December 15, 2014, by Teaching at Nottingham

UNNC Small Teaching Development Grant successes

Professor Julie Sanders: “We are delighted to announce that the successful proposals for the 2014-15 UNNC Small Teaching and Learning Development Grant (STL) have been selected, with project ideas ranging from navigational design on Moodle and app for supporting student note-making. You can read about the successful applicants and their projects below.

App development for supporting student note-making practices
Dr Paul Martin, Dr Fillipo Gllardi, Dr Dave Towey, Dr Andy White, Mr David Foster, Dr Cecilia Goria

This project will develop a mobile app to be used by researchers and students in developing teaching practice, assisting students in their note-making, and facilitating research on student learning practices. The app will enable students to make multimedia notes and share these with classmates and tutors. As well as benefitting students, this will facilitate developments in teaching practice, for example enabling tutors to make use of students’ notes during seminars. Because student notes will be potentially available for researchers (with students’ permission) the app will also allow researchers to investigate how students use lectures and conduct research.

Campus of Code
Mr Paul Dempster

Raising awareness of what computer programming is and providing the general population with a pathway into learning programming skills are topics currently receiving significant attention. Programming is increasingly seen both as an underpinning of how modern society functions, and as a “general skills” subject along the lines of the perception of mathematics.

This project creates a lightweight umbrella organisation, Campus of Code, aimed at all students, which will raise awareness of programming activities on campus, offer a practical pathway into programming skills via taught workshops, and provide a pedagogical opportunity for CS students to act as tutors.

Collaborative Navigational Design on Moodle for interactive distributive learning: doing it with the students
Mrs Marion Sadoux, Mr Joaquin Lopez, Mrs Mizuho Jones, Dr Dorota Rzycka

This project aims to develop and enhance the Language Centre use of Moodle in partnership with students. Our objective will be to identify joint solutions to optimise and harmonise the way in which we use and design on Moodle across a wide range of modules often taught by a large number of tutors.

The use of a Learning Management Systems such as Moodle plays a potentially crucial role in language learning. In languages, we seek to develop skills and competences rather than content knowledge. The ability to review and develop upon class based tuition, to put language into use beyond the classroom are just as essential as the independent development of life long language learning skills through digital literacies. Key to this development is the way in which materials and activities are structured on Moodle through agile and accessible use of navigational design. This is proving particularly challenging for larger multiple tutor modules where a current lack of coherent learning pathways is limiting both tutor and student appropriation of learning and threatening to reduce the use of the LMS to that of a repository. Furthermore disparities in structural design and approach from one module to the next may hinder learning and engagement. We need to develop more harmony so that as our students progress from module to module they are able to experience a coherent and progressive approach to blended learning.

Our project also seeks to explore, through its student-led approach to design, the drivers and constraints of distributive learning in a culturally diverse context where current “western” theories and design practices may need readjusting. In this sense the outcome of this project will propose a better understanding and approach to Blended Learning for other schools in UNNC but also for other campuses of the University of Nottingham.

Teaching and Learning Enhancement Office
The University of Nottingham Ningbo China

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