The following is a guest post by Lucy Porte who is studying for an MSc in Health Informatics at UCL. In January, Lucy travelled all the way from Manchester to join us at #LearnHack in London. Here is her report:

 

Up Up and Away! 

I had the best weekend recently at #LearnHack 7.0, sponsored by the UCL Centre for Engineering Education and hosted by the School of Management. A distance-learning student, I could not resist the temptation to do a research based hackathon from the centre of Canary Wharf and so headed down to London for the weekend. When we got to the 50th floor of One Canada Square, I knew my decision had payed off. 

 The themes this year were Generative AI and assessment and feedback, to tie into #LearnHack’s overall focus on innovation in a research and education setting. There were so many different parts of the event, from board game sessions to brainstorming workshops, pizza breaks to Brewdog pints, an evening seeing the winter lights display and even a competition to see who could make the best AI-generated artwork. This was all alongside the main activity, the creation of our #LearnHack artefacts, which we would get to present at the end of the three days. 

Having only attended one hackathon before and being fairly out of my depth, I was quite apprehensive about this element. Luckily there was a range of amazing project topics to choose from, including game design, UX design, qualitative research pipelines, a tool to perform automated marking and a tool to summarise biomedical research papers. I really struggled with choosing one of these, and spent a lot of the first two days discussing projects with people and gathering ideas for implementation. In the end I chose the last project because it tied into my studies in Health Informatics. 

Amy, Jenny and myself soon got to work creating a prototype for our idea. Thanks to Amy’s extensive background work, we were quickly able to focus on our objectives and train a ChatGPT to extract method steps from biomedical papers according to a framework we had found online. Because of ChatGPT’s learning capacity we could iteratively improve the tool to create better results and even evaluate its own performance. We were all very surprised to be granted first prize, which included $1000 of AWS tokens and UCL Changemakers funding to continue the project! 

 

We are going to be presenting a poster about our idea at the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium in April, and can’t wait to see what comes out of the Changemakers funding, but will be sure to feed back! I honestly didn’t realise I could get so much out of one weekend with the Digital Education team, and would encourage everyone to subscribe to the #LearnHack mailing list, so you can be first in line for next year! 

Lucy Porte 

Guest post by Teodora Lazar

---

On the 2nd of June, UCL’s Digital Education ran #LearnHack 4.5, a day of problem solving, tackling challenges around technology and learning. Students and staff from different departments in UCL came together in BaseKX to solve a challenge, share their ideas and make new connections. What started as being an event that aimed to explore how technology is being used for teaching and learning, became a common ground where students and staff can work together towards achieving a common goal.  

#LearnHack 4.5 tackled 3 challenges, pitched and voted before the event. Two of them where technical challenges, and the other one was conceptual. The different formats of the challenges were chosen democratically in order to ensure that students from all backgrounds can contribute to the final outcome. Mixed teams, formed on the spot, worked towards bringing forward the best solution for the challenge, competing against each other at the same time

Kicking off with a presentation of all the challenges, the participants got the chance to understand them, ask questions, and form their teams. The challenges were:

UCL Intranet for Students by Saskia Cebrian Guerrero & Fabian Urban

“As a new student at UCL, it was very difficult for me at the beginning to find the library services, where to pay my bills, maps, my schedule, events from the UCL Union and Moodle, since they are all in different-not linked platforms. I think its necessary that students know from the very beginning all the important links and information from the university in an integrated platform. And that is my idea, to create an Intranet designed by and for students.”

Predicting when assets will fail by Peter Jones & Rebecca Allen

“To use data from UCL’s Estates team to build a predictive model that will assess which assets are likely fail, enabling predictive/preventative maintenance.”

Hacking #LearnHack by “the #LearnHack organising gang”

“The aim of #LearnHack is to bring the whole of the UCL community together to solve some of its problems from the bottom up or the inside out (however you prefer to look at it). Every event is an opportunity to make a real difference to how we do things in the areas of teaching, learning and campus life. While both ticket sales for the  event and feedback by past attendees have been consistently great, attendance hasn’t always been so fantastic. Why is this and what can we do to build a more self-sustaining community moving forwards?”

 

The rest of the day was a good opportunity to have a lot of fun while debating, prototyping and working as a team. The participatory format and the friendly environment enabled collaboration and lots of discussion about ways to tackle the challenges. Even if the day was very labour intensive and tiring, the food, snacks, drinks and sweets provided kept everyone going. Also, the wonderful culture of community and collaboration remains a constant characteristic for each and every #LearnHack.

Being an event that explores the topics of learning and technology, two optional workshops were delivered throughout the day in order to nourish the learning and knowledge sharing atmosphere. The first workshop, ‘Primer on Visual Abstracts’, explored how to increase the impact of one’s publication, through image conceptualisation. Meanwhile the other one, ‘Putting it all together: R and R Markdown’, investigated how one can combine formatted text and analysis code to build up-to-date reports. These workshops were a good way to learn some new skills, but also to take a  well-deserved break from all the hard work to solve the challenges.

The final presentations were the moment when each team introduced their solutions, ideas and prototypes and told everyone about their findings. Through presentations of just a few minutes, the teams managed to prove that they came up with tangible, creative and useful solutions to every challenge. Even more, they all handled the questions coming from the public and the jury like pros.

The solutions to the challenges were:

 

Make #LearnHack Great Again by Team ‘Something Cool’

This team responded to the challenge Hacking #LearnHack by creating a strategy plan to improve the reach, recognition and impact of future #LearnHacks. They also responded to this conceptual challenge through a technical measure, by creating a prototype for a brand new website.

Maintenance System by Team Regatta

The app that Team Regatta came with responded to the ‘Predicting when Assets will Fail’ challenge. They decided to tackle the issue by creating an app that could be used by the UCL staff to report maintenance issues. They designed a centralised system through which data could be stored in a easy to use, and easy to analyse manner.

Predictive Analytics by Team Broken Assets

This team decided to build a model to evaluate the probability of assets failure, so the problems could be fixed before even happening. They analysed the data by taking into account the historical maintenance and the environmental factors. The approach that this team took was very data heavy, since they managed to map out most data sources throughout the day.

Intranet for Students by Team Lime Pair

Responding to the challenge of building an intranet for students, team Lime Pair built their prototype that would incorporate on the same website page, all online resources that are vital to all UCL students: Portico, Moodle, Library Services and others.

 

#LearnHack proved once again that it not an event for techies only. Don’t be fooled by the name. This one day hackathon brings together researchers, creators, artists, visionaries, thinkers, designers, inventors, dreamers and many others.

You don’t identify with any of these? No problem, we are always open to new suggestions.

The Department of Science Technology Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) kicks off new academic year with ABC (Arena, Blended, Connected) Workshop, one of the panned activities to enhance the use of learning technology across our teaching programmes.

In the department, our teaching philosophy is that the use of technology in the learning experience must be driven by pedagogical considerations, and not the demands and availability of the various technologies themselves. To enhance the use of learning technologies, we must first reflect upon curriculum design.

With the support from the Digital Education Team, teaching staff from the MPA programme attended the ABC (Arena Blended Connected) curriculum design workshop. We used paper card-based approach in a style of storyboarding to assist participants to reflect on structure, modes of delivery, learning outcomes and assessment methods etc.

Our colleagues loved the simplicity of the approach and the effectiveness of the workshop model. Although learning technologies were not explicitly ‘called out’, it was firmly embedded in all six common types of learning activities during the exercise: acquisition inquiry, practice, production, discussion and collaboration.

Following on the workshop, Dr Ann Thorpe (the department’s E-learning Champion) and I set up a series of meetings with individual module leaders to further explore the use of learning technologies in their teaching programm.

We have been excited to see that the consideration of how technologies can enhance learning has already embedded in their design processes, for example producing videos as part of “Flipped Classroom”, streaming guest speakers to present and engage with students in classroom, and use of audio assessment feedback are some of the ideas currently developing following the workshop.

While providing continuing support for the above mentioned activities, we’re also scheduling some bespoke workshops throughout the academic year. Since the department leads the organisation of How to Change the World (HtCtW) (part of UCL Global Citizenship Programme for undergraduate engineering students), we are interested to explore new ways in presenting engineering ideas during HtCtW. Augmented Reality (AR) has been identified as one of the emerging learning technologies over the past few years and the popularity of Pokemon Go have helped influence us to choose AR as our first lunchtime workshop topic. Watch this space for an update report soon.

Alan Seatwo

Learning Technologist, STEaPP

UCL School of Pharmacy is actively involved in the development of a number of innovative approaches to develop teaching and learning and to further embed technology-enhanced learning within the MPharm and MSc programmes. A recent example of such an initiative is our highly-successful wiki-based integrated therapeutics project, which continues to help students to integrate their knowledge across traditional discipline boundaries. The launch of a newly-designed and updated MPharm programme in 2013-14 and access to new technologies has encouraged further innovation, three examples of which will be described.

iPad-supported Workshops – Small group-based practical and PBL exercises in which students have access to iPads have become one of the primary modes of workshop-based teaching in the new MPharm programme. Students use web-based resources and information retrieval techniques to solve problems and discuss their approaches in their groups, fostering peer-supported learning. Sessions are supported by faculty and TAs as facilitators. iPads are also pre-loaded with suitable apps appropriate to the session and students can download workshop resources from Moodle then record and submit their results electronically during the session.

Research Project Assessment – Starting in 2013-14, the mode of research project assessment was fully revised to incorporate: (a) a project portfolio, in which students record their day-to-day activity with an emphasis on data management, reflection and critical review (of results and key literature); (b) a succinct research paper formatted in the style of a journal specific to the field of research; and (c) presentation of a poster at a mini-conference held at the School, at which staff and students ask questions to presenters based upon their projects. There was a tangible air of excitement and excellent engagement at the poster conference, demonstrating the success of this approach.

Green Light Pharmacy Clinical Experience – The provision of clinical pharmacy experience from the start of the First Year is a key priority for the MPharm programme. Students regularly visit our partners at Green Light Pharmacy where they can observe real-time patient-pharmacist interaction through a live video feed to a purpose-built teaching facility on-site and have the opportunity to interact with real patients under the supervision of a pharmacist. The clinical experience offered by these visits has received extremely positive feedback from students in annual module review questionnaires.

Stephen Hilton, Mine Orlu Gul, Adam Phillips, Oksana Pyzik, Arnaud Ruiz, Michelle Wake, David West, Andrew Wilderspin and John Malkinson

Teaching innovation and technology enhanced learning in UCL School of Pharmacy poster

Communications Manager (Education) Luke Davis is the editor of the Teaching and Learning Portal – a one-stop shop for news, case studies and resources on the subject of teaching at UCL.

We asked him about his work on the site and how UCL staff can get involved.

 

What can people expect to find at the Teaching and Learning Portal?

The aim is to offer everything that a member of UCL staff could need on the subject of teaching. That includes plenty of case studies about new approaches being used inside the university as well as up-to-date news and event info. There is also information on topics such as professional development, learning technologies and education strategy.

 

What does your role involve?

Day-to-day, I find out about the latest things UCL staff are doing in terms of teaching and then produce new case studies, features and news stories.

 

How long have you been at UCL?

Just three months. It’s a big change from working in a small communications agency, but I’m really enjoying it. There are so many fascinating people doing incredible things, and, of course, education is right at the top of the agenda.

 

What plans do you have for the Portal?

I’m currently working with colleagues in Web and Mobile Services to redevelop it. It’s a big job that will involve lots of user research before scouring all the existing content and redesigning the site. The idea is that we end up with a modern, attractive site that’s easy to navigate and full of up-to-date, useful, fascinating content. We’ve set ourselves the daunting target of having it ready in October.

 

How can UCL people get involved?

If you do have a story, or even if you’d just like to suggest a topic for me to explore further, please get in touch. I’m always on the look-out for new leads and ideas. And if you want to keep up-to-date with what’s on the site, please sign up to the monthly digest newsletter.

 

Contact Luke at l.davis@ucl.ac.uk

Visit the Portal at www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning

I’m Chris Holland, the new Copyright Support Officer at UCL. New because I have only been in post for a couple of weeks, but also new in the sense that this is a new post in the UCL Library Teaching & Learning Support Section (TLSS).

I will be very happy to help with any questions about the copyright aspects of reusing  other people’s work or the rights of UCL authors in their own original work.  My expectation is that the area of E-Learning will give rise to some challenging copyright issues and I am looking forward to providing assistance.

I am based on the 4^th floor of the Science Library and report to Hazel Ingrey.  The main focus of my role is firstly to deliver guidance and support on copyright issues to UCL researchers, teachers and support services. Secondly I will develop and deliver a communication plan to promote awareness of copyright issues to all relevant communities within UCL. This will also involve delivering targeted training on aspects of copyright.

Should you have any queries about copyright (anything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask!) or if you just want to introduce yourself, please do contact me. The easiest way of doing so is to email copyright@ucl.ac.uk. For general information on copyright please visit: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/copyright/