Karen Fill

A learning design toolkit to create pedagogically effective learning activities

Despite the plethora of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools and resources available, practitioners are still not making effective use of e-learning to enrich the student experience. This article describes a learning design toolkit which guides practitioners through the process of creating pedagogically informed learning activities which make effective use of appropriate tools and resources. This work is part of a digital libraries project in which teaching staff at two universities in the UK and two in the USA are collaborating to share e-learning resources in the subject domains of Physical, Environmental and Human Geography. Finding, or creating, suitable e-learning resources and embedding them in well designed learning activities can be both challenging and time consuming. Sharing and adapting effective designs and solutions is both a stimulant and a time saver. This article describes the background to the specification of a learning activities design toolkit to support teachers as they create or adapt e-learning activities. This uses a model of pedagogical approaches as a basis for developing effective learning design plans and illustrates its use. The authors share their definition of a learning activity and taxonomies for the constituent elements. Real examples are discussed to illustrate their approach.

Sink or swim: taking advantage of developments in video streaming

Amongst the many recent developments in learning technology, video streaming appears to offer a considerable range of benefits for tutors and learners alike. For these to be fully realised, however, various conditions have to be met. Merely making streams available and directing students to them, does not necessarily result in quality, or indeed any, learning. Drawing on material from the literature and the World Wide Web, as well as recent project experience, this paper discusses the potential effectiveness of video streams as learning resources in higher education within the context of current and possible future technologies.

Assessing the contribution of collections of case studies to academic development in higher education

In recent years there has been a proliferation of paper-based and electronic collections of case studies focusing on different facets of academic practice in higher education. Inherent in their compilation and dissemination is the assumption that these collections contribute to improvements in practice. How justified is such an assumption? This question serves as a backdrop to the paper in which attention is given to the range and variety of collections of case studies; their nature and purpose; positive and negative arguments concerning their value; and their role in educational development. It is concluded that, if collections of case studies are to make an effective contribution to educational development, academic developers should attend to a variety of questions concerning their adoption and use.

International networks in higher education: realising their potential?

Purpose – To illustrate the nature, range and variety of international networks linking individuals and institutions and reflecting the globalisation of higher education and desire of educators with common interests to shed their parochialism and communicate and collaborate on aspects of academic practice across national boundaries.Design/methodology/approach – The authors draw on their personal experiences of securing European Union funding for establishing a network of tertiary level educators and some targeted online research, to inform their review and analysis.Findings – Internationals networks in sphere of higher education can be either subject‐specific or thematic in their aims and either global or restricted to one part of the world in their membership. Some are the outcome of activities at grass roots level while others are a response to policy initiatives from inter‐governmental organisations.Practical implications – Although widespread, international networks in higher education are by no means...

Towards a Canonical View of Peer Assessment

Peer assessment (or peer review) is a popular form of reciprocal assessment where students produce feedback, or grades, for each others work. Peer assessment activities can be extremely varied with participants taking different roles at different stages of the process and materials passing between roles in sophisticated patterns. This variety makes designing peer assessment systems very challenging. In this paper we present a number of peer assessment case studies and show how a simple review cycle can be used as a building block to achieve the more complex cases. We then propose a canonical use case for peer assessment, in which a review plan is used to describe how review cycles can be combined to achieve the required complexity.