Friday 11 June 2010

Assessment and Feedback/Creativity session - Economics

Catherine O'Donnell, Roisin Curran, Karen Virapen and Jill Harrison today delivered a workshop session looking at assessment and feedback strategies and creativity in the curriculum. This session was delivered to staff from the School of Economics.

The group wanted to focus around the first year experience, particularly looking at assessment and feedback strategies for this group. They have some retention and student engagement issues with first years, so are keen to revise their curricula. They also need an overall look at their course strategy in preparation for revalidation next year, and so Roisin Curran gave them a talk on how they could bring creativity to their courses.

Some groups were initially unconvinced as to the merits of using the workshop approach in revising their assessment and feedback strategy, but by the end of the process all the groups were able to come up with a suggested plan to move forward and revise their courses for students.

Slides for this session are available here:

Wednesday 9 June 2010

Elluminate online seminar



Viewpoints today hosted an online seminar (using Elluminate software). The aim of this session was to tell interested parties more about the work of Viewpoints.

This Elluminate session gave a brief overview of the Viewpoints project, our key objectives, and the tools that we aim to produce. It described our tool framework and planned project outputs and touched on the possible benefits of our approach to curriculum design.

Participants were able to view some sample workshop materials and a walkthrough of our planned online tool functionality.

Two interactive activities during the session allowed participants to try out the workshop approach for themselves.

Viewpoints also shared user experiences to date by demonstrating a range of 'user stories' in video, audio, photo and quote form.

The session covered the work done to embed Viewpoints tools within our institution, and ended with a discussion of future directions and a structured question and answer session.

To watch the recording of the Elluminate session, click on the link below (warning: this will launch a Java-based application for Elluminate)

Viewpoints archived recording, Elluminate online seminar

You can also watch the user videos that were shown as part of this session: