Flipping great.

Earlier this year, we had the good fortune of catching up with Dr. Bryan McCabe, a lecturer in Civil Engineering at NUI Galway. Bryan has been re-configuring his pedagogic approach, by giving students exposure to lecture materials out of class through lecture videos and quizzes. He then uses lecture time to problem-solve, discuss and debate. More popularly known as "the flipped classroom", this learning model has been growing in popularity in recent times, due to its emphasis on active student engagement (Chen, Wang, Kinshuk & Chen, 2014).

In this short video with Bryan, he discusses his approach, and the feedback he has received from students on allowing them to take more responsibility for their learning, and engage collaboratively in the practice of engineering.

 

Further Reading:
Chen, Y., Wang, Y., Kinshuk & Chen, N.S. (2014). Is FLIP enough? Or should we use the FLIPPED model instead? Computers & Education, 79, 16-27.
 
Straw S., Quinlan, O., Harland, J. & Walker, M. (2014). Flipped Learning: Using Online Video to Transform Learning. Nesta Report. Accessed from http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/flipped-learning-using-online-video-transform-learning

Check out two NUI Galway Library Books:
Bergmann J, & Sams A. (2012)Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. Washington, DC: International Society for Technology in Education.

Bergmann, J. & Sams, A.(2014). Flipped learning Gateway to Student Engagement, Learning & Learning with Technology.

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Why I blog

Image by andyp uk on flickr 

A couple of weeks ago, as part of an informal lunchtime conversation session on the topic of Academic Blogging, Simon Warren (@worried_teacher) invited me to speak, along with John Danaher (@JohnDanaher), on my blogging experiences. This forced me to take some time and reflect on my own practice as a blogger, what I blog about and why. So, thank you Simon for giving me the purpose to reflect.

John blogs at philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.ie and is a prolific blogger. He admits to spending between 10 to 15 hours per week on his blog, writing an average of 2 lengthy posts each week. His writing is habitual and he starts most days writing at least 1000 words. He writes for research purposes and much of what he writes is repurposed for papers and articles. 

Clearly I am not nearly in the same league as John Danaher, but listening to him speak, I realised that some of our reasons for blogging are similar. 

 
The LearnTechGalway blog

This blog first started as a conference blog in May 2007, and has since accumulated more than 400 posts, with various authors from the Learning Technologies team at NUI Galway. We use the blog to document our work; to highlight and showcase the work of others; to share information about upcoming events; to document events we've hosted or attended; and to network with other groups.

The audience for the blog is the university community at NUIG and a broader network of academic, academic-related and educational technology people nationally and internationally.

Writing for me

But actually, my primary audience is myself! As a non-academic, there is not the same pressure on me to write; but as a former academic (who is still interested in research) I find that blogging provides me a platform to articulate and make sense of the world around me. John described something similar - he uses his blog to explain things to himself. 

When I first started blogging (in 2007), my contributions were short and factual. I blogged about news, gave details on upcoming events and wrote up conference reports. The conference and event reports developed as I started to reflect more, and began to put my ideas in writing. As my online identity continues to develop, through blogging and Twitter and other social tools, my blogger's voice has also continued to develop. It is still not a confident voice, but that is something that I would like to work on. 

So, blogging, for me, supports my own professional self development, allowing me to reflect, and helping me to shape my identity, both online and in real life.

Me as an open practitioner

It has also become important to me that I reflect openly and I'm working to become more of an open practitioner. This is not necessarily a comfortable place to be, especially as a woman online. But through blogging and twitter in particular I have developed a pretty good (and constantly shifting) personal learning network (PLN).

The value of the network is manifest in multiple ways. The feedback from comments on the blog or on twitter (or LinkedIn or Medium or wherever they happen to be) reminds me that I'm part of a wider community, but also supports the development of my thinking. Blogging can also result in unexpected opportunities for research or collaborative work, such as my chapter in David Hopkins' Really Useful #EdTech Book last year.

This post has taken me a couple of weeks to complete (though you wouldn't know that to read it). Yesterday I had the immense pleasure of hearing Joseph O'Connor speak at the National Summit for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. As well as providing the hugely accurate description Writing is like attempting to juggle with mud he also said

Learning is a way of seeing, again, a way of looking at the world 

I think blogging does this too. And blogging is part of my learning.

See Also..

Can blogging be academically valuable - by John Danaher

Blogging helps academic writing - by Pat Thomson

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Providing campus wide video services with limited resources

This article first appeared in the December issue of the Media and Learning Newsletter, published by the Media and Learning Association. Sign up for regular issues online.

The Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) at the National University of Ireland, Galway is a staff-facing central unit which has the broad aim to enhance the quality of teaching and learning at the University. The centre is responsible for various types of activities, grounded in the promotion of good pedagogy, including the support of learning technologies and media production. In the last 5 years, we have seen an increase in the use of video in online, blended and on-campus courses, including the flipped classroom approach.

With a small complement of staff (just 4 members in the learning technologies team) to support an institution with about 17,000 students and 2,500 staff across 5 Colleges, we have to be selective in how we allocate our resources. We have a small recording studio, for video and audio, with facilities for video editing. Our approach is to empower academic staff to develop their own resources through a combination of technology provision, formal and informal training, advice, support and good practice guides.

There is an impression that video is inherently complicated and that advanced knowledge and skills are necessary to produce anything worthwhile. However, increasingly people are walking around with a smartphone video camera in a pocket, and this is particularly true for our students. We can create and upload a short video to YouTube or Facebook in seconds, so why not educational video too?

Since 2011 we have used the Kaltura platform and VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) building block to make video easier for all staff and students. Instructional videos, webcam or screen recordings can be created and uploaded to the VLE using simple tools that don't require anything more complicated than a webcam and headset, and no knowledge of video files and formats.

While having a technological solution is a necessary first step to support and grow the use of video as a mainstream teaching and assessment tool across campus, it's not sufficient. The CELT learning technologies team is involved in a range of activities to raise awareness and enable the whole university community to leverage the power of video in teaching and learning, including:

• provision of basic advice and support, through a ticketing helpdesk, online resources and good practice guides for self-support. Online resources include both text guides with screenshots as well as video guides using the tools themselves.
• highlighting and showcasing existing good examples of video that have been well integrated into the curriculum.
• hands-on training through workshops on using the tools and technologies for video. The workshops can be stand-alone or included in staff development technology events.
• embedded in the formal CELT professional development programmes (PG Cert in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, PG Dip in Academic Practice), thereby situating the use of video technology firmly within the pedagogic context.
• leading by example, by making use of video in our own teaching and training activities, even when the focus is not video.
• working closely on selected, defined projects with individual staff and/or student groups, thereby creating showcase opportunities.
• provision of recording and editing facilities and services, where appropriate and feasible.

In an environment that is increasingly driven by measurements and metrics, it's important for us to monitor the use of video. From the Kaltura analytics tools we know that contributors, contributions and entries played have increased year-on-year since 2011, and are likely to grow further.

Republished with permission. 

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