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The following is sparked by Twitter conversations arising from a tweet from @neilmosley5 quoting from this article by Tony Bates. In particular, pondering a tweet from @gamerlearner where the idea is that a "consistent requirement for educators in HE to have some kind of formal teaching qual" will not only help motivate academics "to take time out to learn how to teach better" and generally value teaching more....more...
Benbya et al (2020, p. 3) argue that digitial technologies do make a difference, including this point (among others)...more...
In late 2018 I started work at an institution using Blackboard Learn. My first project helping "put online" a group of 7 courses highlighted just how ugly Blackboard sites could be and how hard it was to do anything about it. By January 2019 I shared the solution I'd developed - the Card Interface. Below is a before/after image illustrating how the Card Interface 'tweaks' a standard Blackboard Learn content area into something more visual and contemporary. To do this you add some provided Javascript to the page and then add some card meta data to the other items....more...
In learning what matters most is what the learner does. As people looking to help people learn we can't make them learn. The best we can do is to create learning situations - see Goodyear, Carvalho & Yeoman (2021) for why I'm using situation and not environment. We design the task, the learning space and social organisation (alone, pairs, groups etc.) that make up the situation in which they will engage in some activity. Hopefully activity that will lead to the learning outcomes we had in mind when designing the situation....more...