Tag: #pelc12

In April, we have the annual Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference. The following abstract has been accepted:

FASTECH is a new JISC-funded project building on a new body of knowledge about staff and student experiences of assessment and feedback, collected from over 22 degree programmes in 8 universities through the HEA-funded TESTA (Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment) project. From this baseline data we have identified many common and distinctive disciplinary challenges facing students and their teachers.

FASTECH builds upon this community of practice, and starting with 15 core programmes, seeks to undertake institutional change. As TESTA has demonstrated, improving practices within particular degree programmes enables us to work with the grain of teachers’ subject interests, disciplinary emphases, and departmental loyalties, and to address the full course experiences of students. FASTECH picks up on particular concerns such as: time/resource, the need for inclusivity, technology fears, patchy implementation, technology which doesn’t improve student learning, assumptions that students are ‘techno-geniuses’, re-inventing the wheel, and concerns that focus on programme ignores institutional change,.

FASTECH seeks to use standard technologies that have already been piloted to address the problems identified in TESTA: quantity of effort, quality and quantity of feedback, usefulness of feedback and appropriate assessment. The paper will focus upon the challenge of engaging whole programmes with the feedback and assessment agenda, with a focus upon collaborative working, rather than initiatives enforced from the centre out. We will look at how lessons learnt from TESTA are being applied, emphasising time and cost effectiveness, and student engagement, and how the momentum from one project feeds into another.

We will look at a number of case studies from The University of Winchester and Bath Spa University, likely to include Media Studies, American Studies, and Creative Writing, who have used videos for seminar reports, tablet PCs in the classroom, reflective blogs, and Grademark.

Dr Bex Lewis (University of Winchester), Nicole McNab (University of Winchester, Joelle Adams (Bath Spa University). Note: Nicole McNab is leaving the University of Winchester, so will pre-contribute her contribution via screen casting, and Joelle Adams will join us via Skype. 

Paper Aims:  To discuss the advantages of engaging staff and students at the progamatic level to enhance and embed digital literacies across a institution. This paper builds on previous research about assessment and feedback, and its transition into the implementation of technology for academic purposes.
Audience: Staff responsible for embedding technology enhanced practice at an institutional level.
Key Themes: New pedagogies and practices; Digital Literacies