A training presentation for Officers of the Union of Students of Ireland, July 2013

1. Learning Technologies,
Current Debates and Barriers
Presentation to Union of Students of Ireland
Waterford Institute of Technology
Brian Mulligan,
Centre for Online Learning, IT Sligo
11am, 18th July 2013
View live at:
http://itsligo.adobeconnect.com/bmulligan

2. What’s wrong with Higher
Education?
You can learn anything online!
Do we even need higher education?

3. Why use learning
technologies?
 To reduce costs and lecturer hours
 To improve the quality of learning.
 To stop wasting students’ time
 To diagnose and assist
underperforming students
 To improve access
 To prepare students for lifelong
learning

4. Costs
Access
Quality

5. Tools and Techniques
 Electronic resources
 Interactive multimedia
◦ Simulations
 Online collaboration tools
 Online submissions and feedback
◦ Including plagiarism detection
 Automated and Peer assessment
 Live online classes
 Lecture Capture
 Open Educational Resources
 Virtual Learning Environments
 The “flipped” classroom
 Learning Analytics

6. Interactive multimedia
 “click to continue”
 Simple to sophisticated
 Branching/Adaptive systems
 Simulations

7. Electronic resources
 Websites
 Documents
 videos (youtube)

8. Online collaboration
 Group projects – Peer support
 “Asynchronous “ discussions
 Shared documents
◦ Google Docs, Dropbox
 Meeting rooms (Google hangouts)

9. Online submissions and
feedback
 Allows for fast grading and feedback
 Can include plagiarism detection
◦ Eg Turnitin

10. Automated and Peer
assessment
 “objective” tests (MC quizzes)
 Automated essay marking (?)
 Students marking each other
◦ Quite reliable

11. Live online classes
 Skype of steroids
 Can be recorded

12. Lecture
Capture
 Easy recording and publishing of
screen and audio
 In the background during lectures
 Works well with electronic whiteboard.
 Great for:
◦ Difficult topics (can take slowly and
repeat)
◦ Studying and revision
◦ Mature students with difficult schedules

13. Open Educational Resources
OER
 Includes MOOCs
◦ Massive Open Online Courses
◦ Coursera etc.
◦ Some institutions offering assessment
and credit.
 Free materials
◦ Including free textbooks and research
publications
◦ Eg. Khan Academy

14. Virtual Learning Environments
 Moodle, Blackboard etc
 Just platforms to put materials up on
 Not all that different from each other.

15. The “flipped” classroom
 Lecture taken outside of class.
 Homework done in class.

16. Learning Analytics
 Coming soon!
 With large numbers of users
 Can prove what works
 Can automatically adjust.

17. Current debates
 Ireland
◦ How to get more education online
◦ How to get lecturers to use more learning
technologies
 Worldwide
◦ Free online learning
◦ Quality
◦ Competency Based Accreditation
◦ Disaggregation
◦ Getting institutions to change
◦ Private vs Public
◦ Competition and failure

18. Barriers in Ireland
 Institutional inagility
 Lack of knowledge
 Lack of competition
 Vested interests

19. Thank you!
Discussion – Questions.
Contact: mulligan.brian@itsligo.ie