Jisc Change Agent's Network Event

We are really pleased to be attending tomorrow's Jisc Change agent's network event in Birmingham. The event is held over two days and is a chance to hear about projects and meet people that are working on staff/student partnerships to improve innovation in curriculum.

The 2 day networking event showcases examples of change projects from across both the higher education and further education sectors. Our project will be represented on Wednesday 18th March in the session entitled "Market Place- showcasing student innovation".

If you are attending the event, we look forward to seeing you there!

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!

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.

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!

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.

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?

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!

Student Produced Video

Students4WebES update, below is a student produced video about the key points on employability skills from the employers involved in our project.

Video produced by Ben Robb, a media student at Abingdon and Witney College in 2013. Although a bit rough, it shows that employers had similar ideas about what employers think are key employability skills.

The Event Management Team

As part of the Students4webES project, Abingdon & Witney College will be hosting the JISC RSC South East event 'Employability Skills and Technology: Improving Outcomes for Learners' on April 22nd at the Witney Campus. In order to ensure the day is a great success, we have enlisted the help of a group of six 1st year Business Studies students, based on the Witney Campus, to help with the event management.

If you are attending, do look out for the students below who will be on hand to guide conference attendees to the right rooms and to generally ensure the smooth running of the event!

To find out further details about the event click here.

Consent forms and photographs

The first major task for the core group of students involved in the project was to research and produce a consent form for participants in our up and coming webinars. The consent form covers a number of areas, including the recording of webinars for future use and photographs taken during the project.

Students hard at work researching potential employers

Having had signed consent forms back from a number of students, I can post our first photo of students on this blog.

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

Infographic of baseline data on webinars

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

Just getting started...

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Having started our project just over a month ago, on the 15^th October, we have recently recruited a volunteer group of students to work with us on our JISC Advance project – Students4WebES – here at Abingdon & Witney College. Our project is about Webinars and Employability skills and involves Level 3 students.

Our first session with the volunteer students and staff involved in the project, luckily coincided with the JISC online conference – Innovating e-Learning 2012: Shaping the future - which was so helpful when trying to explain what a webinar is and why they are becoming so popular.

We logged into a live session at the conference and briefly discussed what was happening and watched for a short period of time.  This made it so easy for the staff and students to gain a very quick overview of a webinar before attending one of the 3 introductory sessions being run on webinars for all the 2^nd year Level 3 students on our Professional Futures Programme. 

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager