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Digital Pathways to Alternative Futures

Digital Pathways to Alternative Futures Online

Digital Pathways to Alternative Futures

Members of the Irish Universities Association ‘Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning’ project team will host a panel discussion with academic and student partners outlining how digital pathways explored throughout the course of the project have used an open practice approach to ensure a more sustainable, inclusive future in Irish higher education.

The Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning in Irish Universities Project is a three-year project, now extended to September 2022, funded through the Higher Education Authority’s Innovation and Transformation Programme. It is aimed at enhancing the digital attributes and educational experiences of Irish university students through enabling the mainstreamed and integrated use of digital technologies across the teaching and learning process.

Developing Open Resources with DigiLego:  Dr. Karen Bacon (Botany and Plant Sciences, NUI Galway) 

Virtual teaching and learning became much more common in many institutions during 2020 due to the pandemic but in many areas of environmental science, there were few high-quality resources available. This was particularly the case for botanical field work, where the details need to identify plants were not always available in existing resources – for example, while GoogleEarth may be useful for geomorphology teaching, it does not have the required resolution to accurately identify most plant species. To combat this, a virtual field trip was developed around the Salthill, Galway area in July 2020. The resource is presented in H5P and includes video quadrats, 360 interactive views, detailed photographs and other resources to aid students learn how to identify plants in a virtual environment. Following on from this, the Erasmus+ DigiLego project aims to create an online resource where the community can find a range of “building blocks” to full resources for online teaching in environmental sciences, geography and other related areas.  More information on DigiLego can be found here: https://project.digilego.eu/ 

Speaker bio: Dr Karen Bacon studied botany and geology in University College Dublin and received her PhD from UCD in 2012. Her research interests include plant ecology, palaeoecology, and field teaching pedagogy. She has taught in several institutions in Ireland and the UK and was a lecturer in Ecology & Global Change in the University of Leeds from 2013 – 2019. She joined NUI Galway as a Lecturer in Plant Ecology in 2019. Karen’s interests in field teaching include use of technology in the field and, since 2020, virtual fieldwork, particularly in relation to field botany.

 

Crowd-sourcing an OER: Exemplars and Case Studies of Technology-Enhanced Assessment: Suzanne Stone (Teaching Enhancement Unit, Dublin City University)

Over the last number of years, an Open Educational Resource (OER) was developed by the Teaching Enhancement Unit, DCU, to support teaching and learning staff in developing digital assessments. A crowd-sourcing (Donlon, Costello & Brown, 2020; Mattar, 2018) approach was used to build the resource, allowing the curators to draw on the rich expertise and experience of the Higher and Further Education community across Ireland and the UK. The decision to develop the resource as an OER was natural to the resource curators as open educational practitioners but the process presents both opportunities and challenges. This presentation will draw on this specific example to spark discussion around the challenges and opportunities of open educational practice. 

References:

Donlon, E., Costello, E. and Brown, M. (2020) ‘Collaboration, collation, and competition: Crowdsourcing a directory of educational technology tools for teaching and learning’, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 36(3), pp. 41–55. doi: 10.14742/ajet.5712.

Mattar, J. (2018) ‘Constructivism and Connectivism in Education Technology: Active, Situated, Authentic, Experiential, and Anchored Learning’, RIED: Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 21, pp. 201-217.

Speaker bio: Suzanne Stone is a project lead on the Enabling Digital Teaching & Learning project at DCU and is currently in the final year of the EdD programme at DCU. Suzanne's research interests include: digital teaching and learning; digital wellbeing and universal design for learning.  Suzanne is an advocate of open educational practice.

 

Developing, Reusing, and Revising OERs for Students: Míde Nic Fhionnlaoich (IUA Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning intern) 

Míde will talk about the open EDTL resources “For Students by Students” and how they have been developed, shared, re-used and revised.

Speaker bio:

Míde is a Student Associate Intern for Enhancing Digital Capacity in Teaching and Learning (EDTL) in Irish Universities. A Conamara native, she is a fluent Irish speaker and is currently in final year studying Law with Social Justice in University College Dublin. She is a strong believer in the importance of the student voice in decision-making in Irish universities, with a particular interest in the concept of Students as Partners in teaching and learning.

 

The panel discussion will be moderated by Kate Molloy. Kate is a Learning Technologist with the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at NUI Galway and is currently the NUI Galway lead on the Irish Universities Association Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning project.

Date:
Monday, April 11, 2022
Time:
15:00 - 16:00
Time Zone:
UK, Ireland, Lisbon Time (change)
Online:
This is an online event. Event URL will be sent via registration email.
Registration has closed.

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