JISC

The project has now completed. The final report is available from the bottom of the page

Overview

The project will address the educational challenges faced by the University of Exeter’s flagship Business School as it enters a phase of considerable student expansion and international diversification. The Business School anticipates growth in student numbers in the region of 250% by 2014, with approximately 40% of those students coming from international backgrounds.

It is mission-critical for the University that the Business School continues to provide an excellent educational experience for all throughout this expansion and technology is envisaged as playing a major role in this. To this end, school staff and students, collaborating with the University’s Education Enhancement Unit, will be involved in designing and delivering a ‘step change’ so that technology is used to enhance learning across all aspects of the curriculum.

Aims and objectives

• To deliver and evaluate collaboratively planned technology- enhanced activities and experiences for all students across six first year modules.
• To develop means of curriculum delivery that support flexible learning with particular emphasis on the challenge of large numbers and internationalisation.
• To experiment with and evaluate what might form an appropriate technology-enhanced ‘mix’ for providing an integrative and skills –rich learning experience.
• To provide professional development for staff and students across a variety of roles in the Business School to ensure that they can actively and confidently contribute to the design of technology-enhanced integrative learning experiences

Project methodology

The project will be run collaboratively between the University’s flagship Business School and the Education Enhancement Unit (EEU). Dedicated project personnel in the EEU will support lecturers and teaching fellows delivering six core modules across the first year in the Business School. The module leaders will trial and make use of a number of different technologies that:

1. are routine for some, but by no means all, academics (such as use of WebCT to provide lecture notes and additional support materials, formative feedback from web-based quizzes and tests);
2. have been tested within the institution but are far from embedded (such as electronic submission of assignments both to support plagiarism detection and to enable efficient administrative processes);
3. are presently untried at Exeter (such as the use of personal response systems during large group lectures, video-streaming of lectures so that all content can be constantly available for reviewing and revision, and use of SMS; the extension of electronic submission of assignments for online marking and feedback; electronic examinations);
4. promote a sense of community (such as web 2.0 tools) for students both within modules and across the first year cohort.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

• Learners will have led on designing experiences and will have experienced a ‘step change’ in the way the curriculum is delivered.
• Variety in curriculum delivery will have been developed or adapted to support flexible learning and preferences.
• The Business School will have trialed and evaluated integrative approaches and shared these with colleagues in the UK.
• All staff contributing to the six first year modules and students on bursary placements will have attended sessions and enhanced capacity, knowledge and skills. Teaching and learning behaviours will show tangible evidence of change with regard to the use of technology.

Technology / Standards used

The Integrate project is investigating the processes surrounding and application of a range of technologies. The technologies we have identified for use so far have been chosen by merit based upon their potential to fulfil a particular need. The needs have for the most part been identified by the academics and teaching fellows working with Integrate. Technologies are selected mainly for their fitness for purpose – will they do what we want? Selecting the right technology in some ways could mean the difference between a successful pilot, and therefore future, in the Business School and an expensive failure, both in terms of staff time taken to investigate use and potentially in terms of money wasting in buying a tool or service. Part of the decision making process relies upon experiences in the e-learning team, but also on the experiences of other people external to the University. In this latter aspect we hope to avoid wild goose chases for tools or services that either simply don’t work or are in some way inferior to other similar tools and services. After researching effectiveness the Integrate project will then make a decision as to whether or not to undertake a trial and ascertain effectiveness in the Business School setting.

The technologies identified so far include the following:

SMS: Student feedback and participation will be elicited using vie mobile phone technology. Students will use their own handsets to text responses to a PAYG number. The messages can then be manipulated in Excel to provide graphical representations of results or put into a word cloud generator such as Wordle to create visual representations. Readily available technologies will be used: SMS; MS Excel; Nokia PC Suite; Bluetooth; web-based word cloud generators. Related projects: Kastanet, WALES

ARS: Student feedback and participation will be elicited using an audience response system (Turning Point). The ARS kit is the result of a successful bid to the University’s Development and Alumni Relations Office and will see 200 handsets being made available to the Business School. Many of the modules in the Integrate project have cohorts greater than 200 so investigation will concentrate on smaller modules, or smaller group sessions (tutorials, help classes) of the larger modules.

Echo360: Echo is a lecture capture and streaming system used in three large lecture theatres across the University. These theatres are frequently used by Business School modules due to their large cohorts. Captured lectures are stored centrally and hyperlinks to media are provided through WebCT courses for students to review in their own time.

Flip video: Students can use handheld video recorders to capture presentations, vodcasts and different aspects of their student lives. The videos can then be uploaded to WebCT for sharing. Recorders can also be used in student projects aimed at capturing different elements of the student experience.

Tablet PC: This will be trialled in maths-based modules as a way of capturing mathematical explanations. Screen captures can they be shared through WebCT. We will be working towards using the Tablet with Echo in order that audio and video can be captured along with the explanations.

WebCT: Work will be undertaken to make better use of the tools available through WebCT.

Second Life: Potential uses of SL will be explored in a constrained way in order to ascertain its potential for the Business School. A potential application might be accessing keynote speakers, although the benefit of SL over videoconferencing is as yet unclear.

CAA: Integrate is looking to pilot Assessment21’s ABC tool with the hope of gaining marking efficiencies – ABC allows markers to work question by question rather than script by script. Assessment21 believe this leads to better consistency in marking and also saves time.

e-PDP: The University’s bespoke e-PDP system will be used across all modules for students to record reflections and progress in all areas of their studies. Related projects: Leap2a

As cohorts change and different agendas come to the fore, the Integrate project will look to incorporate and support other technologies based upon user needs. Also, as the student projects get underway (WP6 Students Supporting Staff and Students) more technologies may need to be incorporated into the project and investigated and supported by the central team. Examples might include Ning for peer to peer social networking, Twitter, RFID for attendance monitoring, Wikis, blogs and VOIP as a method of collecting feedback. The well-supported nature of the Integrate project (supported by two dedicated members of project team and a group of bursary students) allows the potential for a great deal of flexibility in the work undertaken by the project and allows for a broader scope than would be usual for a project of this size.

Lead Institution

• University of Exeter