Manchester Metropolitan University

The HEA digest contains details of a useful course in London next week entitled Copyright Clearance for Print, Broadcast and Multimedia Production, for anyone who needs to know how to get copyright clearance on films and videos. The course is run by Richard McCracken and Bernadette Atwell from the Rights Department at the OU. More information is available on the BUVFC website/. If you are interested in having this kind of course run at MMU, please let us know in the Learning and Teaching Unit.

News from JISC:

JISC has commissioned a series of five exemplars which demonstrate how FE practitioners can use content found in online resources to support their teaching. The FE Exemplars cover a wide range of scenarios including how a practitioner might use film to support GCSE History students studying the Vietnam War; how text from InfoTrac can be used to create tasks for home based study for the BTEC National Beauty Therapy Science; how practitioners can use an image from the Education Image Gallery as the focus for a discussion activity about the Golden Jubilee for Level 1 Literacy students.

There are five Exemplars covering the following subjects:

History
Leisure
Hairdressing
Business
Skills for Life

All the exemplars are available online . Please note that you will need to be using a computer on campus (i.e. via an ac.uk domain) in order to access them online.

OK, the topics may not be directly relevant to you, but you might get some ideas from the presentations. I haven’t been able to look at them, as an off-campus worker, but feel free to leave your feedback in the comments box and let me know what they’re like!

Have a look at this useful site on some ground rules for using discussion boards. It may help your students avoid misunderstandings and prevent a few ‘flame wars’.

http://www.learnthenet.com/english/html/09netiqt.htm

Normally I avoid technical type conferences as I don’t understand too much of what’s going on. However I would make an exception for the WebCT annual European conference which usually has lots of people who are interested in learning and teaching, although obviously within the context of using WebCT (yes I know that’s an oxymoron for some people, but not for me). Anyway, next year’s conference is in Edinburgh from 27th February to 1st March 2006. If you think you might like to submit something, but aren’t quite sure, any of us on the WebCT team would be happy to talk to you about it (web-ct-tech@mmu.ac.uk).

The HEA has published A Standards Framework for Teaching and Supporting Student Learning in Higher Education for consultation. If you are at all interested in the way in which teaching is supported and recognised in HE, it’s worth having a look and responding to the document, or letting us know what you think so that we can incorporate your views in anything the LTU puts together in response. The need for flexibility and integration with normal professional activity seems to have been recognised in this round of consultation – it all looks like a big step forward to a workable system.

The Education subject centre of the HEA is co-organising a one day conference on Widening Participation to University Study Through Flexible Delivery is being held on Friday 21 October in London.

This one day conference, exploring the range of flexible delivery practices in Continuing Education/ Lifelong Learning, will provide the opporunity for practitioners to present case studies highlighting the use of flexible delivery as a methof of widening participation to university study.

Whether or not you want to assess your discussion board, the Australian Flexible Learning Framework provides a useful document on online discussions.

I wouldn’t recommend filling in one for every student (you’ve all got far too much paperwork already). However, it sets out criteria which make for poor, average or excellent postings under headings such as expression, language, problem solving etc. The criteria could be modified to suit your own purposes and may even make good guidelines for students to improve the standards of their postings.

The document can be downloaded from: http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/designing/assessing/e_deliver/e020.htm

Look for Assessing Online discussions – rubric towards the bottom of the page and click on the More details.. link at the bottom of the page to download from the Word document link..

I went to look at the Academic Phrasebank hoping that it would actually allow me to write a whole paper (remember the random Computer Science research papers?) but it is in fact a serious site from Manchester University with lots of useful phrases to use in academic writing. At first sight you might worry that it will encourage automaton-type writing, but on second thoughts you will realise that it could be worth it not to have to read some of the worse phrases that may have crossed your sight lines…..(eg ‘lots of people think that…’)It also structures the site into phrases for use in different parts of an academic document. Maybe that will remind some people that (for instance) the method and the results shouldn’t be mixed together (I live in hope). Anyhow, something to recommend to your students?

Thanks to Anita Gill for pointing this one out to me.

Campus Technology has a good overview article on the use of ePortfolios at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and the University of Iowa. Some of it has a PR feel, but the summaries of how the portfolios are being used, and the little insights into institutional planning, are worth a read. (via Stephen Downes)

It’s been discussed for a long time, but it looks as though applications to University could start to be made after the results of A levels are known. According to this article in the Guardian, the Government has now launched a consultation on this and hopes to bring in a new system by 2008. “Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell said the move to applying after A-Levels would be fairer to students from poorer backgrounds, who are most likely to have their grades underestimated by teachers. Pupils from wealthier homes were more likely to have their A-Level grades over-predicted, he said.”

Would any of you be sorry to see the end of Clearing?