Transcript of MP3 Audio File Presentation by Amanda Oddie, Liverpool Hope University


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Right, at Liverpool Hope we've been involved in two projects. One that we're actually leading and is in conjunction with Bolton, St Helens and Phosperix is carrying on from one that we did last year, which was the SLIDe Project, and the aim of the LD4P is to look at the RELOAD Editor from a practitioner's point of view and actually establish if it is user friendly. Can it be made more user-friendly for uptake with practitioners?

So, what we’re actually doing is running some workshops - in total there'll be four workshops with practitioners in HE and FE. In HE, we've got people from psychology, media, and computing; and in FE, we've got people from science, art, and hairdressing. So lots of different curriculums. What we're doing is running workshops with those groups of practitioners and doing an initial survey questionnaire about the interface and how easy they found to do the workshop with RELOAD.

We're producing some prototypes - Liverpool Hope are producing some prototypes - in conjunction with Phosperix. Then we're going to actually use those prototypes with the practitioners again and get their opinion; and obviously that's an iterative cycle until we find a prototype that we think that we're happy with as one of the problems that we have found is that most practitioners found RELOAD difficult to use; and obviously if we want it to have an uptake in HE and FE, the software needs to be quick and user friendly.

What else are we doing? We're producing different learning designs, so as I said we've got HE and FE and got different disciplines. That's because so far, we'd only used it with computing people, who have got some technical expertise anyway, and we wanted to try it with different disciplines and obviously see how those practitioners found it; and also they'll be teaching different types of content using different pedagogical approaches, and we wanted to see if they found it suitable for their classes. That's really what we're... we're only up to the workshop stage at the moment, so over the next year, that's what we're going to be doing.

[Points to slide] That's actually just a screen shot of one learning design that we've done. That's actually a Masters Multimedia course that I run - so that's an LD that I've produced.

As well as the two projects that we're doing with JISC, we're also looking at being able to deliver our whole MSc Computing course fully online using IMS LD. The reason we've done that is we're obviously trying to promote the uptake within our University because we've seen its benefits. It's actually enabled us to map different pedagogical approaches that we want to use. At the moment. our institution is tied into a VLE called Learnwise and a lot of the staff aren't happy with that, because the technology is forcing them to teach in a certain way, because the technology itself is quite limiting and the practitioners that we spoke to so far have actually found RELOAD to be quite useful in letting them be flexible with the teaching approaches that they want but difficult to use. So we're trying to address the second issue because obviously they are seeing the benefits of the IMS LD spec.

The second project that we're involved in is being led by the OU and the OUNL and that's actually looking at CopperCore and the SLeD engine, because originally when we did the SLIDe Project, what we found was that the CopperCore engine and the SLeD player were unstable. And I did actually run a course with students at undergraduate level last year and it was more a blended course and I was also attending lectures. It wasn't fully online, which was a good job because the software actually kept falling over. The SLeD was unreliable and once a certain amount of users had logged in and had been on for a while, it would start kicking them all out and not going through the learning design properly.

So the purpose of the D4LD is to actually provide access to the LD courses for students by making the CopperCore engine and the SLeD more reliable and we've actually done that. They've done that over the summer, because obviously we're teaching with it now so we needed that issue addressed as a priority; and we have found now that it's not falling over, it's not logging out the users or anything like that. It's actually a lot more stable and it's quicker, because the system last year was slowing down so they've done quite a lot of work in the OU on addressing the CopperCore and SLeD issues, which has been very good 'cos so far we've had no problems with the students.

Obviously we're going to be running lots of different learning designs now, because of the three projects we're involved in - two with JISC. We're going to run lots of different learning designs using this. The partners in HE and FE that we've got for our other project are actually going to be using this live with students next year as well. So as well as the MSc Computing going online, we'll have lots of different disciplines using it online with different practitioners. So we should be able to get lots of feedback from the practitioners in terms of our interface design, but also from the students about their experience and how they found doing the courses in this way. And a lot of our students have already been exposed to Learnwise, so it also provides us with the opportunity to get a comparison there as well to see if they found any differences with the system.

And finally [points to slide] that's just what the students see. This is the SLeD Player. We've changed a few colours and things like that (interface styles to suit ourselves), but that's in essence what the students see and that's been made more reliable. Part of the OU and OUNL's work is also to look at this in terms of its interface design, so not just the stability but also the user interface design from a student's point of view - if they can change preferences, how things are seen. At the moment, there are a couple of problems really that come from the spec - in that when they do things like quizzes or fill in details in forms they have to click "OK" after every single question, after every single input - which isn't user friendly to the students and some of them do forget and so you have to remind them so they go back and fill it in properly. So the OU and the OUNL are addressing those issues over this semester, so hopefully when we start running our new LDs after Christmas, some of the issues are addressed for the students. So that's really where we are.