JISC

Blind Cricket
Virtual practice and training sports environment for the blind or visually impaired using 3D virtual sound and Wii technology.

iChem3D
Investigating the use of Chemtube3D, and developing range of learning designs for the application.

ExPOUND
Explaining Proofs: Offering Understanding through Notated Demonstrations

COMSLIVE
COMmunication Skills Learning in Immersive Virtual Environments. This project will develop and evaluate scalable models of teaching and learning that exploit the unique functionalities within the Project Wonderland Virtual World (VW) platform to enhance written and verbal communication skills amongst health care learners.  

ScaLe (Scaffolding Learning) With Twitter
Exploring the usefulness of ‘microblogging’ (Twitter) as a means to scaffolding learning and engaging students in critical thinking. Applied with a high-fidelity human patient simulator, expert clinicians and teachers will construct a series of ‘tweets’ to illustrate a patient’s deteriorating, or improving, condition. Using Twitter applications, such as Twitter PollDaddy, learners will direct the course of a clinical scenario at appropriate assessment points and use Twitter’s review applications to highlight their clinical reasoning.

Optimising Audio Feedback
Investigating three forms of audio feedback currently being used by lecturers around the UK to determine the optimal method for a variety of learners: audio-only, asynchronous audio-visual, and synchronous audio-visual. Quality and quantity of feedback will help determine which method will provide effective feedback for students without overburdening assessors.

Supporting Education in Virtual Worlds
This project intends to analyse and catalogue emerging pedagogical opportunities offered by integrating virtual worlds and virtual learning environments.
It will show how the relative strengths of each platform i.e. administrative capabilities of virtual learning environments and the presentation layer of virtual worlds can be exploited and subsequently enhanced through integration.
It will develop, evaluate and disseminate effective models of best practice, where little guidance currently exists, based on experiences in practical usage of this integrated approach for teaching applications from multiple institutions.  

Unlocking the hidden curriculum
The aims of the project are to:

1. introduce students, staff and the wider community to the concept of a university campus as a “living laboratory” using interactive technology
2. use technology as a medium to promote and engage with Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and in particular bio-diversity
3. display scientific information in a creative, and accessible way using augmented reality technology and mobile devices to allow engaging interaction between physical and virtual worlds

Peer Evaluation in Education Review (PEER)
Higher education teachers acquire complex assessment skills by making hundreds of evaluative judgements about students’ assignments each year and by constructing personalized feedback on those assignments. If we want students to develop critical thinking and autonomy in assignment production then they should be provided with high-level evaluative experiences similar to those of teachers. This project will identify educational designs and evaluate software tools that support student peer-review processes, and will pilot-test these in different classroom scenarios.

Digitally Enhanced Patchwork Text Assessment
This project will develop the use and effectiveness of digitally supported patchwork text assessments in a range of traditional academic subjects within different HEIs.
Informed by evidence from previous work in professional courses, partners will each design, implement, assess and evaluate a final year digital patchwork assignment that enables students to demonstrate appropriate subject-specific capabilities and graduate competences in an identified academic programme.
Threshold technological functionalities required for successful implementation of patchwork text assessment will be identified and results disseminated.

eMargin – an online collaborative textual annotation resource
This project will develop a web-based system to allow students and their teachers to annotate electronic texts, share these annotations with one another, and take part in threaded discussions. Annotation and discussion will take place in preparation for, during, or as ‘homework’ after face-to-face class sessions; for distance-learning courses, the system will act as a virtual learning environment. Student and teacher feedback from a pilot study has demonstrated demand and suggested which additional features will be of most use.  

DIVERSE (Development and Integration of Varying Educational Resources and Student Engagement)
This project will undertake a cross-departmental study of the use of ‘resource clouds’ for subject research, peer-review and validation of materials. It will build on DIVERSE, a tool for crowd-sourcing relevant subject resources, to determine student understanding of lecture and assignment topics. Through an analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, it will examine why students favour particular resources, determine how reading lists can be more effectively created and provide case studies of how students can contribute to lecture design.

SHED – Sharing Higher Education Data
Professionalism is a key learning outcome for students’ employability.  Our ‘student/employer matching service’ would embed professionalism in learning pathways through enabling students to relate their learning to employer demand and expectation.  Students will give employers secure and controlled access to data by, and about them, using innovative technology. Employers will contribute to students’ progress, influencing choices of pathway and specialism, and students, employers and institutions will benefit from best match for work-based learning activities, more employer engagement and sector intelligence.

WIDGaT: A W3C Widget Design and Authoring Toolkit
The WiDGAT toolkit (Design Decision Maker, Authoring Tool and repository) will support the education sector in the self-design and development of open source, ARIA Compliant W3C standard widgets. It will enable the creation of widgets that contribute towards the realisation of Adaptable Personal Learning Environments and address particularly (but not exclusively) the needs and preferences of disabled students. We will utilise existing JISC tools and projects where possible to extend our existing Community of Practice (see JISC WIDE project).

Spot the Difference!
Over recent years there has been considerable interest, investment and engagement in the use of technology to identify sources of text based plagiarism.  Despite considerable concerns in the arts no similar work has been undertaken in the area of non-text based plagiarism.  This project seeks address this by piloting the use of visual search tools developed by the University of Surrey and test their application to support learning and teaching in the arts through the identification of visual plagiarism.