Monday

• Prepare my slides for IT Futures talk.
• Catch up with Fraser – lecture recording; barriers to online learning.
• Online learning steering group meeting.

Tuesday

• Noteable project meeting – first one with James in post.
• Exec meeting
• eScript Migration Board – signed off prototype and plans
• Meet with Simon from York
• Meet with Jon from IAD – how to integrate lecture recording with their support resources. Agreed on focus on study skills development and large class teaching. Following up with Cathy Bovill and Donna.

Wednesday

• IT Futures conference today. Gave a talk on our lecture recording project. Covered the amazing work that Euan Murray has done on recording chalkboards. In reality he’s produced a solution for recording writing surfaces, and it doesn’t require super-fancy tech. It’s based on good graphic/ui design for the room control touch panels, some thought about feedback for the lecturer (to check what’s being recorded at any point) and clever programming of the room control systems. Also emphasised that this project was very much about learning from other institutions, but still has a strong evaluation component built in. Since most of the talk was backwards looking, I also asked for ideas for creative uses of lecture recording technology. Suggestions included:
  • Using live streaming to join our disparate campus together
  • Using live streaming to do joint activities with on-campus and online students
  • Doing more to work with recordings once made – critical analysis via annotation by students for example
• 3 hour hands-on workshop learning how to use OnTask. Comments from academic colleagues in the room were about the extent to which data integration needs to be automated and how they thought it was good, but it’s “yet another system”. Reminded me again that the fundamental premise of the NGDLE is built upon a model of digital skills and academic workload model that is totally removed from reality. Although the workshop facilitators encouraged interaction during the practical doing bits of the session it was also deathly quiet – this stuff takes more concentration and is a bit harder perhaps than anticipated?

Thursday

• Another good blog post from Tony Hirst on Jupyter and Binderhub turns into an email discussion about our Notebooks project and including something explicit around sharing notebooks as OER in the pilot project criteria.
• Meeting about the JISC Digital Experience Tracker survey – reviewed questions and finalised our institutional questions.
• Meeting about the QAA Enhancement Themes and our institutional plan. Need to submit an abstract to the Enhancement Themes conference by 12 January 2018 on our lecture recording project.

Friday

• Meet with online learning services provider.
• Another great presentation from Abelardo on feedback in large flipped classrooms with OnTask. Great points in general about the kinds of feedback students need (coaching mentality, not judge) and what can be done to support students in a flipped classroom scenario. Need to watch for the video recording going up. Also caught up with Hamish.
• Popped over to ECA at 16:30 to see Lindy’s embroidery project exhibition before it closes.