Group Admins
Description
The three ‘E’s – Entrepreneurship, Enterprise and Employability – are increasingly important in HE, to demonstrate economic impact. The advent of ‘immersive learning’ (De Freitas & Neumann 2009), to teach professional skills, build community (Thomas 2013) , and encourage ‘graduateness’ (Glover 2002) are responding to pressures to ensure relevance of vocational awards.
Freitas and Neumann 2009) suggests using social media – formal VLEs or informal, like FaceBook – to support ‘exploratory learning’. However, the focus is primarily on retention, not employability. Monitoring attendance has also been investigated, but the link to academic performance is questionable (Durden and Ellis 1995; McKenzie and Schweitzer 2001; Stanca 2006).
For twelve years, collaborative ‘Inter-Professional Education’ (IPE) has been explored across two faculties, and four distinct awards, with second year students engaging in inter-disciplinary group projects, supported by external Industry mentors. Use of formal and informal communication channels, allowed self-regulation of tasks, enabling individual assessment within collaborative tasks. Part of this experience was “engagement as salary,” with a proportion of final grades linked to attendance at tutorials, and activity on ‘official’ collaborative sites, used as primary sources of evidence for assessment.
Especially beneficial in work simulations was credit for peer-support, rewarding students asking for help, as well as those providing it. Shared resources between teams, and an emphasis on process over product prevented students from feeling they had to ‘compete’, while allowing a controlled level of stress commensurate to actual work experience. This successful approach has been applied to first year ‘immersive learning’, as well to other equivalent awards, aiding external accreditation.
A demonstration of collaborative tools will be made, along with discussion of the ethical implications, and support for large-scale group work, especially those concerning ‘live’ projects with external mentors. This workshop will be of interest to academics wishing to use work simulations or ‘live projects’, use of collaborative tools in coordinating individual assessment within group projects, and explicitly supporting employability and transferable skills in vocational awards.
Session Plan
[40 mins]
5 mins – introduction and a plea to actually get out your mobile phones!
10 mins – Interactive demonstration of Trello, including demo of iOS/Android App access to a live project built during the session
15 mins – Interactive demonstration of github/bitBucket source code control and issue tracking and how version control can be used beyond software engineering examples, including demo of iOS/Android App access to a live project built during the session
10 mins – Round up and Q&A
References
Durden, G.C. and Ellis, L.V. (1995), The Effects of Attendance on Student Learning in Principles of Economics, The American Economic Review, Vol. 85, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Hundredth and Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association Washington, DC, January 6-8, 1995 (May, 1995), pp. 343-346, Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2117945
De Freitas, S. Neumann, T. (2009), The use of ‘exploratory learning’ for supporting immersive learning in virtual environments, Computers and Education Journal Volume 52, Issue 2 pp 343-352 Available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/03601315/52/2
Glover, D. Law, S. & Youngman, A. (2002), Graduateness and Employability: student perceptions of the personal outcomes of university education, Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 7:3, 293-306, DOI: 10.1080/13596740200200132 Available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13596740200200132
McKenzie, K and Schweitzer, R. (2001), Who Succeeds at University? Factors predicting academic performance in first year Australian university students, Higher Education Research & Development, Vol 20, Iss. 1, pp21-33, Routledge, DOI: 10.1080/07924360120043621, Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07924360120043621
Stanka, L. (2006), The Effects of Attendance on Academic Performance: Panel Data Evidence for Introductory Microeconomics, The Journal Of Economic Education Vol. 37 , Iss. 3, pp251-266, Routledge, DOI: 10.3200/JECE.37.3.251-266, Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/JECE.37.3.251-266
Thomas, L. (2013), What Works? Student Retention & Success. Available at https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report.pdf
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Mike Reddy posted an update in the session “All your grade are belong to us: A longitudinal study of inter-disciplinary team-based assessment u 4 years ago
Hi all!
Hopefully, you are reading this in preparation for attending the above session on the use of online tools for collaborative/group work, particularly when formally assessing on an individual basis. To get the most from this session, you might want to install Trello on your mobile/tablet (there should be iOS and Android versions available),…[Read more]-
The software would not let me post URLs, so please insert the colon and double slash after the https in web addresses.
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