Associate Lecturer Development Conference – LSE, April 2015
Wednesday, 29 Apr 2015, 12:07
Visible to anyone in the world
This is a quick blog about an AL development conference I attended on 25 April at the London School of Economics. I was looking forward to this event because I helped to put together parts of the programme. Plus, I foolishly volunteered to run a session and facilitate the Mathematics Computing and Technology session. It was destined to be a busy day.
The keynote talk was by my colleague Pat Atkins who presented a summary of some of the changes that were happening across the university. These included a gradual alignment of associate lecturer contracts to various student support teams, and the introduction of a new group tuition policy, which is likely to substantially affect both tutors and module teams.
Other sessions
I helped to ‘pull together’ three AL development sessions during this conference. After being inspired by ‘acting’ sessions that had been organised by colleagues from the South East region, I discovered that I knew someone who offered training to deal with difficult telephone calls.
Another session was about working with different pieces of technology (which was facilitated by two experienced technology associate lecturers).
The third session was about working with students who have visual impairments. I remember that the tutor, Richard Walker (who ran a similar session last year) saying that there is likely to be a high probability that every associate lecturer will have to work with a student who has a visual impairment at some point.
Other sessions at the conference were about working with students who have English as a second language and a session about the role of the advisors in the London region.
The main purpose of this blog is, however, to present a quick summary of the session on OU Live Pedagogy that I ran.
The pedagogy of OU Live
For the uninitiated, OU Live can be thought of a bit like a version of Skype that has a whole load of other features, such as a shared whiteboard, and tools that enables a tutor to ask students different questions. It also enables tutors to share portions of their screen, so students can see exactly what a tutor sees.
I think I was inspired to run this session by going to a number of other similar sounding sessions over the last few years. A thought was, ‘what could I add to the debates about OU Live that I haven’t already heard’. I had two objectives for my session. The first objective was to share some of my own views about what it means to teach (or to facilitate learning) through OU Live. The second objective was to share experience and practice. Or, put another way, to learn about how different tutors use it to teach different modules.
A big part of the session was drawn from an earlier blog post where I wrote about the different ways to use OU Live. For this session, I renamed a couple of the approaches. The approaches that I talked about were:
Traditional tutorial: which is similar to a face to face session
Demonstration tutorial: where a tutor demonstrates something, such as a set of pages or some software.
Practical workshop: a session where a tutor puts a lot of focus into a product, tool, system, or activity.
Debate: an interactive debate between two tutors.
Recording a lecture: a short lecture which potentially augments materials provided by the module team, or to offer further explanations.
Drop-in session: an informal scheduled time where students can interact with a tutor and ask questions.
Student session: a scheduled but unfacilitated session that allow students on the same module to chat to each other.
Special (or additional support) session: a one to one session between a student and a tutor.
These ‘types’ are very informal. I’ve created these types by trying to summarise all the different ways I’ve heard people talking about how they use OU Live. It isn’t systematic, and it isn’t informed by theory; this rough taxonomy (of you could call it that) is more informed by the sharing of practice.
An important point that I made during the session is that, in some ways, technology moves a lot faster than pedagogy. Tools such as OU Live offer us tutors a lot of different features. The challenge is trying to figure out how to use them in the best possible way to make sure that students can learn efficiently. It’s tempting to use these tools to just deliver dry lectures, where there are sets of PowerPoint slides. The real challenge (from where we can create really engaging learning experiences) is to understand how to apply these tools to enable active learning.
Final thoughts
I always enjoy coming along to AL development events, and this one was also fun too: I enjoy running sessions! The next conference is likely to take place in November 2015 in the Camden Town centre.
There’s going to be a couple of months off, before the conference planning group starts thinking about the next event. (And, in the meantime, I’m going to take the liberty to visit the Oxford region to see what they’re doing).
Associate Lecturer Development Conference – LSE, April 2015
This is a quick blog about an AL development conference I attended on 25 April at the London School of Economics. I was looking forward to this event because I helped to put together parts of the programme. Plus, I foolishly volunteered to run a session and facilitate the Mathematics Computing and Technology session. It was destined to be a busy day.
The keynote talk was by my colleague Pat Atkins who presented a summary of some of the changes that were happening across the university. These included a gradual alignment of associate lecturer contracts to various student support teams, and the introduction of a new group tuition policy, which is likely to substantially affect both tutors and module teams.
Other sessions
I helped to ‘pull together’ three AL development sessions during this conference. After being inspired by ‘acting’ sessions that had been organised by colleagues from the South East region, I discovered that I knew someone who offered training to deal with difficult telephone calls.
Another session was about working with different pieces of technology (which was facilitated by two experienced technology associate lecturers).
The third session was about working with students who have visual impairments. I remember that the tutor, Richard Walker (who ran a similar session last year) saying that there is likely to be a high probability that every associate lecturer will have to work with a student who has a visual impairment at some point.
Other sessions at the conference were about working with students who have English as a second language and a session about the role of the advisors in the London region.
The main purpose of this blog is, however, to present a quick summary of the session on OU Live Pedagogy that I ran.
The pedagogy of OU Live
For the uninitiated, OU Live can be thought of a bit like a version of Skype that has a whole load of other features, such as a shared whiteboard, and tools that enables a tutor to ask students different questions. It also enables tutors to share portions of their screen, so students can see exactly what a tutor sees.
I think I was inspired to run this session by going to a number of other similar sounding sessions over the last few years. A thought was, ‘what could I add to the debates about OU Live that I haven’t already heard’. I had two objectives for my session. The first objective was to share some of my own views about what it means to teach (or to facilitate learning) through OU Live. The second objective was to share experience and practice. Or, put another way, to learn about how different tutors use it to teach different modules.
A big part of the session was drawn from an earlier blog post where I wrote about the different ways to use OU Live. For this session, I renamed a couple of the approaches. The approaches that I talked about were:
These ‘types’ are very informal. I’ve created these types by trying to summarise all the different ways I’ve heard people talking about how they use OU Live. It isn’t systematic, and it isn’t informed by theory; this rough taxonomy (of you could call it that) is more informed by the sharing of practice.
An important point that I made during the session is that, in some ways, technology moves a lot faster than pedagogy. Tools such as OU Live offer us tutors a lot of different features. The challenge is trying to figure out how to use them in the best possible way to make sure that students can learn efficiently. It’s tempting to use these tools to just deliver dry lectures, where there are sets of PowerPoint slides. The real challenge (from where we can create really engaging learning experiences) is to understand how to apply these tools to enable active learning.
Final thoughts
I always enjoy coming along to AL development events, and this one was also fun too: I enjoy running sessions! The next conference is likely to take place in November 2015 in the Camden Town centre.
There’s going to be a couple of months off, before the conference planning group starts thinking about the next event. (And, in the meantime, I’m going to take the liberty to visit the Oxford region to see what they’re doing).