Category Archives: Higher Education

Digifest 2019

My aims for Digifest (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/digifest-12-mar-2019) were to find out A bit more about digital literacy and initiatives to improve digital skills Horizon scanning – what’s coming up? How Microsoft Teams (and other Microsoft offering for education) are being used Joel Bloomfield from Microsoft talked about Microsoft’s ambitions for the future

We are the very model of a modern university

We are the very model of a modern university

We come from many disciplines and represent diversity

We know the kings of England, and we order books historical

And digital resources, too, in order categorical

We’re very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,

We understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,

We teach and offer services financial and professional

About our student outcomes we are more or less obsessional

——-
We’re very good at teaching and supporting learners earnestly

Yet due to UUK and their new pension scheme perversity

We face retirement poverty and monet’ry adversity

We are the very model of a modern university

——

We spend our time in labs elucidating vital science

Yet today we’re here on picket lines expressing our defiance

Now you’d think the brightest minds deserve the best in actuarial

But when I see the calculations they just make me very ill

We’ve come from health and geography, the arts and sociology

The least that USS can do is offer an apology

To researchers and admin staff, to IT and careers folk

It seems that UUK see us as little more than just a joke

You’d think that our hard work would earn us thanks and good intentions

But it seems our dedication now is hardly worth a mention, so

We face retirement poverty and monet’ry adversity

What IS the very model of a modern university?

Sustainability, Society and You and more MOOCs

This November starts several new initiatives for me. Sustainability, Society and You The Sustainability, Society and You MOOC #freeonlinecourse on FutureLearn started yesterday. Six weeks of learning and sharing about sustainable lifestyles, individual, group, neighbourhood, national and global level.  I’ve supported this MOOC, for lead educator Prof Sarah Speight, since

Is completion necessary for MOOC participants?

I really am not sure that it matters that a lot of the participants in MOOCs do not officially “complete”. Yet a lot of the furore around MOOCs centres on the fact that only a small proportion of the students actually complete the course. I’d like to argue that it isn’t necessary for students to complete the MOOC to get something out of it.

Legitimate peripheral participation (lurking!) is a phenomenon that has been studied in traditional online courses and communities and is particularly relevant in MOOCs. Someone like myself may well join a MOOC and take from it what I need and have time to get, and be perfectly satisfied with the learning I have achieved, yet perhaps not have completed very many assessment activities or indeed any at all.

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