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2 June partner meeting transcript

Page history last edited by Anna Gruszczynska 12 years, 7 months ago

Transcript of the 2nd June partner meeting (Birmingham, Burlington hotel)

Present: Richard, Craig, Phil, Mike, Dafydd, Anna

File 1

Anna:  Just wanted to announce new converts to twitter, edupunk_phil, we’re going to 
Richard:  How are you finding this OER experience? 
Mike:   It’s been very energising already, I’ve got to say, I’ve only just arrived, I’ve joined the Twitter sphere. I’m uploading a document from the reflexive task to the wiki and it’s not even lunchtime yet.

 

File 2

Anna:  If you ever want to, for yourselves, have  a bit of a reflection on what’s been happening in the context of the project, we have been using the reflexive tasks right from the start of the project, all of them are collated on one of the wiki pages where you have easy access to all four of them, both the task itself but also the conversations that we had related to the task; at the moment, we are on to task four which is the peer review, and with that we had people put together a number of different prompts which are relate to three project priority areas and also what C-SAP believes is quite special about the project which is the social sciences context; because if you look at the other projects within the UKOER programme quite a lot of them ha[[en within the geek-fantasy land not that there is anything wrong with that but they focus so much more on the technical aspects of OERs and something that Mike said in a conversation with me and I hope you don’t mind sharing because I found it very powerful, a lot of lecturers coming to OERs will have the same question that you had you know whether it is worth investing your time, energy into producing an OER, how do you know how much time it’s going to take how do you know what’s needed to embark on that OER journey and also something that people have been asking at the OER2011 conference how do you know about the things you don’t know because what people have been telling us in the context of the, mostly the cascade and the collections project, suddenly they started having not always very comforting thoughts about copyright and about you know pedagogical, what sort of pedagogical descriptions do I have to use to make the resource discoverable for others, how do I make sure that the images I attached to the resource will be used in a way that is you know – ok let me just bring that page up – oh and in practical terms, people’s personal pages that’s the space we have used for documenting people’s involvement with the reflexive tasks, if you ever want to read what your colleagues. 

 

 

File 3

Craig:   Right, so picking up on student engagement then, is this an appropriate time for this? 
Anna:  Yes, anything 
Craig:  Because Phil and I were speaking about this on the way, on the journey here and my initial optimism and passion for the ideas of OER as in cascading information, prompted my initial approach with a group of new students, I thought OK, new students, new ideas, perfect place to initiate this approach of cascading OERs however it didn’t actually work out as intended because sort of the stock response from the students was one of, it was criticism they couldn’t quite understand the reasons, the rationale for them to access these open educational resources unless they actually are really rigidly grounded within learning outcomes, assessment criteria so that, I wasn’t kind of expecting that but that was the initial response, so that then leads on I suppose a more up to date initiative, so we’ve got, I suppose brand new students but not news students in the academic sense so that the students that I am now working with are second year students, they have much more experience in research, research methods and at least early indications seem to show that they are kind of more open to the idea of getting involved in this kind of initiative so we got them involved in a few of the tacit ones and then we will move them on to a more collaborative approach so we’ll get them  to begin to access them, engage with them and have a focus group and that will give me and Phil an idea as to what they actually liked about the open resources, what they can actually use the resources for, search mechanisms on Jorum, MERLOT, so that’s where we are up to at the moment where student engagement is concerned. 
Anna:  What about the, anything you want to share the other aspects of what we introduced, just a second, let me bring that up- 
Richard:  Can we make a quick comment on student engagement, have a round and then come back 
Dafydd:  Delyth in her absence has contributed- 
Anna:  Will that be on your personal page? 
Dafydd:  Yes 

 

File 4

Dafydd:   It’s far from being perfect, i.e. do not use Google translate... we used, in terms of the development of the resource what we wanted to do is get students as active creators, as information co-creators using a blackboard discussion board which we would then use as a resource in, within the resources that are developed for future students, now on one level that worked well in the sense that all the students uploaded their questionnaires to the blackboard discussion board, there was some discussion, there were some glaring errors that we corrected and the questionnaires at the end were [?] there were two things that were interesting there in that very collegial atmosphere of trying to get students to be co-creators of knowledge, one is that the quality of the comments themselves were variable and therefore we didn’t intervene, we decided we weren’t going to intervene but there is a question in my mind should we have intervened and then when you do intervene it suddenly isn’t quite what you set out for it to be. In fact, I’ve been reviewing this on the train on the way out and I haven’t spoken to Delyth but I’m sure she’d agree, what we are thinking of doing is putting the whole discussion board along with reflexive comments from us as part of the resource going forward so for the next batch of the students likely to use the resource we will have the resource, the responses and the final questionnaires and then comments from Delyth and myself about why you need to be critical and why you need to  not accept every comment that comes from your peers and you need to reflect, so in a way I think that will make it better in the longer run, so the one problem was student weren’t necessarily accurate (?) in their comments, their criticism of the questionnaires and the second problem then is that students also tended, because it was perceived as a collegial exercise, tended to be more positive than they maybe should have been in their comments on their colleagues, they were postgraduate students so you’d expect them to have a certain level of collegiality. It’s an interesting ell, there are a number of interesting things there, how do you actually do student engagement in resources and how do you build students as co-creators of a resource and how much should you intervene, so those are my initial thoughts. 

 

File 5

Mike: 

Having come to this rather late, we did maybe talk about staff for a minute but we didn’t really think about what students thought about technology-enhanced learning, we conducted a focus group to see what student experience was and they mentioned their understanding of electronic learning which is Blackboard, the VLE that we use. In terms of digital learning, they were interested in the availability of broadband, they were interested in the technical capacity of the university to deliver learning, we asked them about Facebook they were very interested in Facebook, they talked relatively disparagingly bout some staff that use Facebook and that was quite interesting, we mentioned twitter as well and people were aware of it, they talked about the kind of celebrity culture within Twitter but they didn’t really feel that this was something they wanted to use they didn’t feel that it was useful for communication and because we were looking at levels across the board what was interesting, it was very much an open focus group, the perception of OER wasn’t even an issue and that perhaps tells a story of its own.

 

File 6

Mike:   I think that economic and fiscal context is a reality for all of us. 
Richard:  What sort of reality is it for students, would be for the students who will have a greater expectation of the quality of the education they are receiving whatever that means, do they want high class OERs, or are they are going to be happy with “try this, it’s sort of the thing that might be useful, not exactly what you want, will not exactly teach you Elizabethan poetry, it’s two decades later but it is sort of in that area but it can be useful, we can fob them off with that, how specific and purposeful do we need to be, does the material need to be 
Phil:  Can I just say something, some of this is slightly similar but might be going off the point, one of the dilemmas myself and Craig talked about on the way here and we talked before, is the dilemma of the tutor and that the OER you are recommending is better than you, now, you know, I think now, I can cope with that kind of criticism but if I was new to teaching, no way, well, when I say no way, I don’t know, it’s a massive [? So again when they are talking about the value for money side, there’s all these things, some of the lectures on ItunesU, which I think are brilliant because they are by Harvard lecturers, and he lectures on the same kind of topics as myself but I would say that he knows more than me, I don’t know, whatever, certainly his PowerPoints are nicer than mine so you can say, this guy- 
Richard:  This is one measure- 
Phil:  But I am going to show it to my students because it might be good for them to see how Harvard students behave in lectures, so it might then sort of make, oh those are the kinds of questions,  that’s the norm so I am going to show it but there is this kind of like risk as we were saying which is where edupunk comes in, you know, don’t come here, do it yourself 
Richard: 

Reminds me as we were talking about the “Red dwarf”, you know, any “Red dwarf” fans around, you know, better than life, better than learning? You know, we might be measured against, there is one thing there about not being good enough for the students, maybe being too good, there is another side of that.

Dafydd:  There is an element of fees and I was thinking about it when a number of institutions in Wales have just announced their nine thousand fees and I was thinking whether you would get a group of students following lectures from Harvard, carrying on with their jobs, and they’d be much happier, that’s just an aside. We had one where we were talking about developing the resources and getting some of the experts in the field from one of the institution to be on there and actually, if we are trying to sell our course and a core part of one of the main modules is actually an expert from an institution that is a couple of hundred miles down the road which is our direct competitor, one can imagine if two institution were competing for the students and the institution B is saying, actually the lecturer , the expert at institution A is brilliant so weaves him in as a core person, I think that’s interesting- 
Mike:  As well as competing for students, I think it is a dilemma, we have to be conscious of colleagues, talking about this if we have plentiful resources available at a time of extreme pressure and stress for jobs and doing a focus group for staff we encountered some quite strong feelings quite understandable with higher education experiencing quite a severe economic contraction, I mean there is a real sense of anxiety that may not have been there in better economic times, I don’t know. 
Phil: Well, there are some major, major obstacles, you know, at the conference, sort of picking on what Anna said, people are not talking about this, you know, it was all those massive numbers and it was all evangelical, wasn’t it [Anna: yes, yes]  and I don’t think they nearly scratched the surface in terms of these problems and in terms of student engagement but also in terms of staff engagement, like myself, you know, it’s like we are putting ourselves out of work which then makes you think, isn’t it good that OERs have got copyright restrictions because can’t be as good as myself but if I breach copyright in my lectures and that doesn’t matter. [All laugh]
Richard: Ah, academic as risk-taker. Academic as outlaw [laughter] I like it
Anna: Just to add to what Phil is saying, we have been trying to introduce this back channel and the meta level as you can see we are not just engaging between the six of us, we are engaging with the broader OER community and we had, we had a response from Pat Lockley-
Richard: Resign [all laugh]
Anna: But you know, that also shows you, you know, there is a broader OER community, quite an international community as well and all of those networks will continue, hopefully well beyond this project but I mean, yes, on the one hand as Phil mentioned within the OER 2011 conference quite a few of the presentations that we’ve been to were along the lines of we were involved in this project, we produced a number of fantastic resources, there they are. That layer of more reflexive and critical engagement was quite lacking which is where the strength of this project lies, I believe and Twitter, wiki, etcetera it’s just one of the tools that we use as we critically reflect on what’s happening but yes, those discussions are not happening.
Richard: I wonder whether, there’s a proposition that’s emerging in the project that we need to be aware of, that our take, this group’s take on the use of OERs in education is potentially more critical than we observe among the rest of the community, if what we saw at the OER2 conference is an indication of that, interestingly the two sessions that we ran were picked up by Diana Laudrillard who was doing the keynote on the last day which I didn’t hear but Anna tells me that she related to both our sessions as being indicative of a need for a, for want of a better phrase a critical pedagogy, a critical reflection on the use of some of those materials, I suggest, as far as you wish to, if this is a reflection on what we are doing that we are encouraging you to take that, as our lead on that, do you feel comfortable with that is what I am saying and Phil, you were there and you endorse that to an extent and that was your observation of other projects as being non-critical of this, the impulse to develop OERs as what, finish the sentence dot dot dot, replace academics, to enrich the learning experience, to achieve cost-effectiveness, all very problematic at least problematic and at least very under-theorised, under-researched and then any contribution we can make to that will be powerful, it will be in the report with your report and your contribution, it’s the way that we are at the post-half-way stage, it’s the way you are thinking, it’s the way that things seem to be going, how does it sound to you, how does it feel to you?
Craig: To me it feels like an opportunity to mention the concept that we are sort of grappling with because I believe that with the previous experience of student engagement or lack of engagement, you know, we started to think, you know, what is the issue here and I think it is too much of a leap for students who are paying a lot of money you know to receive information from experts to suddenly turn around and say, we are liberating you from the constraints of the institution so go away and get the information yourselves and see what you can come up with and I think the attitude is, it is your job, I am paying for that, this is what you are supposed to do that, but saying that, Phil and myself became interested in the sort of concept of edupunk, the sort of anti-ciorporate4 approach to education and things like learning outcomes, objectives, assessment processes measured against these criteria how they ultimately, basically exclude the possibility of new knowledge being generated by the students, students actually engaging with it, so talking about edupunk, which is quite, it’s been established for a few years so myself and Phil have come with an alternative approach which dovetails quite nicely with this notion of edupunk what we are terming an anarchogogy.
Anna: A what?
Craig: Anarchogogy, so the notion of pedagogy, which translates loosely as to lead the child, to play on the word anarchy, anarcho, anarchos without rulers, but it is to lead without rulers, so this idea of anarchogogy takes on board the fight that we are experts in our field but we don’t want to impose that knowledge onto students but really use it more as an invitation, signpost to different aspects of knowledge so in a sense to lead students in an empowered way, to take on board different ideas, different approaches to learning to so we have a role to lead them to this sort of more empowered approach of learning but not to impose percentage wise or to quantify too rigidly and just reduce student effort to a percentage, take them more to generating their own ideas and creating their ideas in a more creative kind of way, what that looks in practice is more what we are engaging with, but that links into the movement against the corporate strangulation of creativity, of student engagement and knowledge so what also we were kind of thinking with that is finding in a sense curricular pathways to getting students to a point where they are personally interested, where they feel engaged with the curriculum materials
Mike: It’s an interesting idea of anarchogogy in the context of neoliberal government and the forces of marketization in education, you know, nine thousand in fees and the student as consumer, universities dropping in some cases hundreds of degrees because of a much more responsive, it is a highly commercialised context, I think it is interesting and timely for talking about-
Richard: But in the spirit of being critical, can I challenge that notion, why isn’t that just good teaching, you are making students independent learners, you are challenging them, isn’t that what good teachers do?
Craig: It also has to be seen in the context of the staff development module that Phil and myself are working on, we are not for a second saying that our colleagues are not good teachers but as part of this project, myself and Phil have started to feel, there is something that just did not feel right about the corporate approach and the rigid, dry approach to assessing what students learn, it is almost a reduction of learning.
Richard:  I understand the rationale, but aren’t you just being game keeper, game poacher, but why aren’t the students saying this, you’re saying this on their behalf – what empowers you to say this?
Craig:

That’s the whole idea, that’s basically the essence of it and it’s the idea is almost to try and bring passion -

Phil: The reason why it is more than just good teaching - the effects of Web 2.0 it is the difference.
Richard: Mediated by Web2.0, what’s the effect of Web2.0, what’s Web2.0 done?

 

File 7

 

Richard:   In terms of your OER, you and John are working on something, a module, what sense do you have about translation, transformation, what are you translating to? 
Mike:   A couple of things really, the module governance and political change that was originally a module at Huddersfield with John and we looked at that and commented and tried to see what it would look like as an OER and as I know of the various comments that have been made on the wiki, and also I had a discussion with Anna and Helen [Jones] as well about a module that I’ve been teaching for five years to people beginning to study criminology and I know from experience and teaching from trying to respond to student experiences of that and you know supporting them face-to-face and how that’s worked in seminars and the issue has really been, how is that going to work as an OER because I think that on the whole the material is good, it’s workable, there are two hundred and twenty students on the module, the way you communicate to those students, every Wednesday at 11 o’clock I stand in front of 220 people and I try to communicate and talk to them, actually today I’ve been thinking about what I’ll be doing next year and I’ll have a Twitter feed behind me because I can see how fantastically that would work. 
Richard:  You are very brave.  
Mike: Because I know from experience when you want an interactive experience, the people that speak the loudest are often, some fantastic contributions,  a lot of interaction, there’s nothing, you can imagine if I’m bored after two hours of talking you can imagine what it’s going to be for students on the other side of that, it’s trying to see, I think the material works well in the context in which it is used but I am aware that it is very, very different almost industrial warehousing you know with the economic pressures there’s going to be much more of you know, lots of people in a room together because you know that represents- 
Richard: For the purpose of the debate, you told us about the practice which you, to some extent which is problematic but you get through it, students survive it, when you translate that into an OER, to what extent is that OER Mike-lite, is it without Mike, have we removed mike from the learning experience when we make them into an OER.
Mike: That is a very good question, I am not sure, you know, there must be something about, I am often conscious you know, when teaching, when it’s gone well you get some feedback, you can tell immediately, when you are teaching a group of people you can tell if there’s a row where people have smartphones out, there is a sense if you are losing people you can speed it up, you can clarify, you can move it on, this is one of the things I like about teaching that makes it interesting, as a teacher I am thinking what I’d like to do is to communicate that and that in the OER that comes through, that seems to be a function of, I don’t know if it’s a function of personality or temperament, it’s a, when we did the focus group it was fascinating to talk to students of what their experiences were in terms of electronic learning, electronic delivery, it was interesting, one of the students actually said, we extracted it as a quote what a student said was that people are really boring and it’s doesn’t matter if it’s going to be boring online and there’s no interest, we were talking about the assumption, how they identify fantastic learning with the teachers and their personality so that was interesting so it didn’t seem to be anything to do, they just seemed  to like the teacher and how do you distil that and, what’s I just worry if you’ve got an OER a bunch of PowerPoints, a bunch of seminar tasks-

 

File 8

Phil:  This is going to be a write-up, really, it’s going to be difficult filming the students like that because the deal was that, we get some part-time students 
Anna:  This is just one of possible models of documenting that engagement, it’s not prescriptive at all 
Richard:   Recording is quite simple, two-minute vox pops about what they did it could be audiofiles or they could give you a little written piece and you could include the quotes, I am not teaching yopu to suck eggs how to write up a student focus group, forgive me but I want to expose you, remind everyone to be as creative as you want to, depending on how much time you have. Part of the deal is that you are going to write up issues around student engagement and we are going to help you derive from that element of student engagement- 
Anna:  And the other part of the deal will be that there will be evidence of student engagement and the cascade framework will be written up, also to free you up to work on the tweaking of the resource, ironing out the issues, so we are talking mid-July- 
Richard:  And the focus for student engagement might be the actual OERs you are developing yourself but they needn’t be if, for you too I don’t think that students will give you feedback, you may not want them to give you feedback on your edupunk because that is not intended for them, you might use what they say as an element of edupunk module, did the students want to break down the barriers, did they want to break down the barriers in terms of their own learning and that’s reflective and very powerful, Dafydd, you are thinking of having some sort of focus groups with the students themselves-
Dafydd: Yes, what we are thinking of ta the moment is organising ideally something not dissimilar to that, videotape or recorded in some form of a podcast, structured feedback session with one or more of the students that have been using the resource.
Richard: Here’s an idea. Is it possible that you could captivate their use, they are looking over their material so you could screen capture as they do it, get their commentary on their material, that might be effective in your particular and might be coherent, complementary, any thoughts about your-
Mike: I’m meeting with John tomorrow and will try to work what we are trying to do specifically but I am not sure that I like the mode of talking heads, a couple of minutes, something broader possibly.
Richard: What about Twitter; a Twitter fountain? I’ve done a student conference this year, this is an idea, you like Twitter, you can do a Twitter fountain, you’ll have to Google that and all you say to them is look, over the next few weeks, in the moment, reflection in action, when you have a thought about an OER, just tweet it, I want you to use hash and you put your own hashtag, any problems with that, give me  a shout and I’ll tell you how to do it.
Anna: And we’ll also tell you how to document an archive because there are ways to do it.
Mike:  I’ll have to think about that wouldn’t have been-
Richard: What you’d have chosen, but you expressed an interest in that-
Mike: I would choose something that works with student use-
Anna: Do they have smart phones?
Mike: They do have smartphones.
Anna:  But not all of them-
Mike:  I am very conscious just now that I need to look at student engagement I don’t think that Jorum offers enough detail.
Richard:  I guess the idea of Twitter came from the idea that it doesn’t have to be face-to-face, it could be asynchronous, you could do it on a Blackboard forum, you just, you might have the introductory discussion with them and say, any more thoughts on this? You pointed earlier, the vocal student, the shy student, the reflexive student who doesn’t get to think about it until three hours later and then thinks, oh, the things I could have said, and this is how you might engage with the students.
Mike:  I would be tempted to use some of the tools within Blackboard, I was thinking I could use survey monkey that seems to be quite effective and easy to set up, I’ve had good responses and you know, maybe a Twitter feed would be good when I feel more confidence; I am just looking at the timeframe over there, I’d like to make sure that we have everything.
Anna:       We also need to talk briefly about dissemination and well, that’s, that is something that will continue beyond today, but just to, as I mentioned in the morning that is something that I introduced in conversations with you over the phone, there is funding within the cascade project for each of the academic partners to organise a small dissemination event and we envisage that event if it does take place to be  a mini cascade in action, you know, over the course of the project you’ve been cascaded to, you started to develop your sense of the cascade framework, now it is time for you to cascade you know to pass it on and give that, we are aware that this is a really tight timeframe, it would be possible for the event to happen and take place in September, however, under the provision that all of the expenditure would have to happen by 22ndof August, so we could make provisions for say booking a venue etc., booking the catering, getting the guest speaker etc. but all of that would have to            

 

File 9

Anna:   Would you like to start with the description of the challenges, what it is, where you are, Dafydd, do you want to kick off?
Dafydd:  Basically, there are two resources stroke modules that we are working on, one is a ten credit postgrad module largely on SPSS but developing in different ways at the moment and I think one of the things that would be good to get a feel for is in what form do we deposit that because I am also a tinkerer and one of the things in terms of practice with the students illustrated was that technological difficulties can really impact on students use of the resource and what I mean by that is ideally the assumption that we are going to be dealing with full time students who are on campus and therefore they’d all have access to SPSS statistical packages that are available on every campus and there is no problem, you would have thought, they weren’t. Institution said, no problem, you can get a desktop anywhere and login, fine, it was a problem. So one of the things I started to do now was to go back and redo the resource, redo the set of captivate videos rather than as tutorials, as demonstrations I mean that’s progressed and we’ve now got different aspects of that module and resource ready and available so much so that what I did this morning was to export the course cartridge into a course file just to see what that process was like. I have said zipped file now on my laptop so that’s a Blackboard course cartridge for the ten credit module which I could upload tomorrow if tomorrow was the deadline.  
Richard: Anna and I need to explore on your behalf the efficacy of putting that into Jorum, it’s possible, both of you use Blackboard, it’s possible that you could 
Mike:  Yes, that would be very helpful, I’ve seen it done with varying degrees of success, I know that it’s easy to do but to do it well? 
Richard:  There is also the issue of the wrapping up doesn’t do, in your export, it doesn’t copy the blogs or the communication things like the forums, you might not want it to but, is there something in the structure? 
Dafydd: It would be really interesting to know what it copies and what it doesn’t copy-
Richard: There may also be some elements, if you use the collections Blackboard, you may use Y Porth as a collections and then put into your own repository on Y Porth materials, media files it may not have wrapped those as well.
Dafydd Right, OK.
Richard: We need to explore that.
Dafydd:  That would be really useful.
Richard:  How many Captivate files are you thinking of, Dafydd?
Dafydd:  There’s about fourteen of them.
Richard:  Fourteen
Dafydd:  Yes.
Richard:  Is everyone comfortable with Captivate as a, as a technology, piece of software, do you know what it is? Give us a brief example of what you captivate, the scenarios-
Dafydd:  The interaction to SPSS in part one, the, oh, I could get it up,
Anna:  Yes, let me just get the cable-
Richard:  You need your dongle.
Dafydd:  I haven’t got my dongle.
Anna:  Do you want to borrow mine?
Dafydd: Give me two seconds. In the meantime, we’re also doing a set of, the reason I was asking about the deadline on that specifically is that in a conference on Friday I was showing off the resource for colleagues from psychology, who said look, this is interesting, I’ve got things I could contribute to such a resource, why don’t we talk further about this and again, if possible, I’d like to-
Anna:  If you can just save that and load up your resource then that would be brilliant.
Dafydd:  That would be something I would really like to be able to do.
Richard:  While Dafydd’s doing that, the thing about Y Porth, you can access it, they will give access to people who want, it is not closed, I doubt it would be very easy to get access to your Blackboard or for you to get access to my institutional one, but it is a repository.
Dafydd: I didn’t understand it was a repository until I started doing this project but then it became clear that it was. So you’ve got an SPSS resource, I mean, you can, that looks very Blackboard-esque
Richard:  It is a nice interface.
Dafydd:  It has a nice interface around Blackboard, so we’ve got this, I’m just going to show you. So this is the quant research methods, we have the introduction to SPSS and this is how I use captivate to produce a simple task of introducing variables, variable t, frequency tables but it records your voice and then allows you to follow through with the clicks
Richard: Plus any voiceover, you can edit the voiceover afterwards, it on screen capture, there is a piece of software that can do it for you.
Dafydd: It tracks your clicks then; you get the idea, so that is captivate and that’s where we’re developing now, the demonstration side of that, what’ve been doing is in order to use that effectively at the moment you need an SPSS programme to use it,  the demonstration site allows you to click through so you will be clicking on the screen and that it will allow you to make progress as if you were on SPSS but via Captivate so there were two elements of that resource that it, obviously because we’ve been using it with students this term, it’s there, it’s well developed in the sense it’s at the point where it can be used and obviously I want to do more with it but depending when you need this by, when we need to test things by, this is the one that is taking more time at the moment and what we’ve done here we’ve taken an old module which was very much linked to seminars and tutorials and developed it into a resource which would fit nicely with an undergraduate research module which could in effect be a module on its own but could be used and instead having the flat files, it was a traditional one, I just loaded up one of the examples, we’ve now done a whole different set of resource on sampling techniques, I want to record a podcast on top of this but then you’ve got self-assessment tests which allow the students to assess their knowledge of the different aspects that have been presented in the previous one and in these cases I’ve used the long answer forms for blackboard which can then test the answers based on, so that one, let me go back to,
Richard:  We need to know whether surveys and tests are also exported.
Anna:  Exactly.
Dafydd:  Because that would be
Richard:  If it didn’t export the Captivate files it wouldn’t be the end of the world because you could supply those separately, how big is the file when it was zipped together?
Dafydd:  Six hundred mega.
Anna:  It might be a bit of an issue with Jorum.
Richard:  You could break the bank of Jorum.
Anna:  We’ll look into that.
Dafydd: 

So file size, with these, there are, where are we, there are seven main elements to this ethnographic is ethnography, positivist methods [all laugh] etcetera, of the seven we, Delyth and I are up to three that are in the format which more or less I could give to you tomorrow, there’s another two which are more or less there.

Richard: Is there any sense that this needs to go through another iteration before it is released, are you happy with it the way it is now or would you like to pass it through someone else in case there’s-We have various colleagues we can run it past, in an ideal world I would like to run it past students again, truth is we’re going to use it next year anyway with the students and it will be developed on the basis of that feedback so that isn’t critical so we do need to build in

Richard:  What’s interesting about your project, there’s a parallel,[laugh] because no one is there anyone outside of your own constituency is anyone going to want to look at Welsh medium material, the twelve institutions that can share this will share this, which makes it quite an idiosyncratic, quite an interesting, that wasn’t an insult, I’m sorry-
Dafydd:  Yes, that is the only possible interest outside of those twelve institutions are lecturers
Richard:  If I was to press translate now, in your view, what quality on Google translator, it’s offering to translate oh it wants a plugin update, it could be frames, it doesn’t like frames.
Dafydd:  That’s just a word file, should we download it?
Richard:  I know we can translate individual files, it was its usefulness, its transferability, I’m not asking you to make transferable.

 

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