The Use of Reflective Journals to Stimulate Critical Thinking in the Academic Internship

Reflective journals have been widely accepted throughout various educational disciplines for many years as a means of enhancing experiential learning practices. Reflective journals allow for students to gain a better understanding of a given experience and explore the levels of critical thinking as they work through the understanding and learning processes. Critical thinking involves the logical progression from mere knowledge and understanding to the highest levels of synthesis and evaluation. The immediate study presents findings of the analyses of a series of sequential reflective journals presented over the course of a semester-long internship experience. Findings indicate that reflective journals are shown to facilitate progression through the levels of critical thinking as identified in Bloom’s taxonomy and promote a higher level of understanding and application of theoretical concepts to practical experiential learning.     

Using computer generated images and text for the whole of an undergraduate course

Computer generated images are being used to provide text and diagrams for lectures. These images are then openly available to first year undergraduates in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing Systems at the University of Northumbria. A large lecture theatre is fitted with a computer-driven overhead projector and is used to display the files to over one hundred students. The image files and a text file commentary are provided, via automated routines on department computers, for students to copy onto their own discs.
The images are produced in a compressed and self displaying form, allowing all the material for the course to be contained on a single 1.4Mb floppy disc. All the material associated with these lectures is held on magnetic media.
This paper describes the method used, comments on some of the practical problems of using the method, and gives some of the student reaction to it.     

Making sense of learner and learning Big Data: reviewing five years of Data Wrangling at the Open University UK

Most distance learning institutions collect vast amounts of learning data. Making sense of this ‘Big Data’ can be a challenge, in particular when data are stored at different data warehouses and require advanced statistical skills to interpret complex patterns of data. As a leading institute on learning analytics, the Open University UK instigated in 2012 a Data Wrangling initiative. This provided every Faculty with a dedicated academic with expertise data analysis and whose task is to provide strategic, pedagogical and sense-making advice to staff and senior management. Given substantial changes within the OU (e.g. new Faculty structure, real-time dashboards, two large-scale adoptions of predictive analytics approaches, increased reliance on analytics), this embedded case study provides an in-depth review of lessons learned of five years of data wrangling. We will elaborate on the design of the new structure, its strengths and potential weaknesses, and affordances to be adopted by other institutions.