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!

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

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!

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.

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.

Prezi presentation from ALT-C

Below is the Prezi that Ellen and I presented during Nigel Ecclesfield's session 'A year of activity and innovation in the FE and Skills Sector: looking back to tomorrow' at the ALT-C conference.

JISC Online Innovation Forum

Tomorrow (Friday 10th May) is the JISC Online Innovation Forum. We will be presenting during one of the sessions, talking about the role of web conferencing to boost employability.  Myself and three students involved in the project will be presenting. To find out more about the event and details on how to log into the forum click on the link below.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2013/05/rscinnovationforum.aspx

We will be in the Green Room presenting from 1:00pm, hope to see you there!

Post by:
Emma Procter-Legg
Project Manager

Students' Top Tips for Running a Webinar

Below is the student produced guide to webinars that was produced as part of the Students4webES project.

A pdf copy of the poster is available on our project website to download. Click here to visit the website, scroll down the resources page until you see the poster section, see image below, then click download on the final version called StudentguideFinal.pdf.

Leave us a comment and let us know what you think of the poster!

Prezi presentation

Students4webES Project featured in the Oxford Times

Once a month the Oxford Times produce a business supplement, In Business, which was included in this week's Oxford Times. The February edition includes an article on our project, on the bottom of page 7.

Do check it out if you get a chance, here is a link to the online version of In Business.

The Spa at the Lygon Arms Webinar

Alice Walker, Head Therapist at the Spa at the Lygon Arms, Broadway part of the Puma Hotel Group, participated in our second student run webinar. Alice took part in the webinar by logging onto a computer at the Witney campus of Abingdon & Witney College, whilst the students running it were at the Abingdon campus.  A group of beauty students and their lecturers from the college also participated in the webinar from another room, asking a number of questions via the chat window.

Alice Walker, Head Therapist at the Spa at the Lygon Arms

Abey took the role of speaker which involved introducing and thanking Alice for her participation in the webinar.

Whilst Armna took the role of moderator.

Although this was our second student run webinar it was the first time either student had been involved in running one with an employer.

Below is a recording of the webinar, which proved to be a great success not only for the core students running the webinar but also for the beauty students participating in it. The beauty students had so many questions to ask that we stopped the recording and allowed them to continue their conversation with Alice.

Waitrose webinar

Last week Linda Phillips, HR manager at Waitrose Abingdon, participated in a webinar with students from Abingdon and Witney College.

Linda Phillips, HR manager, Waitrose Abingdon

Linda and her colleague Gen Allen visited the Abingdon campus to take part in the webinar and to meet staff and students involved in the project.

Gen Allen

Linda was supported by Ben during the webinar, one of three students involved in running the webinar.

To see more about the 'behind the scenes' running of this webinar check out our other blog post by clicking here and do watch the recording of the webinar below!

The importance of consent forms

A while back we wrote a blog post on consent forms and photographs, where we mentioned the need for consent forms from all project participants.

One of the early tasks that we gave students involved in the Students4webES project was to research and produce a draft consent form. We then checked it over before asking them all to sign it as well as all of the employers involved in the webinars. We have found that it is best to send the consent form out at the same time as sending the employers further details about the format of the webinar and general information about the project.

Below is a video of one of the students talking about the importance of the consent form for our project.

Featured in the Oxford Mail newspaper

Students4webES project is featured in today's Oxford Mail newspaper on page 12!

If you don't mange to get hold of a copy of today's edition, check out the link below to read the article in full. 
Link to article on the Oxford Mail website

And the snow keeps falling!

Before the snow arrived on Friday morning we made a back up plan for our Project Steering Committee Meeting which is scheduled for tomorrow at Abingdon and Witney College. Our plan is that if people attending the meeting get snowed in, rather than letting our meeting be snowed off we will meet online instead in a webinar.

We have a Blackboard Collaborate session set up should we need to use it for some or all of the attendees - the agenda, project leader's report and project manager's report have all been sent out by email so we are fully ready for more snow! If we do have to go with plan B the only thing that will have to be put on ice is the cake - it might have to be a case of BYOC (Bring Your Own Cake) tomorrow!

View of my garden... and the snow keeps falling!


Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

A few photos on PhotoPeach

Students4webES project photos on PhotoPeach



A few photos from the project meetings and advanced webinar training sessions. If your computer doesn't display the PhotoPeach please click here to see it.

Happy New Year - 1 month of blogging

Having started the project blog at the end of November, now seems like the the ideal time to write a quick update about the blog, with the New Year only hours away.
To date we have had over 300 views with visitors from around the world following our progress.

Currently our most popular post is 'Infographic of baseline data on webinars' which has some great stats about students use of and access to technology and their knowledge (or lack of) about webinars, if you haven't seen it why not check it out!

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

First batch of letters are in the post!

As part of the Students4webES project, the core group of students have been compiling a list of employers that they would like to run webinars with. As the project is about employability skills, we tasked them with drafting a letter, initially written by one student and then reviewed by the rest of the core group. After a few tweaks here and there by the Project Manager and Project Lead, the first batch of letters were dropped in the post today.
The bulk of the letters will be sent out in early January, followed by phone calls to arrange dates for the webinars which will take place during January and February. We will keep you posted on our progress!

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager