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Cathy Gormly-Heenan: Auditing materials

Page history last edited by Anna Gruszczynska 13 years, 5 months ago

1. Project co-ordinator (D Marsh) visit to C Gormly-Heenan, 15th June 2009, Ulster University (Jordanstown)

 

Cathy: sample materials audit

 

Mentioned ECPR conference in September, Cathy doing a panel on teaching politics.

 

PSA also running a joint teaching day / C-SAP open day 8-9th Sept in Leeds.

 

At Ulster, Cathy is Faculty T&L co-ordinator, which gives her a seat on the Uni T&L committee. She is also currently chair of faculty retention board, also a member of the new Centre for Higher Education Practice.

 

At Ulster all new staff go though post grad cert in HE, route into HEA fellowship – also SEDA accredited at Ulster.

 

VLE at Ulster is WebCT. Cathy has had support in the past from Kenny? in IT services, with producing Camtasia video introductions to modules.

A typical module for OER – Introduction to Govt and Politics, 20 credits @ level 1. A mix of materials – weekly lectures, short video material, reading lists, formative exercises, discussion groups.

 

Cathy uses discussion groups in VLE for each module.

 

State Crime will be another candidate – 20 credits @ level 2. Similar structure and mix of materials, PDF versions of powerpoints.

When thinking about the quantities of materials to be release, bear in mind 3 x 20 credit modules might = 30 ppt files alone (typical 10 / 11 week lectures) – if each takes a couple of hours to work on, 30 * 2 = 60 hours approx, 8 / 9 days of project time. May not amount to this, and different for other partners depending on material, but should be prepared for time involved.

 

She has also been involved in a Social Science Study Skills module, rolled out to 1st years alongside their other modules. This was felt to be important as it was implemented in part solution to the issue of retention, however after evaluation it was noted that students overestimated their study skills, and neglected to use the material as it was seen as too generic. Cathy also suggests that study skills delivered as blot-ons are not most effective practice.

 

However as part of this resource there is a useful camtasia package on working with citations, and also a similar resource on plagiarism. At Ulster all modules are linked to Turnitin and students required to submit work through this. There are also an increasing number of tools incorporated into WebCT (such as Wimba podcasting) which appear – would be interested in using but no roll out of support or information about them.

So possible materials again: 

 

  • State Crime
  • Introduction to govt and politics
  • Govt and Politics in UK

 

When thinking about the issue of releasing credit-equivalent material, the assessment methods and weighting determine the credit, not the ‘amount’ of content itself. Are downloads or ‘raw’ notes actually of much use to anyone (i.e. MIT example from any opencourseware material, good amount of materials but typically lecture notes are bullet points from a script, how would one re-use?)

 

In fact Cathy compare MIT online to a module handbook, useful but no ‘instruction’ on how to teach the material (again coming back to tacit practice). Cathy often finds module course description documents in Google if wanting to compare.

 

*Should we make open module descriptions also? If partners are offering material from a specific module, it would be good to at least have from the module handbook: 

 

  • Summary of the aims
  • Learning outcomes
  • Teaching methods
  • Assessment (methods, essay questions)

 

Cathy noted that one of the most problematic issues for staff when developing a new module is not the content so much as the appropriate wording for the learning outcomes – so sharing these along with content would be useful, and would feed into any pedagogic framework for re-use.

 

Cathy also spoke with her HOD, Paul Carmichael, who also teaches on the Introductory module and is happy to be involved / permit participation in the work. During my visit we also visited the Access and Distributed Learning team, who develop a number of courses specifically for online delivery as part of the Ulster ‘campusone’ platform. There could be opportunities here to harness some development expertise, also potentially there are social science materials (such as introduction to quants methods) which would be useful, though under the terms of our funding we could not ‘buy’ these materials on licence.

 

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