Support, collaboration and discussion in the Post-16 community

A large part of the current project is putting together a blended learning course on Moodle which will provide post-16 institutions in the UK with a means to deliver an' Introduction to Webinar Skills'.  Building a course which can be delivered by unknown people in different institutions is a challenge.  Are we being overly ambitious? 

However, as the course is nearly complete, we knew that we needed some help from potential users to make it as 'usable' as possible within the time and financial constraints of this small project so we asked for reviewers from the post-16 community via e-mail lists; ILT Champions and the Association of Learning Technologists.  We were overwhelmed by offers from both groups and so grateful that people were willing to freely give their time to review our course and offer us helpful feedback.

This is a public thank you to those who replied and given us the opportunity to make the course as good as it can be.  We are realistic and of course, anyone downloading the course (eventually) can customise it to suit their institution and group.  The lesson for us is that the community of interested practitioners is a strong one and supportive with it.   The reviewers, and the participants at the ALT-C 2014 conference mentioned in a previous post,who have discussed the options and issues with us on course design and content have been very valuable.

Thank you.

Post by: Ellen Lessner, Project Lead

Top tips for getting a job: 8 employers speak!

One of the aims of our Jisc embedding project was to build on the positive outcomes and outputs of our original webinar project and to highlight the key employability skills identified in webinars by the employers who took part.

Below is a short video that contains some top tips for applying for a job, CVs and participating in an interview. It would be a useful starter for a tutorial on CVs or interviews. The clips are taken from the original 8 student run webinars we recorded during our first phase of the project.

 

We hope you like the video, please do share and let us know if you have found it useful!

ALTC 2014 Learning to Ride: Putting the pieces together

Below is the Prezi from our session earlier today. Thank you so much for all the feedback and helpful comments on our Moodle course.

Abstract accepted for the 2014 ALT Conference

Back in March, we submitted an abstract to present at this year's ALT Conference. We are really pleased to say that our abstract has been accepted and we will be presenting at this year's conference.

The 21st annual conference held by ALT (the Association for Learning Technology) will run from Monday 1st to Wednesday 3rd September 2014 in Warwick. The conference theme is "Riding Giants: How to innovate and educate ahead of the wave".

Cakes from last year's 20th ALT Conference

Below is a brief overview of our proposed session:

As we ride through (another) period of educational change, participants will have an opportunity to discuss and reflect on individual, sector and institutional positions of useful employment skills delivered within an educational setting.

Activities:

• Introduction to the project ('Students for Webinar Employability Skills: Students4Webes) background

• Demonstration of our pilot Moodle course 'Webinar skills for the 21st Century

• Key lessons learned about designing a blended course as an OER and supporting the staff who deliver it

• Discussion: How do we support staff who deliver a blended course they haven't designed? How to best assess a blended Level 3 course?

• Conclusion with Q and A

We are looking forward to presenting and hope to see you there!

The early bird conference rate is available until the 14th July, click here to find out more.

Help wanted! Webinar Skills Course Design Consultation

Last week, we attended the Jisc Learning and Teaching Practice Experts Group meeting in Bristol.

Ellen Lessner and I were invited to present as part of a session on projects from the Jisc FE and Skills Development and Resources Programme - Embedding Benefits strand. We used the opportunity to present our draft Webinar Skills Course and to gather feedback about the design and usability of it.

Draft Webinar Skills Course

We ran our session: 'Help wanted!  Webinar Skills Course Design Consultation' twice and received some really helpful and insightful feedback from the participants. Below are a number of initial changes we are planning on implementing in response to the feedback:

1. Produce a screencast showing how to navigate the course.
2. Merge the 'Resource' section into the other sections.
3. Highlight the importance of group work.
4. Include screenshots showing the 'tutor view' of each section and the 'student view' (the course is built in Moodle with some resources and sections hidden from student view).
5. Display brief instructions on how each resource/activity can be used.

We would like to thank all the participants who attended our session. We greatly appreciate all the help and feedback you have given us.

Emma Procter-Legg

Project Manager

Designing a webinar course

We recently had our second course planning meeting with Owen Hanmer from Jisc. We met online via BlackBoard Collaborate, which was an ideal opportunity to review the functions and features available within the software.

Our aim is to create a Moodle course that contains all the resources, activities and assessment required to run the webinar course, as well as resources to support staff delivering it. By creating the course in Moodle it will enable a proportion of it to be delivered and assessed online. This aspect of the course design fits in with one of the recommendations from the recent FELTAG report (the Further Education Learning Technology Action Group). FELTAG recommends that courses include 'a 10% wholly-online component' (pg. 23), it goes onto recommend an increase in e-assessment and the use of 'open badges' to accredit digital skills.

We are currently reviewing the options for incorporating open badges into our course design as well as a certificate of completion. We will be posting further updates on our course development very soon, so watch this space!

Set up and run a webinar: Learn a 21st Century Employability Skill - Slides and Poll from our presentation.

Please help us with our planning by voting in our poll below.

create online surveys

Slides from today

Web conferencing Skills To Boost Employability in the 21st Century from lessner

Check out our new video!

Below is a video overview of our project. Please watch and share!

   

Created by Ellen Lessner, Project Lead, using Videoscribe.

Let the planning begin!

Earlier this week we were in London for a meeting with Owen Hanmer, from Jisc.  The purpose of the meeting was to start planning our course on learning to set up and run a webinar. Owen ran a number of training sessions on webinar skills during the original Students4webES project and was an obvious choice to help us in the planning of this course.

We arrived in London for our meeting and the first thing that struck me about the meeting room  was that it was all set up perfectly for webinars and teleconferencing.

In the middle of the room, suspended above the table was a microphone, perfectly placed for capturing everything being discussed and on one wall a set of screens and a video camera again perfectly arranged to capture the meeting and fully support 'virtual participation'.

Fuelled by a number of cups of coffee we managed to put together a draft outline of the course. It is clear that it will continue to evolve over the coming weeks, but it is great to have a first draft down on paper (well actually on a shared Google Doc)!

The course will be built as a downloadable Moodle course with resources and activities for a blended learning delivery. We estimate the course will be about 20 hours of learning, but this could well change once we start to investigate getting the course accredited for funding.

Next stop: another meeting, this time with a video editor to look at improving the webinar recordings and to produce a more polished version of the top tips student produced video.

FELTAG Report and funding cuts

Having presented during the FE strand at ALT-C 2013 when the FELTAG open consultation session was run we were eager to read the Report that was published last Monday. FELTAG is the Further Education Learning Technology Action Group, convened by Minister of State for Skills and Enterprise, Matthew Hancock at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

Obviously a report that discusses the future use of technology in FE is highly relevant to our project. The timing of this report and the announcement that the government is cutting funding to ‘low value’ courses will allow us to reflect on both of these points whilst shaping the webinar employability course that we are designing for L2 and L3 students.

The aim of our course will be to teach a technology skill; the setting up and running of a webinar. We feel that the hard and soft skills needed to do this will help students be more successful in looking for employment both now and in the future. Our goal is to find a way to make the course fundable by validating the delivery through an awarding body accepted in the post-16 community. As the FELTAG report suggests, a proportion of the course will be delivered online and we are looking at putting the assessment online as well.

FELTAG recommends that “the funding system must fully support the adoption of new digital technology and learning methods….” (p. 23). This short course should tie in nicely with many of the recommendations for funding. We will keep you posted on how we get on.

Students4Webes Embedding Benefits (S4WEB)

Our first week of the project started with a flurry of activity including deciding on an appropriate abbreviation of the project name - S4WEB - which is a nice Twitter hashtag! We have a number of meetings planned over the next few weeks and will be posting regular updates here about our activities.

This week I found a blog post about a Jisc Learning and Teaching Experts Meeting that Ellen and I presented at last year. The post was written by another Jisc funded project The DIAL project - Digital Integration into Arts Learning - who presented at the same meeting. In the post they discussed the potential for using some of the material as part of the DIAL PoI project which is about Professional Online Identities or the possibility of setting up another DIAL project using a similar approach to ours.

As our new project is all about embedding benefits, it would be great hear from anyone who has seen our blog or attended a presentation and decided to use webinar software in some way. Why not leave us a comment and let us know?

Set up and run a webinar: Learn a 21st Century Employability Skill

Ellen Lessner and Emma Procter-Legg will be speaking at the Jisc RSC Event "Technology, Innovation and Success - A conference for ACL and WBL" on the 28th March 2014 at Senate House, University of London.

Our session "Set up and run a webinar: Learn a 21st Century Employability Skill" will look at the lessons learned from our original project on webinars and employability skills run at Abingdon & Witney College. It is also a chance for us to showcase our (draft) blended learning course on setting up and running a webinar as an employability skill. The development of this freely available short course will form one of the major outputs of our embedding project. The funding for this is from the Jisc FE and Skills Embedding Activity Programme.

Why not come along to our session and have a chat with us about our project!

A Conference Call in Real Life

Below is a funny video about conference calls, which highlights how difficult and confusing these types of meetings can be!

 

Many of these experiences are the same in webinars.

In fact during one recent webinar presentation, I found that I had dropped out of the webinar mid presentation! Luckily I was co-presenting with Ellen and she stepped in whilst I logged myself back into the session.

We are back - our extension bid was successful!

In January 2014, we received the good news that we had been successful in our bid for an extension of our original project via the Jisc FE and Skills Development and Resources Programme – Embedding Activity. We will be back blogging regularly about our activities, outputs and achievements over the next months.

The project officially starts again on Monday 3rd March so look out for more posts about our project aims and plans!