Blended Learning Symposium 2011

Education providers all over the world are preparing themselves to exploit the wonderful new opportunities for learning that the digital and new media environments offer. However, matching opportunity to needs and missions in fast moving situations is far from easy. Professor Salmon shares approaches to enhancing learning through frameworks and students engagement, and also takes a more radical look over the horizon at where the clouds of technologies are gathering.

Welcome Address and Opening Remarks

This presentation will explore the use of student video presentations as an assessment of oral presentation skills. Ms Jenny Dickfoss will share her experience of implementing this blended learning tool in a large class. Ms Catherine Hodgson will discuss the requisite hardware and software, support resources and mechanisms necessary for the success of the project.

Feedforward is an educational strategy focusing not just on post-facto written feedback, but on providing students with prior exposure to and prior practice with assessment in order to develop a clear sense of expectations and standards. In this presentation we will discuss our experience with feedforward strategies in a distance blended learning context across a range of platforms and strategies including feedforward in course content, audio visual lectures, online submission and track changes, marking protocols and wimba.

The interest in student response systems (or clickers) in traditional classrooms has increased in recent years. Coupled with the increased use of mobile devices on campus, SEET saw an opportunity to develop and implement a mobile polling solution that could solve some the problems associated with traditional clicker devices. This presentation will discuss experiences in implementing and using a polling tool that uses the students' own mobile device. It will also cover feedback received from the Academic community and future plans for the tool.

The use of e-learning tools in higher education is rapidly growing in both quantity and quality to enhance blended learning. Although students generally perceive e-learning resources to be valuable for their learning, many published studies reveal that currently available e-learning tools provide little educational benefit. It is hypothesised that their lack of educational benefit may be attributed to their design not being governed by any relevant pedagogy or teaching theories. Therefore, the need for well-designed studies to identify the relevant pedagogy for the development of e-tools, and to better understand the relationship between the defined pedagogy, the educational objectives and specific elements of e-tools in improving student learning is a pressing need in the current educational context.