A lesson in resilience: The abrupt digital transformation of society conferences in 2020

• The pandemic can be seen as an opportunity to revisit the justification for conferences and how they should be run to avoid elitism, climate impact, and diversity.
• 2020 saw a wealth of different approaches to events, including financing, technologies, scheduling, and the meaning of the term ‘live’.
• Engaging attendees and providing networking opportunities are considered the main obstacle to virtual events, but can social networking lessons help resolve – or even improve – this?
• It may take some time for online event programming to achieve the right balance of flexibility versus ‘buzz’ to meet a conference's key objectives: knowledge sharing and peer interaction.
• Live broadcasting is on the rise, but the on‐demand video model is gaining popularity as it ensures high‐quality presentation recordings and consistency of experience.
• Over time, technical challenges of online meetings will resolve, with competition leading to more reasonable pricing, customers becoming savvier, and vendors learning from experience.

     

Putting learning back into learning analytics: actions for policy makers,researchers, and practitioners

Educational technology research and development - This paper is based on (a) a literature review focussing on the impact of learning analytics on supporting learning and teaching, (b) a Delphi...     

Enhancing curriculum and delivery: linking assessment to learning objectives

Typical university‐wide course evaluations do not provide instructors with sufficient information on the effectiveness of their courses. This article describes a course assessment and enhancement model where student feedback can be used to improve courses and/or programs. The model employs an assessment tool that measures student perceptions of importance and their current competence in course‐specific learning objectives both pre‐ and post‐course. Information gained from this assessment enables course improvement over time and also allows for modification in delivery and/or content of the current course. This model is intended to augment traditional course evaluation mechanisms based on specific and actionable feedback on learning objectives.     

Use of rich-media resources by engineering undergraduates

The ability to develop and distribute digital teaching resources in higher education has developed rapidly over the last decade but research into how students use such resources has received limited attention. This study uses questionnaire results, Internet analytic data and semi-structured interviews to examine the use of three types of rich-media teaching resources – lecture podcasts, key-concept videos and tutorial solution videos – by engineering undergraduates. It is found that students value all three types of resource, especially for revision and as a supplement to lectures. Students find short, focused resources more useful than longer ones. Non-native English speakers and those with disabilities derive particular benefits from the resources. The effect of rich-media resources on lecture attendance is found to be small, and two-way.     

Negotiating textual talk: Conversation analysis,pedagogy and the organisation of online asynchronous discourse

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to investigate the ways in which participants in an online asynchronous postgraduate reading group managed and negotiated their contributions within the discussion. Using the conversation analytic concerns with sequential organisation, adjacency pairs and topicality, this article shows the analytic insights that this perspective can bring to the examination of written asynchronous discourse. The paper shows that in the section of the discussion analysed here, the discourse displayed remarkable similarities to the ways in which face-to-face conversation has been seen to operate in terms of the organisation of conversational turns, the application of specific interactional rights, the lineal development of topics of conversation and the structural use of question-answer turn pairs. The paper concludes by showing how this form of analysis can relate to the formation of reflexive pedagogy in which course design can be created to take account of such findings. It shows how a detailed understanding of how pedagogy is played out in interaction is fundamental for reflecting on the relationship between pedagogic aims and educational practice.