Do you use Moodle, Turnitin, Lecturecast, Opinio, My Portfolio, the UCL Wiki? Do you use Email, text, Facebook to contact students, do you read or contribute to blogs or Twitter etc. or use other technologies to support the student learning experience?

If so, why not try UCL UCL’s professional portfolio in e-learning?

Now in its fifth year at UCL, CMALT is a chance to learn about, share and implement good practice in the wide range of technologies that support our students’ teaching and learning.

“Working together with colleagues from across UCL was helpful in terms of discovering and developing good practice”.

CMALT is a national peer-based professional accreditation scheme developed by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and an opportunity to certify your growing skills and experience in learning technology.

1. What does it involve?

Completion of a descriptive and reflective portfolio of about 3,000 words, demonstrating your knowledge in four core areas: operational issues (constraints/benefits of different technologies, technical knowledge and deployment); teaching, learning and/or assessment processes; the wider context of legislation, policies and standards and communication/working with others, plus one specialist option subject. We will run monthly workshops to discuss and work on the core areas of your portfolio, and provide you with a mentor from our team to support you as you complete your certification portfolio.

2. How long does it take?

It takes about six months from start to submission and it takes around 25-35 hours in all to complete including around 15 hours contact time. The 2016 cohort will start in February 2016.

3. How much does it cost?

It costs £120 to register as a CMALT candidate under the UCL scheme (normally £150). In many cases the candidate’s department covers this fee.

This is an excellent opportunity to support your professional development with lots of support available.

There will be a lunch time meeting to provide further information for prospective participants next week on Wednesday 3rd February 2016 from 1pm-2pm in Chandler House, room 118. All staff are welcome. If you are interested in CMALT but unable to attend this meeting please contact a.gilry@ucl.ac.uk

We built it, but would they come?

Designing an online course in e-learning for UCL staff has its uncertainties, mostly to do with the big question, is anyone actually going to turn up? The pressures on staff at a research intensive University are multiple and intense. Everyone is juggling so many competing priorities, that taking the time to learn about teaching with technology may be an aspiration never fated to turn into a reality.

We looked to the MOOC phenomenon for inspiration. If there is one thing MOOCs do well it’s publicity. They make the prospect of doing a course so easy and so enticing, that you can’t help but sign up. So we made our promo video and sat back and waited. We said to ourselves, if we get 30 people, that will be good, but of course, really we wanted more.

It was with some relief, therefore, when the self-enrolments started to trickle through. We passed the 100 mark fairly early, but we weren’t quite at 200 a day or so before the course was due to start. Never fear, however, because the enrolments didn’t stop. Currently UCL Arena Digital has 214 participants, and people continue to sign up.

Who were they and what were they doing?

Painstaking analysis reveals that there were 96 different UCL departments represented. The top 5 departments (by numbers of participants) appeared to be:

1. Dept of Managment Science & Innovation 11
2. IOE – Culture, Communication & Media 9
3. Dept of Security and Crime Science 8
4. Centre for Prep Studies – Astana 8
5. Centre for Languages & International Education 7

In addition to these figures, however, there were 15 people who came from different departments but who all had an affiliation with the UCL Institute of Child Health, and 23 people from the UCL Institute of Education. Honourable mentions too, to the Research Department of General Surgery, Institute of Ophthalmology, SELCS and IOE – Lifelong & Comparative Education, all with 5 representatives each. We had one person from UCL Australia.

During the Unit, we invited participants to watch some video tutorials and explore resources in a Lesson activity and a Book (both ways of presenting content in Moodle). Then we asked people to share some media they use in their teaching on a Padlet (which is a great, easy tool that resembles putting post-it notes on a virtual pin board). There was a glossary for participants to contribute to, and a discussion to take part in, and a final webinar to share experiences on the Thursday of the second week.

Click that link!

By Wednesday 18^th March, the Using Multimedia: A Moodle Lesson activity had 1246 views (including 242 tutor views). The Going Further with Multimedia: A Moodle Book resource had 1465 (including 71 tutor views). The Wall of Media (the Padlet) had been viewed 64 times, The Language of the Media Glossary had been viewed 327 times, and the discussion forum “When can the use of media enhance teaching and learning” had 544 views.

We were overjoyed at the enthusiasm of course participants. We have 16 entries in the Glossary now, spanning 5 pages, 34 posts on the Padlet Wall of Media, including some brilliant tutor-crafted screencasts and lots of great examples from participants’ teaching. The shared Practice space has been filling up too. That’s a blank Moodle course for participants to try out what they’ve learnt if they don’t have somewhere else to practice their skills. What is great about it, is that we can all see that learning has taken place, and it is an encouragement to everybody.

Now take a break …

Something else we learnt from MOOCs is that participation drops off sharply after the first week, and continues on a downward slope. It seems that everyone’s intention is good, and the enthusiasm can be sustained for so long, but, inevitably, all the other pressures of life get in the way once more. So, we thought, if we split the course into two week Units, with breaks in between, maybe that will keep people with us. And if you haven’t already enrolled, it means that you still can – and you have time to catch up before Unit 2 begins.

Unit 2 will start on April 13^th 2015 and will focus on Communication

So get ready for wikis, discussion forums, Twitter and more. If you ever thought of ditching the PowerPoint and doing something more interesting instead, then Unit 2 is for you.

Enrol here and see you all again very soon.

Over 200 UCL colleagues have already joined UCL Arena Digital, our free online course to help improve Moodle skills and enhance your online/blended learning.

We are in Week 2 but you are still welcome to join.

The course is fully online and will take only 2-3 hours of your week. The course is made up of three Units. Each unit will last 2 weeks and there will be breaks in between Units. Each fortnight will end with a live online webinar where you can share your experiences with your colleagues on the course.

The course is designed so you can take all three Units, or simply pop in for the Units that especially interest you.

• Unit 1: multimedia – the current one – find out how to create and embed media and interactive tools in Moodle to enliven the online environment for your students.
• Unit 2: communication – discover ways of using tools inside and outside of Moodle you can use to communicate with students and support their collaboration with each other.
• Unit 3: assessment and feedback – explore ways of using the online environment to create new kinds of assessment and give feedback to students.

Unit 1 started last week and will continue to Thursday 12 March, when we will conclude with a webinar.

Even if you missed last week there is still time to get involved and all the materials will also be available afterwards.

You can enrol at https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=29477

Log on using your UCL username and password

Unit 2 will launch in early April 2015 – look out for further announcements.

Switch on video captions to read instructions

They say that technology moves so fast it is hard to keep up. I discovered the iPad app Adobe Voice at the beginning of the year, after a friend showed me a totally appealing Christmas video her 8 year old nephew had made in minutes.  I immediately thought that the ease with which Adobe Voice enables you to add a voice-over to pictures and text would make it an ideal stress-free way to make teaching videos – an introduction to a course, an announcement at the beginning of the week, a prompt for the class debate, an assignment guide …endless possibilities in a blink of an eye.

Add screenshots saved to your camera roll

Adobe Voice allows you to add images from your camera roll. Take a few screen shots of your course on your laptop, or snap something interesting in the street, and save your pictures somewhere you can access on your iPad. That could be a dropbox, a shared drive, or on cloud based photo storage like iCloud or Amazon Cloud Drive. You could even save your PowerPoint slides as images, but that would probably work best if they didn’t contain much text. You can combine words with your own images in Adobe Voice, add icons or access a stock of Creative Commons images from Flickr or Pixabay.com within the app.

Just talk (but not for too long)

Recording audio over each slide is as simple as pressing the microphone icon beneath the image and talking. The best thing about the app is that it encourages you not to say too much. Because it breaks your audio into chunks, it comes out more naturally, with fewer stumbles and less need to re-record. If you do re-record, however, that’s easy too. You can add music or not, and select from various themes that put different animation effects into your video, so the end product looks interesting and professional.

YouTube Capture app for sharing

In January, it seemed to me that the only drawback was the need to upload the video to Adobe Creative Cloud before you could embed it in your course for your students to see. The video didn’t seem to play all on devices. Yet, thanks to the speed of those technological developments, you can now save your video to your camera roll and use the marvellous YouTube Capture app to upload your video to YouTube in a blink of an eye. You can even do a few more edits like adding subtitles and annotations. How easy is that? Very. So I made this video to show you how I made this video.

Want more? UCL Arena Digital starts Monday 2nd March..

If you want to find out more about apps like these and ways of using them in your teaching, enrol on our free online course UCL Arena Digital. The first unit on Multimedia starts on Monday 2nd March 2015 and you can enrol here with your UCL username and password:

https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=29477

Spread the word!

Improve your Moodle skills and enhance your online/blended teaching by taking part in UCL Arena Digital.

UCL Arena Digital is a free online course for all staff at UCL.

The course is fully online and will take only 2-3 hours of your week. The course is made up of three Units. Each unit will last 2 weeks and there will be breaks in between Units. Each fortnight will end with a live online webinar where you can share your experiences with your colleagues on the course.

The course is designed so you can take all three Units, or simply pop in for the Units that especially interest you.

• Unit 1: multimedia – find out how to create and embed media and interactive tools in Moodle to enliven the online environment for your students.
• Unit 2: communication – discover ways of using tools inside and outside of Moodle you can use to communicate with students and support their collaboration with each other.
• Unit 3: assessment and feedback – explore ways of using the online environment to create new kinds of assessment and give feedback to students.

Unit 1 starts Monday 2nd March 2015 and lasts for 2 weeks.

Enrol now at https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=29477

Log on using your UCL username and password

Unit 2 will launch in early April 2015 – look out for further announcements.

Do you use Moodle, Turnitin, Lecturecast, Opinio, My Portfolio, the UCL Wiki? Do you use Email, text, Facebook to contact students, do you read or contribute to blogs or Twitter etc. or use other technologies to support the student learning experience?

If so, why not try UCL UCL’s professional portfolio in e-learning? 

Now in its fourth year at UCL, CMALT is a chance to learn about, share and implement good practice in the wide range of technologies that support our students’ teaching and learning.

“Working together with colleagues from across UCL was helpful in terms of discovering and developing good practice”.

CMALT is a national peer-based professional accreditation scheme developed by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and an opportunity to certify your growing skills and experience in learning technology.

Why not join us and work towards a CMALT certificate?

Please see our  flyer for more information.

There will be a lunch time meeting with Liz Wyatt from ALT to provide further information for prospective participants on Wednesday 21st January 2015 from 12pm-1pm in Chandler House, room 118.

All staff are welcome, although we recommend that UCL CMALT candidates have been working for one academic year, or have relevant previous experience. Please email a.gilry@ucl.ac.uk

If you are interested in CMALT but unable to attend this meeting please contact a.gilry@ucl.ac.uk