We’re holding a one-day lecture capture conference in the Keith Green Building on July 3rd, with the theme:

Pedagogy, policy and support: taking lecture capture to the next level

The event is intended for academics, learning technologists, IT staff, and A/V managers with an interest in the use of lecture capture and screencasting technologies.

The packed programme will feature a mix of keynote presentations and workshop sessions. The workshops are divided into 2 parallel strands: (a) Pedagogy and Policy; and (b) Support. The latter will feature how-to sessions covering different platforms and technologies.

Confirmed presenters include Steve Rowett, E-learning Developments Team Leader at UCL, and Ian Pearshouse, lecture capture service owner at the University of Nottingham.

The price of the event is £70 for external delegates, with online booking / payment available at

http://store.lboro.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=213&deptid=272&catid=105

10 free places will be reserved for Loughborough staff. If you would like to take up on of these free places, please e-mail me at c.f.g.shields [at] lboro.ac.uk .

Follow @lboroelearning for more details as they become available.

#lborolc13

Three years after it was first piloted, our ReVIEW campus lecture capture service has reached the milestone of 2000 captured lectures on the system, equating to over 4000 hours of content.

My thanks go to colleagues in Teaching Support and IT Services for the great effort they have put into implementing and supporting this technically complex service. The fact that it is being adopted by an increasing number of presenters (from both academic departments and support services) is testament to the way this complexity is hidden from end-users, for whom the process of capturing, editing, publishing and viewing lectures (and other sessions) has been made as easy as possible.

Later in the summer we should be able to announce some significant additions to the features offered by ReVIEW, particularly around in-class engagement.

TurningPoint v5 Dashboard Interface

We will shortly be upgrading to the latest version of TurningPoint, version 5, in all teaching rooms equipped with a podium PC.

If you have content created in earlier versions, you will still be able to use it, but when you open it in v5 you will need to confirm that you are happy to update it to be version 5 compatible. Once you do this you will no longer be able to open it up in earlier versions so do remember to upgrade your own computers/laptops to the latest version.

TurningPoint 5 features a new dashboard interface for polling in PowerPoint (most commonly used), polling in any application and self-paced polling.

The Teaching Centre has now advertised for an intern, with further information regarding the post available at https://vacancies.lboro.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID%3d1720181H3O%1B&WVID=5913100PrZ&LANG=USA

The post is fixed-term for one year and this vacancy is only open to current Loughborough University students who are graduating this academic year.

The successful candidate will have a particular role to play in supporting e-learning initiatives, in particular around the further use of lecture capture. We’re really looking forward to having within the team someone with very recent experience of being a student here and who is therefore able to represent the views of students.

(This post follows on from the Free tools for Teaching – name randomiser post.)

Here Radmehr Monfared talks about how he uses the free Doodle scheduling tool to organise lab sessions:

Have you ever set up lab sessions for students when there are many sessions but each student has to attend only one? You usually end up with one very busy session and a number of quiet ones.

Some lecturers balance the numbers into groups (forcefully) and if someone complains then they deal with it. However, I realised that if you give choice to students they usually are free for more than one session. Then I can balance the lab load based on their availability.

Doodle Scheduling http://www.doodle.com/ is exactly the tool for this sort of case and is free. I have been using this for many years for arranging meetings and scheduling personal events. However I used it last term for balancing my lab sessions. Most students are familiar with this website and I had no problem collecting data and compiling my lab time table.

Before using it, I checked with IT to see if there is any equivalent tool in the university, but there was none at the time.

This is how it works – You arrange your available lab times in the columns of a table on the web and email the link to students. Students add their name and tick the time slots that they can attend. Then based on availability you distribute students equally within the lab sessions. It worked great for me in the last term.

There are various other mechanisms that you could use for this purpose (including the Face-to-face activity in Learn / Moodle) but Doodle has the benefits of being simple, effective and familiar to many students.

Dr Radmehr Monfared is a Lecturer in Intelligent Automation within the Wolfson School. In conversation with a Teaching Centre colleague Radmehr mentioned a couple of free online tools he has been using to support his teaching. Here is Radmehr describing the first scenario:

It is always a dilemma how to choose a student to answer a question while maintaining the fairness and equal opportunity to everyone, and also not making the student nervous.

I have come across the “name randomiser” idea many years ago. The idea is to rotate through the students’ names on the screen and randomly stop at one name.

This has been proved an ice breaker and a fun activity, while that chosen person has to answer the question. Students certainly like it.

Back in the days when our lecture rooms didn’t have internet access, I use to use a simple VB program that did the job for me, but filling the student list was a problem.

But these days, I use the following website, which is fun (with lots of interesting noises) to take pressure/stress off from the students.

http://www.classtools.net/education-games-php/fruit_machine   The advantage is that I can copy and paste the student list from my excel sheet very easily.  

Another one that I particularly like and used is   http://primaryschoolict.com/random-name-selector/  . This one also allows running a timer for students to answer the question.

[The latter is the tool shown in the screenshot above and it's interesting to note that it was intended for primrary school use but can be useful even in HE!]