The July Jamboree celebrated some of the smaller, more discipline-specific education technology tools available at UCL, and gave you a chance to see them in action and ask questions of the vendors or developers.

The videos of these sessions are now listed below. Access to the videos requires a UCL login. All videos have human-corrected captions and a transcript available.

Monday 11 July: Learning design and content

• H5P: Create, share and reuse interactive HTML5 content in your browser. H5P video (UCL login required). Find out more about H5P)
• Learning Designer: A visually structured approach to learning design to think through and support your students’ learning. Learning Designer video (UCL login required). Find out more about Learning Designer
• UCL MediaPods: Create professional quality videos in minutes with our all-in-one studios. UCL MediaPods video (UCL login required). Find out more about MediaPods

Tuesday 12 July: Feedback and interaction

• Audio and video: Martin Compton and Marieke Guy from UCL share some tips for making videos on a mobile phone, and using tools for audio feedback to students. Audio and video creation video (UCL login required). Find out more about making videos on mobiles or audio feedback)
• GoReact: GoReact brings together online tools for video + feedback, deliberate practice, and more so you can empower confident skills in any discipline or profession GoReact video (UCL login required). Find out more about GoReact
• Mentimeter: Engage your audience & eliminate awkward silences. Mentimeter video (UCL login required). Find out more about Mentimeter

Wednesday 13 July: Mathematics and coding

• MATLAB and Simulink: MATLAB is a programming and numeric computing platform used by millions of engineers and scientists to analyze data, develop algorithms, and create models. MATLAB and Simulink video  (Find out more about MATLAB and Simulink
• CoCalc: CoCalc is a cloud-based collaborative software oriented towards research, teaching, and scientific publishing purposes. CoCalc video (UCL login required). Find out more about CoCalc
• Overleaf: LaTeX, evolved – The easy to use, online, collaborative LaTeX editor. Overleaf video (UCL login required) (find out more about Overleaf)

Thursday 14 July: Simulations in STEMM subjects

• Labster: Labster provides award-winning STEM curriculum-aligned virtual laboratory simulations within biology, biochemistry, genetics, biotechnology, chemistry, physics and more. Labster video (UCL login required). Find out more about Labster
• Lt: Lt is an online learning platform with ready-to-use content for life sciences, nursing, and medicine. Lt video (UCL login required). Find out more about Lt
• LearnSci: Transformative digital tools for science educators. Outstanding learning experiences for students. LearnSci video (UCL login required). Find out more about LearnSci

Friday 15 July: Reading, writing and annotating

• Talis Elevate: Build conversation within your content and give your students a voice. Talis Elevate video (UCL login required). Find out more about Talis Elevate
• Hypothesis Make your course readings more active, visible, and social by engaging your students in social annotation. Hypothesis video (UCL login required). Find out more about Hypothesis
• UCL Reflect: UCL Reflect is provided to allow students and staff to use blogging for teaching and learning purposes. UCL Reflect video (UCL login required). Find out more about UCL Reflect

Links to the UCL Resource Centres for tools mentioned at the Town Hall today.

Live Teaching

Blackboard Collaborate is UCL’s web conferencing or online classroom platform. It is integrated within Moodle as an activity, providing access to a range of different functions in a live, or synchronous, learning environment. UCL Case Study: Using Blackboard Collaborate to teach students across the world.

Zoom is coming to UCL and support information will be available then.

Teams​, now universally used at UCL for meetings and one-to-one sessions, is not yet recommended for group teaching. There is no Moodle or Portico integration and Digital Education do not have the expertise (yet) support in its use for teaching.​

Virtual Cluster Rooms will provide direct access to cluster room PCs for computer-based classes. They Mirror the physical cluster rooms in virtual groups that will be timetabled in the same way and accessed via UCL Desktop Anywhere. More information and guidance about planning for laboratory and practice-based activities is also being developed.

Live/Asynchonous

Mentimeter (polling) is an online polling, questioning and voting tool that you can use in your classes or presentations, whether they are face-to-face or online, synchronous or asynchronous. UCL has a site-wide licence. UCL Case Study: Engaging students asynchronously with Mentimeter.

Visualisers and graphics tablets can assist online teaching. ISD have a limited stock of visualisers for circulation to lecturers. You can read more about options for writing and showing objectson this digital education blog post.

Asynchronous

Moodle has many tools that can help keep your students engaged and learning in the absence of face-to-face sessions. UCL Case Study: Moodle tools to make your teaching more interactive.

• Discussion Forums are often considered the mainstay of online learning. Many staff already use the News forum to announce important information. ‘Learning forums’ can be used for asynchronous discussion (i.e. not ‘real time’) and learning activities. They enable both staff and students to post and reply to posts and are usually are set to allow students and staff to choose whether to become or remain subscribed to a forum. We recommend that Q&A forums are set up for students to ask questions about the course work or assessment processes. Make the purpose of every discussion forum clear, including how students are expected to engage with it and how often staff will reply to posts (if at all). If you want to speak to students in ‘real time’, for example for virtual Office Hours, you might want to try Moodle’s instant messaging style tool, Chat.
• Quiz is the other popular tool for online engagement. A quiz is a useful way to test or evaluate students’ knowledge and to keep them motivated by letting them see areas for improvement. Marking can be automated on some question types (such as multiple choice). Staff can see a detailed breakdown of results, as well as statistics on how easy or discriminating each question is. It can be used for both formative and summative (credit bearing) assessment, such as in class tests or examinations, but the latter is usually done in a ‘live’ classroom, so for online learning summative quizzes are more normal.
• Hot Question used to create a list of popular questions or topics from a group. Participants may ‘rate’ others’ questions. The more votes, the hotter the question and the higher up the list it will appear.
• Book displays collections of web pages in a sequential, easy-to-navigate and printable format. They are especially useful when you have a lot of web content but don’t want it to clutter the front page of your course. Pages can contain links, images, embedded YouTube videos, etc and feature a Table of Contents.
• Lessons can be used to build structured pathways through learning materials and test knowledge as students make progress. Students usually make choices on each page area, sending send them to another specific page in the manner of a decision tree.
• H5P is a simple-to-use tool now integrated into Moodle to create interactive content such as drag and drop, fill in the blanks, flashcards, image hotspots, slideshows, games and formative quizzes (the results are not stored) directly within Moodle. UCL Case Study: Creating interactive video training guides in Moodle.

Lecturecast Universal Capture Personal (screen recording) is a stand-alone application which can be used to create recordings (captures). Recordings can include slides (or whatever you choose to show on your computer screen), video of the presenter and audio. Recordings can include slides (or whatever you choose to show on your computer screen), video of the presenter and audio. Lecturecast offers more than just video playback, though. With the Lecturecast Engagement tools,  tutors can set up interactive activities, to engage and support students.

ReadingLists@UCL is an online service that gives students easy access to materials on their reading lists, allowing academic staff to create and update their own reading lists.

LinkedIn Learning provides a vast range of video tutorials supporting learning in software, creative and business skills – all free to UCL staff and currently enrolled students.

Box of Broadcasts (BoB) is Learning on Screen’s on demand TV and radio service for education. The academically focused system allows staff and students to record programmes from over 75 free-to-air channels, and search BoB’s extensive archive of over 2.2 million recordings.

Student-led and collaboration

• Reflect(WordPress blog) is a form of WordPress, the industry-standard blogging and website-building tool. Blogs may be used to help students reflect on their experiences during study, build a portfolio of their work, collaborate on projects and create public-facing materials. UCL Case Study: Medical Science students use UCL Reflect to create scientific blogs for assessment.
• MyPortfolio is a very flexible tool which can be used as a portfolio, for blogging, CV builder, social networking system, connecting UCL students and staff and creating online communities. MyPortfolio provides you with the tools to set up a personal learning environment and can also be used to support group work.
• Office365​, is of course ubiquitous at UCL, but the educational possibilities are not always appreciated. LinkedIn Learning includes a useful overview ‘Office 365 for Educators’.

As you prepare your Moodle course for next term, in addition to vital asynchronous activities, you will likely want to add a few videos of yourself or a screen recording of your lecture. By now you’re probably aware that UCL has a plethora of technologies. This is partly a necessity, as UCL teaching practices vary so no single tool will get the job done for everyone, but sometimes it’s a little unclear which to use.

To help you decide, Digital Education with help from the Digital Media team and IT for SLASH team has put together this comparison table of the three centrally supported media platforms: Lecturecast, Mediacentral and Microsoft Stream.

The table hopes to clarify some of the common questions; e.g.

• Does the platform allow students to download recordings?
• Can I upload a pre-recorded video e.g. a video recorded in PowerPoint?
• Can I restrict who views the video?
• Can I see analytics on whose watched the video?

If you need further advice on creating and sharing video, please contact digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

Good news for anyone who is looking to make their Moodle courses even more interactive: as of today, several previously unavailable activities are now ready for you to try out.

All new modules are now available under “Interactive Content” in the list of available Moodle activities. Let’s dive in and see what’s available!

Among the new activities we have added are the beta version of the Branching Scenario, the Questionnaire tool and the 360 Virtual Tour module. The latter allows you, for example, to create an interactive walk-through of your lab or department right inside your Moodle course. All you need to get started are static images or, even better, 360 photo spheres of a location. Add information cards, navigation and even audio to make the experience even more immersive.

If you are looking for icebreaker tasks, you might like to try out the Personality Quiz maker. It allows you to create a series of multiple choice questions where each answer option corresponds to one or more predefined “personality types”/profiles/categories. Head over to the H5P example page to see the Personality Quiz in action. Or find out what kind of Moodler you are in our own lighthearted personality quiz (login required).

The Word Search and the Memory game may seem like frivolous additions to the toolbox, but used creatively, the memory game, for example, can be adapted to serve as a “Flashcard race against the time” to aid revision of terminology. Here’s one I made earlier to illustrate the point:

We would love to hear how you are using these activities in your courses – what will you create? Share your ideas and links to your creations in the comments below.

For more information about all the H5P activities we have in our UCL Moodle, please refer to our set of Mini Guides.