Using technology

Again, this is the last post for today - there are four all up, so go down below to read them in order.

A few of the sessions discussed using technology to enhance student engagement. Technology seems to be used in a number of different ways: to promote activities/services, to teach students, and to monitor student engagement levels. There are definite benefits and some pitfalls to be weary of with all types of use.

Promoting services: This session was on using YouTube videos to promote services (and in some ways trying to match up student expectations with university expectations, like studying for your exams early etc). Useful things mention here were issues with orientation, that I’m sure are familiar with: poorly attended (actually, I don’t know that that is the case at Massey), out of context (telling students things before they know they need to know them), too much info, wrong tone (too bureaucratic) and at a time when students (if we are thinking students straight from school here) are too excited to pay attention.

Also worthy of mentioning was the upside of YouTube videos: “hear from a peer”, a friendly face/voice, student employment (students make them), and they capture a student perspective. They’re also reasonably cheap to produce (if you get talented students to do the work – thinking green shirts and design students here).

However, the problem of promoting the fact that you’ve made a video still remains as a big obstacle. The best approach appears to be embedding the videos into lectures. Several conference participants mentioned the value of playing videos before and after lectures (so the video is playing as the students walk in and as they leave). If we could ensure that the sound equipment was the same in all our lecture theatres I think that would be a brilliant idea!

Teaching students: There is the website I listed under “people/ideas to follow up on”, and I also got some information from the session on “Imagining the future”. The latter session gave a very impressive overview of the technologies that kids are growing up with today. And let’s face it, some of it was seriously cool. The clear links between how we can use the technology to actually teach something are less clear. My personal view is that you use technology to achieve a teaching-learning aim, rather than simply using a technology because it’s impressive and hoping that some learning happens along the way (but yes, call me old fashioned). I also wasn’t sure how these amazing new technologies will lead to “personalised learning”, because as much as that is a brilliant ideal to follow, the reality is that teaching groups of students is a very effective use of money and resources. At my table a colleague discussed his project which is about proving the effectiveness (or otherwise) of technologies on learning by mapping brain scans – this was an idea that I had never ever considered, and is really fascinating. I guess the upshot is that technologies that are clearly linked to teaching and learning objectives (while allowing room for more spontaneous experimentation of course) is what is desirable.

Monitoring levels of student engagement: What can I say, the University of New England are phenomenal. 80% of their students are distance learners, and they have the most amazing data warehouse to produce/assess some seriously impressive learning analytics. Jealous much?! Incredible stuff! They use Facebook, Twitter and Blogging to convey vital information to students. And they know they are conveying vital information, because they have been gathering the data on what is actually important to students. Seriously, I could go on forever about how great this was! But in short, they felt that some of their success was due to the fact that their student body are very online- savvy: students have to apply online (so do Massey students actually), and then all their contact with lecturers and course information is online. Sounds familiar actually, but what is missing for us is the very lovely and impressive system we can tap into and use to our advantage, like being able to set up automated yet customised emails that get sent to students, emails that then arrive back in your inbox all colour-coded depending on what stage in the process the student is up to – I was in organisational heaven listening that session. Brilliant!

They also used YoutTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogging to communicate with students. They had a number of ways of tracking students’ concerns, including cool things like the um, er, “word cloud” (and yes that had a swearword filter...) and then they could address those concerns via the different mediums. The result was that students were really feeling like they were part of the institution. They also got around some rather officious rules about how to communicate with students by being clear that they weren’t about marketing, but about providing information for enrolled students. Also a clear and important (I thought) message, was to listen to comments and criticism (from colleagues as well as students), because it will help inform your work and your earliest sceptics will often become your biggest allies.