the Nintendo Wii, XBox Kinect, and  Apple's personal assistant, Siri. The latest breakthrough is the Leap 3D Gesture Device, allowing users to interact with the computer through gestures.  I really think these developments will once again revolutionise the way we interact with computers on a mass scale, so much so, that people will no longer immerse themselves into computers; I think the ubiquity and control of computers will become immersed into our environment. I think we'll move to something that closer resembles Minority Report (If you haven't seen Minority Report, check out this clip to see what I'm on about).

So not wanting to deviate too much from the title of this post, I'll move on to relate this to openness.

So when my kids are doing homework, they will have access to search for anything and everything. And I don't just mean the stuff we can search for now - not just a wikipedia article, a YouTube video or some random site. I mean a voice command that returns an instant seamless stream of content that they can quicky engage with or disregard with a swipe of the hand. Not a google results page that they have to work through methodically to filter out what's good or not, or have to try and move past the sponsored results. Instead, it will know what they want. It will know them!

Now Google have already started to build on the semantic web with their Knowledge Graph, which they claim is building a massive graph of real-world things and their connections, to bring more meaningful results. So combined with the developments above, I suppose I'm hardly predicting anything new. However, we can't take this future as a given. It's not just going to miraculously appear because Google have put their weight behind it. OERs and Open Data will be a key (and critical) factor in this. As things stand, it will rely on the Open Educational Practices that Conole discusses (2012) (which is a bit of a problem because they are currently not embedded as standard practice, nor for that matter, is engagement with OER [from a creation and reuse perspective])

Conole suggests there is a resistance to the adoption of open practices, which I fear will relegate OER to an abstract concept. So what's needed to ensure they don't? 

Whilst the structure and models Conole discusses are very valid, I have a bigger problem with it all. Similar to how I believe computers will be immersed into our environment, so to must this set of practices which are currently abject and separate. I think we need to move away from the mindset that open educational practices are something different, and to do this, we need move away from the very practice that open education itself is something different. That is, the process of (re)developing, licensing, sharing and curating. Currently the difficulty in creating a reusable learning object is too much for the majority - there is no single and/or easy way to go about this - academic staff have to learn about the various methods (whether that's looking at Exe, Xerte, Glomaker, etc), learn how to use them, perhaps develop their graphical design skills so they look engaging. Concomitantly, they must license them appropriately, and upload it to whichever repository they like (Jorum, Merlot, etc). Ensuring every academic has these skills is without doubt a tall order. 

Instead, these processes need streamlining. Sometimes, choice can be a bad thing. I'd like to see a mechanism that brings all of the separate elements of OER together in a standardised way, so even the academics with few IT/digital literacies can participate without having to learn lots of new stuff (actual skills, understanding licenses, and generally being aware of repositories, etc).

Until it's easier for the masses to engage, I'm unsure if OER will ever be fully embedded as a core practice, and ultimately the future I envision will remain a deluded thought. To prove it's possible, I leave you John Underkoffler's TED video on the developments of UI....






This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Performing Mass Actions in Moodle

We've reached the point in the year when colleagues will be thinking about rolling over content from 11/12 units into their 12/13 areas in Moodle. Thankfully this isn't such a difficult task, and this previous post highlights the simple steps involved to do this.

One slight problem that has already cropped up, is that when you take all of your content across to the new unit, you might want to hide most of it to avoid students scrolling all the way down and accessing term 2 content, for instance. Well, we're really pleased to announce a new plugin that can make this whole process easier.

The Mass Actions plugin, which can be added as a block within Moodle areas, can make the task of hiding, showing, and moving lots of activities and resources much easier. It's really as simple as ticking multiple checkboxes and clicking the appropriate button, or you can use the controls within the block to 'select all' within a section (read Week or Topic), and perform the relevant operation.

This quick video [3.24] demonstrates the Mass Actions block, but if you have any problems or questions, feels free to get in touch...



This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Visualising Openness

I've been revisiting my work around the Open Content Movement lately (both in prep for a presentation at last week's #Solstice2012 conference and also for a paper I have had accepted for Research in Learning Technology). In turning back to some of the literature alongside results I received from questionnaires, one particular quote sticks out for me;

"Openness is not like a light switch that is either 'on' or 'off'. Rather, it is like a dimmer switch, with varying degrees of openness" (Hilton iii, Wiley, Stein & Johnson, 2010)

I really like this quote and something I referred to earlier in the year when questioning if the OER movement was mainstream and sustainable. I also refer to Schaffert & Geser (2008), who suggest openness has four principles: Open Access; Open Licensing; Open Software; Open Format.
So in considering the quote alongside the four principles, I wondered a) if it's possible to somehow visualise openness, and b) has anyone already made an attempt? I don't know for either, so thought I would give it a go...

My initial thoughts centre around a Radar Diagram, but it would involve plotting the 4 principles with various points for each. With this in mind, the following diagram attempts to visualise varying degrees of open practice (for want of a better phrase). The coloured area represents the degree of openness, where a larger area (based on plot on each axis) demonstrating greater openness;

If this could be a method of visualising openness, a detailed breakdown of each principle would be required. To this end (and by no means correct or complete), this could be a start;
Open Access (A) points (might include)

• Closed VLE 
• Internal (Institutionally Owned) Repository 
• Public (Institutionally Owned) Repository 
• (National Repository) Jorum/Merlot

Open Licensing (L) points (might include)

• All Rights Reserved
• Creative Commons
• CC-BY-NC-ND-SA 
• ...
• CC-BY
• GNU Public license

Open Software (S) points (might include)

• Flash
• Dreamweaver
• MS Office
• Google Docs
• Xerte/GLO Maker

Open Format (F) points (might include)

• Flash Movie
• Document (.doc, .ppt, etc)
• PDF
• HTML

(N.B each of the points range from lowest to highest, closed to open, etc)

So to take a specific case to plot as an example, we could consider the development of an interactive Flash movie file that has been licensed with Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC) and placed within Jorum. The resulting visualisation might look like this;

The diagram/graph shows this case is a bit weak on the format and software side of things, but they are doing well in relation to Open Access and Licensing.

Considerations

This is just a quick attempt at visualising openness - it's by no means complete and requires much more thought. Immediately I can think of the following points;

• Automation of a radar chart based on form input could reduce individual interpretations towards the 4 principles (this would require more specific details within each though)
• More knowledge/understanding needed (both of Openness and Technical), and perhaps crowdsourced, required to flesh out points within each of the principles
• The points on each axis could relate to the specific 'criteria' (as above)
• It might be worth highlighting that software and format are inextricably linked, however this is not to suggest a 'closed' software produces a 'closed' format; for example consider the expensive Adobe Dreamweaver which produces open HTML formats.... 

I would really appreciate your views on this. Is it stupid? Worthwhile? Does it already exist?

Please use the comments to share your thoughts.



This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Hashtags & Retweets: Using Twitter to aid Communication, Community, and Casual (informal) Learning

Today I presented some early research from using Twitter with students over the past year, at the Solstice eLearning conference at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk.

You can view the slides below, or view them on Slideshare to see the annotations for each slide.

Would love to hear from others using Twitter or other SoMe tools in teaching and learning.

Hashtags & Retweets: Using Twitter to aid Community, Communication and Casual (informal) Learning

View more PowerPoint from Peter Reed

This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Who controls the 'blend' in Blended Learning?

CC-BY Flickr User WGreller

There are many definitions of Blended Learning on the web. For the sake of this post, we can go with a working definition of; 'a cooperative alignment of face-to-face and online learning and teaching activities'. So, this seems to be used interchangeably with terms such as 'eLearning' and 'Technology Enhanced Learning'.

So, who controls which parts of a course of study are to be engaged with in the classroom, and which parts are engaged with online? That's rhetorical, because typically, it's the tutor, and more typically, almost all of the teaching activities take place in the class, with some additional activities to be conducted as 'independent' or 'self-managed' learning.

This post argues these ways need to be rethought. Well actually, I (and other colleagues) have been arguing this point for a number of years. In 2009, I worked with a colleague in a curriculum development activity to design a completely online Perioperative Care module. During the process, we questioned how we could benefit the holistic learning and teaching experience by bringing together the face-to-face class with the online class, and offer much more freedom for learners to control their own 'blend' in the learning experience.

Essentially, we encouraged learners to decide which parts of the module they wanted to study online, and which parts they wanted to come to class for. With increasing financial demands on Faculty, these modules could be marketed as completely online modules, completely face-to-face modules, or a mix of both. Learners arrive at University with expectations related to the use of technology in learning and teaching, and have increasing demands on their time, whether it be through work or personal commitments. As they begin to pay more for their Higher Education, they will come to demand more for their investment (or debt, as it will be for many) - here, more could mean 'more choice', 'more flexibility' or just 'more'. We felt (and feel) that our approach could cater to these demands, and was termed 'Mode Neutral' during an Institutional Validation Event. The name kind of stuck (whether we like it or not). In earlier published work, we defined it as;

"A method that allows students to progress across modes of delivery (face-to-face, online and blended) at any point throughout their study based on their preferences, requirements, personal and professional commitments without compromising their learning"

We debated the key factors that would facilitate such a flexible and fluid learning arrangement, and identified three Dimensions; The Role of the Tutor, Curriculum Design, and Communication for Learning, and each are required to maximise the student experience.

As our thinking evolved, we realised that these dimensions are not simply 'present' or 'not present', but instead are present in various degrees - almost three dimensional. The degree to which the dimensions are present rely on the implementation of certain 'conditions', and therefore could be visualised;

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To summarise, our attempts challenge(d) the long standing approaches of tutor-controlled blended learning. Of course, there are significant workload implications in introducing such flexibility, but if this positively impacts upon the student experience, it's worth it.

Where do you stand on the term 'Blended Learning', and who should control this blend?

You can read about our more substantial thoughts, including details of conditions within each dimension, through;

Reed. P, Smith. B, Sherratt. C (2008) eLearning and Digital Media. Vol 5; No 3.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts....


This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Communicating with Year Groups through Moodle

Year Tutors and Programme Leaders have a common challenge in easily communicating messages to large groups of students. This post discusses how you can use the Programme/Network Area in Moodle effectively to solve some of these challenges.

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You may not be aware that groups of students are automatically created in Programme/Network/School areas in Moodle based, on their year and mode of study. If you click into 'Groups' from the Administration menu (within a Programme/Network area), you will see students are grouped according to their 'Year of Study' and 'Type of Study', which means staff can target specific resources and activities to particular groups.

As you can see from the image on the right, students in the Computing & Digital Technology Network are grouped in multiple ways;

• The beginning of the group name relates to the Programme number (11398A), and the year instance (11/12). 
• Following that we have CH (Combined Hons) or UG (Undergraduate). In some areas you will see PG (Post-graduate) instead of UG.
• Then we have the Year of Study (1, 2, 3), which relates to University Levels 4, 5 and 6; alongside the Type of Study, broken down as Full-time (F), Part-time (P) or Sandwich (S). Also, where appropriate, we see indicators for partner college students (MN, SC, SP). 
• The number in parenthesis relates to the number of students in that particular group.

So what now?

Well now we know what (and who) they are, we can add the relevant groups into a Grouping, e.g. Level 4 students from across the Network (inc. CH, FT, PT and S). Then, we can create a forum that is only available to students in that particular Grouping, making it much easier to get messages out to specific cohorts of students more efficiently, and providing them with a platform to discuss academic (and perhaps non-academic) work. You can learn more about the difference between Groups & Groupings here.

The Computing & Digital Technology Network area has forums for each level that are really well used by students, and were identified as 'good practice' in the Students' Union Student 'Shout Out' event....

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Of course if you want to communicate with large numbers of students that are not automatically grouped, you could always create your own custom groups. The post on Moodle Groups & Groupings clarifies the difference between the two and demonstrates how easily you can create your own. Of course, you can always feel free to give me a shout to run through this with you.


This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Moodle Roll Over

Well it's that time of year where we think about planning for next year. To this end, this post will discuss some of the options for carrying content from one Moodle area (e.g. 11/12 unit) into another (e.g. 12/13 unit).

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Unit Import / Roll-over

The most straightforward way to roll content across from one unit into another is to bring everything across - all resources, quizzes, etc. Of course there are one or two things we'll need to 'check off', but essentially the process is straightforward enough.

You can access the CeLT guide to support this process, and/or watch this short (<5 min) video, which walks through the steps...

Checklist

• Remember that Turnitin activities will not copy across, so these will need to be recreated in the new area
• Any other assignments or quizzes that have dates associated will need updating to reflect the new dates - this can cause problems for students later on if overlooked. 
• Also check the dates associated to each week in the unit (if using a weekly structure). You can edit these from the settings page (under the Administration menu).

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Importing Selected Content

It's possible to import selected pieces of information, resources and activities into a new area, simply by only selecting the relevant check boxes. However there can be some problems when bringing that content into an area with existing content. If you are interested in doing this, it is advised to get in touch with me (or the eLearning Support Officer from your Faculty) to discuss the options and potential pitfalls.



This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.