This Wednesday’s #LTHEChat was the first of this new semester’s joint monthly get togethers with the Higher Education Academy (HEA). The topic was connection for student retention (or student resilience as Vincent Tinto prefers to call “retention” which he regards as an institutionally focused word). As usual there was a lot of useful sharing. Here’s the Storify: Connection for Retention- building effective learning relationships.
#LTHEChat 62: using assessment and student engagement
Robert Dragan (@robert_dragan) and Dawn Alderson (@dawn_alderson) led a very lively tweet chat yesterday on Assessment and Student Engagement. Despite Twitter itself playing up, colleagues discussed the following six thought provoking questions and you can read the full record that was captured in Storify. Here is the TAGSExplorer visualisation.
Q1: What do we mean by student engagement? #lthechat pic.twitter.com/0EZR2YhLdX
— LTHE Tweetchat (@LTHEchat) September 21, 2016
Q2: How is assessment perceived by teachers and students? #lthechat pic.twitter.com/4oB89qMzCQ
— LTHE Tweetchat (@LTHEchat) September 21, 2016
Q3: How do you design assessment that engages students? #lthechat pic.twitter.com/MvwycMjvVu
— LTHE Tweetchat (@LTHEchat) September 21, 2016
Q4: What forms of assessment are most likely to lead to student engagement? #lthechat pic.twitter.com/fJQp9SSX28
— LTHE Tweetchat (@LTHEchat) September 21, 2016
Q5: Besides increasing engagement, what are the broader goals of well designed assessment? #lthechat pic.twitter.com/Z8xdXjJjrV
— LTHE Tweetchat (@LTHEchat) September 21, 2016
Q6: What is the future of assessment? #lthechat pic.twitter.com/kqjphNLyR3
— LTHE Tweetchat (@LTHEchat) September 21, 2016
Assessment is definately on my agenda at the moment, and I’ll need some time to reflect on my own thoughts on this topic. But themes that seemed to emerge from the chat were that assessments that engage students need to be be authentic, aligned to the learning outcomes, and negotiated with the students that we are assessing.
#LTHEchat continues to go from strength to strength and is my primary way of topping up my enthusiasm for teaching. Why not join me, next Wednesday at 8:00 pm BST?
#FLble2: Blended Learning Essentials: Embedding Practice
I attended the first run of FutureLearn MOOC #FLble1 Blended Learning Essentials: Getting Started last year. Because of other commitments, I couldn’t take part in the first run of the second part #FLble2 Blended Learning Essentials: Embedding Practice but it looks like I have another chance in the re-run that starts 3 October.
https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/778548535130226688
Highly recommended!
If you missed it, the team leaders Diana Laurillard and Neil Morris gave a talk on the Blended Learning Essentials courses on Future Learn at the 2016 Alt Conference.
Swansea 10k
Renate and I walked to the Swansea Central library today and on our way back we were fortunate enough to see the start of the Swansea 10k run. I hope everyone had a good time.
Giving up the Ghost
Fresh and Crispy has been running as a self-hosted Ghost blog for a couple of years now but today I moved it back over to a self-hosted WordPress blog.
One of the main reasons for the move is that upgrading the Ghost software is a painfully slow manual process. Other reasons include my desire to try technologies like Mike Caulfield’s Wikity which needs a WordPress multi-site and the sheer convenience of being able to blog from the WordPress App.
To transfer my content, I had to use the Python script ghost2wp.py provided by tzangms to convert from Ghost’s JSON format to WordPress’s xmlrpc. But that went very smoothly.
The Ghost blog will stay active as ghost.cpjobling.me for a while: at least until I have transferred some of the tags over.
