UCL speaker presenting with a microphone. Credit: Mary Hinkley for UCL.

29 October 2024

By Leda Kamenopoulou

Synchronous accessibility can be challenging

In a previous IOE blog, I wrote about accessibility as a right and not an option, and I summarised key actions for creating accessible digital content, such as Word and PowerPoint documents. These resources, however, are almost always created asynchronously. In this post, I consider how to make sure live teaching delivery is accessible, focusing in this instance on the needs of students with hearing impairment. I list best practices that I recommend as an expert on inclusive education and sensory accessibility, and as a programme leader for UCL’s Special and Inclusive Education MA, experienced in putting reasonable adjustments in place for our students. (more…)

Credit: gpointstudio via Adobe Stock

3 October 2024

By Andrea Gauthier, Mina Vasalou, Yang Yang and Team FoodWiser: Sanya Bajaj, Enying Chen, Xinyue Dong, Thi Huyen Mi Nguyen

As the new academic year begins, we reflect on our ‘Digital Design Thinking and Making’ (DDTM) module, which is part of IOE’s Education and Technology MA. The aim of DDTM is to support the critical understanding and application of design to educational technologies, with a focus on environmental sustainability. Taking a research-based design approach rooted in creative design practice, during Spring 2024 the student team ‘FoodWiser’ worked with UCL’s caterer, Gather and Gather, to develop a new digital tool for tackling food waste in the UCL halls of residence cafeteria. Food waste isn’t just an annoying problem of dealing with leftovers: each discarded plate of food means wasted resources and unnecessarily inflated greenhouse gases. (more…)

Credit: pressmaster via Adobe Stock.

17 September 2024

By Wayne Holmes

This commentary is adapted from Wayne’s contribution to the ESRC Education Research Programme event, More or less technology in the classroom – the value and purposes of technology use in schools. Watch the event recording on UCL Mediacentral.

Technologies have long been designed for use in education. However, the ‘potential’ of this EdTech, especially AI-enabled EdTech, has been frequently overstated and its limitations underexplored. In any case, while EdTech offers ‘solutions’ to a variety of educational problems, not only do they rarely actually ‘solve’ the problems that they target, it isn’t even clear whether they are the ‘right’ problems in the first place. (more…)