CTIL NEWSLETTER

MOOC: Massive Open Online Course Massively Successful

Hello everyone! In November’s CTIL Newsletter, you’ll find out about the University’s ALT (Association of Learning Technology) membership, get some updates on My Dundee, the Creative Media Team, and our Online Exam Team. You’ll also get to learn a bit about the success from our MOOC, Care Home Nursing: Changing Perceptions.

Making the Most of the University’s Membership of ALT

In this edition of the CTIL Newsletter, we’d like to highlight the University’s institutional membership of the Association of Learning Technology (ALT) a professional association and educational community engaging around a wide range of technologies that support learning and teaching. By virtue of the University’s membership individual staff register to become an Associate Member of ALT on their website. Once you’ve become a member you can join the ALT mailing listserv where you’ll find a very welcoming and helpful community of practice.

ALT champions open educational practice and they have a wealth of resources available online. They publish an an open access journal, Research in Learning Technology , which includes papers relevant to higher education as well as schools education. There’s also the ALT blog, which has an archive of posts and resources going back to 2005.

ALT also runs various events and special interest groups which you can find more about on their website. The standout ALT events are two annual conferences, OER which runs every April and the ALT Conference. Both conferences live stream keynote sessions and also other short communication sessions. You can access these via there YouTube channel and the respective conference websites, and there are some gems in the archive including a keynote from Hans Rosling back in 2008.

The next key ALT event is their ALT Online Winter Festival which will be running online on 11th and 12th December. You can register on the event web page. If you want to know more about ALT or want to get more engaged with what they have to offer just be in touch with the team in CTIL.

Module Creation Change

The way we create modules on the Virtual Learning Environment is changing. The team have been working on making the process of module creation and administration more efficient and beneficial for our academic community. To review the full process, please check out this full paper published to the University Learning and Teaching Committee. If you have any feedback, please get in touch with us!

I would just like to say a huge thank you for this course. It inspired me to start looking for roles within nursing care homes and today I went for an interview and have been fortunate to be offered the post of Clinical Lead where I hope to put a lot of what I have learned from completing this course into everyday practice.

MOOC Success

Our Future Learn course, Care Home Nursing: Changing Perceptions, just ended and proved to be a big success! Care homes are vital in meeting the needs of people living with health and social care needs. Despite this, the sector struggles to recruit and retain registered care home nurses. On this free online course led by Mrs Lindsay Dingwall (Clinical/Academic Nurse Consultant (Older People), School of Nursing & Health Sciences and NHS Tayside), hundreds of learners gained knowledge of the skills nurses need to effectively look after care home residents. They explored the myths surrounding care homes, the clinical and ethical decisions nurses need to make on a regular basis and how care home nurses work together with residents and their families.

Updates

My Dundee

Blackboard Ally has been updated, so it’s now easier than ever to download alternative formats. For instance, did you know that if you upload a PDF to your module, your students can click on the Ally tool and download it a an OCRed PDF (automatically extracted text for improved reading and searching), an HTML page (for viewing in the browser and on mobile devices), an ePub (for reading as an e-book), Electronic braille (BRF version for use on electronic braille displays), and Audio (MP3 version for listening)?

To make the most out of Ally, please pay attention to the accessibility score icon, and use it to find out how to improve your documents to make them as accessible as possible for all of your students.

Creative Media Team

Out Creative Media Team are currently working with the Academic Skills Centre on the Numerate Campus Project to build a set of digital Numeracy aids.

Through the summer, the team worked with Careers to identify opportunities that we could assist with in the delivery of their curriculum for the Career Planning Module on the Ultra platform. The Creative Media Team focused on media content development that could be used to enhance the module and also be used as assets out with the module to increase the value of the work.

For some exciting examples of this work, keep your eye out for December’s CTIL Newsletter!

Online Exams

Our Online Exam Team is busy getting everything ready for the December exam diet. They are currently preparing 84 exams!

In addition to making sure everything is ready to go in a few week’s time, they’ve also been running drop-in sessions for students and staff.On 20th November they ran drop-in sessions for students, giving them hands-on experience using ExamOnline. On 27th November they held the first Staff exam sign-off session.

The second staff session will take place on 3rd December, so be sure to mark your calendars if you haven’t gone already.

Want more help?

Come to our drop-ins, held every Tuesday and Thursday from 12:00-2:00 on the first floor of the library in  Exchange Street, booth 5. You can also email us at Help4u@dundee.ac.uk