Netskills workshop

This morning I am in Newcastle, going through the elements which make up the task that I will be asking the participants at the Netskills workshop to do. Last week I did the workshop in Oxford at the same event, it went very well and we have received some really positive feedback. 

The workshop element that I am running is on WebPA (of course). While thinking what we could do, I decided that we would take a model used at Loughborough within the peer assessment workshops run, but not look at all the types of peer assessment. One of the reasons for not looking at all the types of peer assessment is due to the limitation on time, I have one hour.

So in the hour that we have, I have a quick presentation, covering the background and where WebPA comes from. Then I introduce the task... in this case I am asking them to produce a poster in groups on the Student Learning Experience (the main thread of the days workshops). I have a set of users who they become as this takes the edge of when they have to fill in the assessment.

Again today I hope that Sharon Waller can mark the posters, before all the participants come back together. Once back together, we collaboratively set the parameters for the assessment and look at the reports generated.

Last time Martin from the Economics Subject Centre came out as top student! As Martin is going to be there again to day I hope he is not top student again. When I originally thought about this work shop I thought of giving out chocolates as a prize, but this then adds a competitive edge and detracts from peer moderated marking and takes us more in to game theory. So no chocolates, but we will identify the top student, but we wont identify the worst, even hiding under alias' its not fair to pick on one person.

In Oxford everyone seemed to enjoy the ask and being a student again. By doing this they are seeing the student perspective and experiencing what the put students through (even if it is only an hour). After to day, I will put more information on running a workshop on the projects web site for others to pick up and use.

A busy time...

As a project we received some really good news over the weekend. A paper we submitted has been accepted, a part from some edits we need to make from the reviewers comments. Of course when the paper is officially published I will provide the citation for it.

However, this news has impacted my already busy week some. I need to turn the edits around quickly. As on Wednesday I am in Oxford at a Netskills workshop, then Thursday and Friday I am at the ACED Conference. Both are representing the project. The Netskills workshop should be fun, I will be getting the participants to create a poster on a given topic and then mark themselves and their team mates using the WebPA tool. We will not be comparing different peer moderated marking techniques as we don't really have time in 1 hour.

Thursday and Friday, are very different though. I only have 20 minutes to provide an over view of WebPA. This time thought the focus is quite particular, civil engineering. So I will be providing two case studies, where WebPA is used at Loughborough. I am currently not aware of any other institution using WebPA in civil engineering, though it would be nice to compare.

Next week will also prove to be busy and interesting. At the moment I am attending another Netskills workshop but this time in Newcastle. Following this I am going to take some time out, but only if the paper has been submitted.

Visiting another university

Today we are off to another UK university to introduce WebPA to a number of teaching staff there, in hope that they will be able to get the system installed at their institution.

However, we are going to change the format after doing three or four of these workshops. Rather than 'death by over texted PowerPoint' we are going to try having less information on the presentation. I have been against the use of tight text on power point presentations for a long time. The presentation should be a que for the presenters next point or points, rather that the time honored read the text out. This however, will be new for the project researcher, but I think that they will be fine and make a great success of this method.

As for my bit, the demonstration, we are going to try and encourage the participants to interupt and discuss the software more. Hopefully, this will encourage the prospective users to think about how they would use WebPA in their teaching, thus providing us with more potential models of use and new elements that maybe added to the system in future releases.

The reason for the change is due to a meeting that we attended last week. Rather than provide the standard presentation, an over view sheet was provided, just to give some basic information about the project. The rest of the time, we had more informal conversation, including through the demonstration.

But today, we are also going to provide the participants with time and logon information, so that they to can have a go in a safe and secure environment, without feeling that the information will be seen by real students.