Rebecca Wilson based in the UCL Digital Education Team and Theo Bryer an academic based in the IOE have collaborated for many years developing creative approaches to working with digital technology. In 2017 they visited Bengaluru and worked in schools and a children’s home making films with young people.

In this blog entry they write about their research trip to Kathmandu, Nepal in March 2025 working with teachers, MA students and primary school children. The project was funded by a grant from the IOE Global Engagement Fund.

Group film project at Kathmandu University

We arrived in Kathmandu to find ourselves in the aftermath of a violent demonstration and in the midst of an evening curfew. After a long detour we finally arrived to the peace and tranquility of our traditional Newari style guest house in Patan, on the outskirts of Kathmandu.

After this dramatic beginning and despite the air quality being the worst in the world during the time we were there, the next ten days unfolded as planned. We participated in course development meetings and co-taught a series of practice-based workshops, with MA Education students in Kathmandu University and at a local school. These workshops were co-designed with our academic colleague Mr Sushrut Acharya. He lectures on similar teacher education programmes to us and was interested in the creative pedagogies proposed in Theo’s chapter: Multimodal meaning-making through digital media [Bryer, T., Pitfield, M., & Coles, J. (2024). Drama at the Heart of English: Transforming Practice in the Secondary. Routledge.

Sushrut Acharya Lecturer at Kathmandu University

Our aim was to focus on what Sushrut refers to as ‘transformative teaching methods’ that the students, who were all teachers, might adapt in their school contexts. These involved students exploring the potential of digital production and drama to teach aspects of literary texts but with a broader application to cross-curricular teaching too. We invited them to engage in a series of drama activities and then to shoot and edit very short films inspired by an excerpt of Chapter 5 from Shelley’s Frankenstein; a response to the question: How do we know the creature is alive?

… the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Below are links to three of the short films teachers made in an afternoon workshop.
Frankenstein
Alive
The Creature

We were also fortunate to have the opportunity to run a drama and digital photography workshop with some amazing primary pupils and their teachers in the Genuine Secondary School in Bhaktapur on the outskirts of Kathmandu. We worked on a drama inspired by a traditional story exploring bravery, tenacity and focus with a class of enthusiastic 10-year-olds.

Photos taken by young people on iPads of our drama activity in school in Kathmandu.

Our ten days collaborating with teachers and academic colleagues was an inspirational experience, and our active learning approach was welcomed and co-developed in this very different context. This collaboration will continue to develop, exploring the possibilities of future international partnerships supported by the Prospero.digital platform. We are also in discussion with our UCL Nepali colleague Dr Ranjita Dhital (Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Health Studies, Arts and Sciences BASc) about developing digital arts and drama-based interventions in Nepal and the UK.

Drama workshop at Kathmandu university

We were interested in aspects of the performative culture that we encountered in public spaces, including dancing and music-making that was often being recorded. The Botanical Gardens and Garden of Dreams provided a filmic backdrop to these activities. The teachers and children that we worked with seemed very responsive to working with digital technology in creative ways.

What inspired us most was the ethos of the teachers and academic staff that we engaged with; the ways that relationships and care clearly sustained them in challenging circumstances, expressed through sharing of food and many acts of kindness. This experience gave us a significant perspective on our own work and context.

Lunchtime feast brought in by students

Rebecca Wilson has worked for over 20 years as part of the Initial Teacher Education programme at the IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society – the team rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted in 2024. As part of the UCL Digital Education Team, Rebecca continues to promote the creative use of new technologies as a teaching and learning tool and seeks to develop the skills and knowledge of UCL staff and students.

Dr Theo Bryer runs the English with Drama PGCE and the Creativity from Theory to Practice module, part of the MA English Education and MA Digital Media: Education to which Rebecca also contributes. Theo researches the relationship between live and recorded drama and the ways that assuming a role can support learning.

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Icarus – a simulation tool developed by UCL School of Management academics – has won 1st prize in the ‘Best use of simulations or virtual environments for learning’ category at the 2017 Learning Technologies Awards.

Lynsie Chew, Programme Director (MSc Professional Accountancy), and Alan Parkinson, Deputy Director (Education), who initiated and managed the simulator, attended the awards on 29 November where they were awarded Gold 1st place in their category.

The simulator, which is used in teaching on the School’s MSc Professional Accountancy, simulates running an airport, with users able to control a wide-range of aspects including variables such as the number of runways and the rent charged on retail units.

Icarus was one of six simulators shortlisted at the 2017 awards.

The UCL MSc in Professional Accountancy, in partnership with global accountancy body ACCA, is unique in its virtual availability to students located around the world.

The University approached Unicorn and LAS to design and build a complex and highly immersive simulation which would allow groups of learners from around the world to collaborate and work in teams over different time zones. This was ICARUS – a sophisticated, multi-layered, immersive and above all, realistic business simulation. The judges felt that the choice of an airport as the focus was inspired because of the wide range of businesses and services and the complexities they introduce, that contribute to its success or otherwise. Particularly impressive was the ease with which the simulation can be customised and updated with real world events as they happen and how the impact of what may appear as an isolated incident can affect different parts of the business in very different ways.

Focusing on demonstrable learner engagement and tangible outcomes required to secure the future of the programme, this project has been an unprecedented success: it boasts a 40% rise in uptake, and 95% student pass rate.

This post is an amalgamation of  content from the following sites:

• http://www.mgmt.ucl.ac.uk/news/gold-icarus-ucl-simulations-scoops-first-prize
• http://www.learningtechnologies.co.uk/learning-technologies-awards-winners-2017

UCL Digital Education Advisory members contributed to a new Open Access e-book that provides valuable insight into the way technology can enhance assessment and feedback. The book was launched formally on 26th October by Birkbeck College Secretary Keith Harrison, with talks from the editors Leo Havemann (Birkbeck, University of London) and Sarah Sherman (BLE Consortium), three case study authors, and event sponsor Panopto.

Havemann, Leo; Sherman, Sarah (2017): Assessment, Feedback and Technology: Contexts and Case Studies in Bloomsbury. London: Bloomsbury Learning Environment.
View and download from: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5315224.v1

The Book

E-Book Cover

The book is a result of a two-year project on e-assessment and feedback run by the Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE), a collaboration between five colleges, including the UCL Institute of Education, on issues around digital technology in Higher Education. It contains three research papers which capture snapshots of current practice, and 21 case studies from the BLE partner institutions and a little beyond, thus including practice from wider UCL.

The three papers focus on

• the use of technology across the assessment lifecycle,
• the roles played by administrative staff in assessment processes,
• technology-supported assessment in distance learning.

The case studies are categorised under the headings:

• alternative [assessment] tasks and formats,
• students feeding back,
• assessing at scale,
• multimedia approaches, and
• technical developments.

Seven of the 21 case studies were provided by UCL Digital Education colleagues Jess Gramp, Jo Stroud, Mira Vogel (2), and Tim Neumann (3), reporting on examples of blogging, group assessment, peer feedback, assessment in MOOCs, student presentations at a distance, and the UCL-developed My Feedback Report plugin for Moodle.

Why you should read the e-book

BLE E-Book Launch Event

As one of the speakers at the entertaining launch event, I suggested three reasons why everybody involved in Higher Education should read this book, in particular the case studies:

1. Processes in context:
   The case studies succinctly describe assessment and feedback processes in context, so you can quickly decide whether these processes are transferable to your own situation, and you will get a basic prompt on how implement the assessment/feedback process.
2. Problems are highlighted:
   Some case studies don’t shy away from raising issues and difficulties, so you can judge for yourself whether these difficulties represent risks in your context, and how these risks can be managed.
3. Practical tips:
   All case studies follow the same structure. If you are in a hurry, make sure to read at least the Take Away sections of each case study, which are full of tips and tricks, many of which apply to situations beyond the case study.

Overall, this collection of papers and case studies on assessment and feedback is easily digestible and contributes to an exchange of good practice.

View and Download the Book

The e-book is an Open Access publication freely available below.

For further information, see ble.ac.uk/ebook.html, and view author profiles at ble.ac.uk/ebook_contributors.html

For the last four years, the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) has been running a two-week programme called ‘How to Change the World’ (HtCtW) for undergraduate engineering students in the Faculty as part of the Integrated Engineering Programme. The aim of HtCtW is to enable students to work in multi-disciplinary teams and collaborate to create engineering solutions to an open-ended problem linked to a particular global challenge.

Due to the success of this format, the programme is being rolled out externally. It was piloted with members of the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) in London in 2016, and now STEaPP is partnering with the RAEng and National Academy of Engineering to run a student programme for a cohort of 150 students (from China, UK and US) at the Global Grand Challenges Summit 2017 in Washington DC on 18–20 July.

Students will generate their own audio or video podcasts exploring how solving one or more of the Grand Challenges could impact real peoples’ lives for the better. These podcasts will be reviewed and a selection will be promoted across a range of professional networks and media channels, with career-enhancing benefits for participants.

Five members of STEaPP staff will travel to Washington DC and offer face-to-face facilitation at the Summit. In additional, the department is also offering online learning consultancy to the RAEng that enables us to develop, produce and release online learning materials to support the programme. Based on a ‘flipped classroom’ approach, we are use a combination of the Microsoft Office 365 tool and online cloud storage to set up a password-protected online portal where students can access information and reading materials to prepare for the programme. Using Dropbox’s “File Request” allows students at the Summit without an account to submit their deliverables.

We are also working with experts in media to give the students some unique insights into how best to communicate their message. Alok Jha (ITV News Science correspondent), Dr Kevin Fong (STEaPP Honorary Lecture and BBC science programme presenter) and Oliver Morton (the Economist) have been tasked with producing an online guide on how to produce a good podcast.

The use of a range of cloud services enable the partnership of UCL STEaPP, RAEng, British broadcast professionals and US-based organisations to work effectively together to design, develop and deliver this student programme. It is hoped that the experience of this collaborative work will help STEaPP to further develop our expertise in the use of learning technologies in both formal and informal learning curricula.

Alan Seatwo

Learning Technologist and E-Learning Champion at STEaPP

James Martin Charlton, Head of the Media Department at Middlesex University and co-host of today’s Wikimedia Education Summit, framed Wikimedia as a defence against the fake news currently spread and popularised by dominant search engine algorithms. Fake news undermines knowledge as power and renders societies easily manipulable. This is one reason several programme leaders I work with – one of whom was at the event – have expressed interest in incorporating Wikimedia into their curricula. (Wikimedia is the collection of projects of which Wikipedia is the best known, but which also includes Wikivoyage, Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons).

Broadly there are two aspects to Wikimedia in education. One is the content – for example, the articles in Wikipedia, the media in Wikimedia Commons, the textbooks in Wikisource. All of this content is in the public domain, available to use freely in our projects and subject to correction and improvement by that public. The other aspect is process. Contributing to Wikimedia can qualify as higher education when students are tasked with, say, digesting complex or technical information for a non-expert Wikipedia readership, or negotiating changes to an article which has an existing community of editors, or contributing an audio-recording which they later use in a project they publish under an open licence. More recently, Wikidata has emerged as a major presence on the linked and open data scene. I want to focus on Wikidata because it seems very promising as an approach to engaging students in the structured data which is increasingly shaping our world.

Wikidata is conceived as the central data storage for the aforementioned Wikimedia projects. Unlike Wikipedia, Wikidata can be read by machines as well as humans, which means it can be queried. So if you – as we did today – wish to see at a glance the notable alumni from a given university, you can. Today we gave a little back to our hosts by contributing an ‘Educated at’ value to a number of alumni which lacked it on Wikidata. This enabled those people to be picked up by a Wikidata query and visualised. But institutions tend to merge or change their names, so I added a ‘Followed by’ attribute to the Wikidata entry for Hornsey College of Art (which merged into Middlesex Polytechnic), allowing the query to be refine to include Hornsey alumni too. I also visualised UCL’s notable alumni as a timeline (crowded – zoom out!) and a map. The timeline platform is called Histropedia and is the work of Navino Evans. It is available to all and – thinking public engagement – is reputedly a very good way to visualise research data without needing to hire somebody in.

So far so good. But is it correct? I dare say it’s at least slightly incorrect, and more than slightly incomplete. Yes, I’d have to mend it, or get it mended, at source. But that state of affairs is pretty normal, as anyone involved in learning analytics understands. And can’t Wikidata be sabotaged? Yes – and because the data is linked, any sabotage would have potentially far reaching effects – so there will need to be defences such as limiting the ability to make mass edits, or edit entries which are both disputed and ‘hot’. But the point is, if I can grasp the SPARQL query language (which is said to be pretty straightforward and, being related to SQL, a transferable skill) then – without an intermediary – I can generate information which I can check, and triangulate against other information to reach a judgement. How does this play out in practice? Here’s Oxford University Wikimedian in Residence Martin Poulter with an account of how he queried Wikidata’s biographical data about UK MPs and US Senators to find out – and, importantly, visualise – where they were educated, and what occupation they’ve had (153 cricketers!?).

So, say I want to master the SPARQL query language? Thanks to Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, there’s a SPARQL query video featuring Navino Evans on Edinburgh’s Wikimedia in Residence media channel.

Which brings me to the beginning, when Melissa Highton set out the benefits Wikimedians have brought to Edinburgh University, where she is Assistant Principal. These benefits include building digital capabilities, public engagement for researchers, and addressing the gender gap in Wikimedia representation, demonstrating to Athena Swann assessors that the institution is addressing structural barriers to women contributing in science and technology. Here’s Melissa’s talk in full. Bodleian Library Web and Digital Media Manager Liz McCarthy made a similarly strong case – they have had to stop advertising their Wikimedian in Residence’s services since so many Oxford University researchers have woken up to Wikimedia’s public engagement potential.

We also heard from Wikimedians with educational ideas, tutor Stefan Lutschinger on designing Wikimedia assignments, and the students who presented on their work in his Publishing Cultures module – and there were parallel sessions. You can follow the Wikimedia Education Summit tweets at #WMUKED17.