Ben R. Atkinson

As we draw to the end of the decade and the 2010s morph into the 2020s, I thought it would be nice to take a look back on the last ten years and pick out some highlights from my professional life. In the next two blog posts, I’ve split the decade in half and chosen one key event from each year that has really shaped me. I started the decade aged 18 and on the cusp of leaving home to move to University. Ten years later I’m still in the same city, beautiful Lincoln, and have carved out a career in media and education. There is still a long way to go, but the journey has been fun – it’s good to take a moment to reflect sometimes.

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In this final CRJ post for my PGCHE course, I wanted to reflect back on my learning as a whole in both the EDU720 and EDU710 modules.

It was when completing a second self-evaluation against the UKPSF (something I also did back in Week 1 of the first EDU710 module) that I realised just how far I’d come over the course of this PGCHE. I now have a diverse collection of experiences which I can draw on in my future practice, including being able to plan modules more thoroughly, write an assessment and feedback strategy and defend this to a group of senior academics and, most importantly, understand the diverse way in which students learn – bringing me to the realisation that the student learning is far more important than what I am actually teaching.

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This week’s topic of ‘Choosing Technology for Online Learning’ was particularly interesting to me, as in my current institution, the University of Lincoln, I am the Digital Education Developer (Learning Technologist) for the College of Arts. As such, I felt there was a lot I could bring to the discussion around the choice of learning technologies, however this did mean that I sometimes found it hard to navigate a path between the knowledge of learning tech that I already had and the exploration of new tools and platforms.

Thinking firstly about the learning technologies we use on a day-to-day basis, I decided to frame my response around the core tools that we support at Lincoln. The approach that we take at the institution involves have a ‘core’ suite of tools which are supported by the University and further outer rings of tools which can be used but may not be directly supported. Information on the core tools is available on our LALT blog. As such, I focused on technologies for video (Panopto), collaboration on the web (Collaborate Ultra), marking and assessment (Turnitin) and live audience response (Poll Everywhere). My own list of tools received some good responses from my peers, with Carols Garde-Martin taking forward Poll Everywhere as a tool to pilot later in the week and both Graham and Jill pointing out that the list was ‘useful stuff to know’ (Dunn, 2019). It was interesting to see what other colleagues suggested in this forum, particularly the use of Minecraft for Education which James C recommended (James C, 2019). I knew of the platform as a game, but was not aware that Microsoft had developed a version for education which has a specific application within the creative arts. I must admit, I did download the software and had a go – but I’m afraid I just couldn’t get my head around it. Perhaps this is one technology where the students are best leading the way. Finally for this section, I found Federica’s list late in the week when reviewing the forum and have to say it is a fantastic resource covering a full range of learning technologies that could be applied to any form of teaching and learning practice (Orandini, 2019). This list is a collection of all the ideas suggested by students on the module and it proves just how many varied approaches to technology there are and how useful they can be to pedagogic practice within higher education.

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Week 6 of this EDU720 module, opened up with a discussion about our thoughts on how best to evaluate our flipped classroom activities. For me, there were three key points that should be considered in any evaluation – if the approach solved the original problem it was introduced for, if the students found the approach useful and, in my specific case, how well the project-based element fitted into the overall activity.

There has been a lot of discussion on the forums more generally throughout the last few weeks, about whether flipped learning activities actually improve the work that students and the amount that they are learning. As we’ve experienced, these kinds of activities are usually introduced to solve a problem or re-image a specific part of a course, so it’s very important to consider whether the activity actually resolved the problem for which it was introduced. Jill’s response on this week’s forum sums this up nicely, as although she enjoyed running the activity and found it useful, she suggests that ‘would probably not introduce a flipped classroom approach, as the most fundamental reason to do so is to free up seminar time, which is not an objective of my type of course’ (Dunn, 2019). Another idea I raised in my suggested evaluation points, was that of how to establish if the flipped learning activity directly impacted upon the assessment (given I wanted to introduce a project-based approach) – evaluating this would be a much longer process and beyond the bounds of evaluating the flipped activity alone. This was something Paul picked up on suggesting that ‘this is part of evaluating the alignment of this approach into the overall module’ (Roger, 2019) and that a positive response to the flipped learning activity should, in theory, ‘feed thru to an improvement in the summative assessment’ (Roger, 2019).

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In this first week of the second semester of my PGCHE course (EDU720: Developing Flexible Learning Environments), we were asked to consider the second assessment task by way of an introduction to flexible learning environments. The second task will ask to write a series of summary reflections covering the various teaching weeks of this second semester and our own reflections. We will also be tasked with undertaking a second Learning Conversation review with a colleague in our own institution which, along with the CRJ for each week, will be taken into account during the marking and feedback process for the second assessment.

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