Escape from Paper Mountain: a creative approach to training staff in online marking [1768] Home : Annual Conference 2017

Public Group active 7 months, 2 weeks ago

Wed, Sep 6 2017, 1:00pm – 2:20pm
Authors: Helen Whitehead, Claire Chambers, Sally Hanford, and Alvaro Roberts
Room: Elizabeth Gidney II (2)
Theme: Empowerment in Learning Technology
Type: 40-minute session

Description

The University of Nottingham is moving towards online marking across the institution, and during the summer we introduce new versions of the Moodle and Turnitin systems we use to implement this. As part of our awareness raising, and training for staff in online marking, we decided to try something different from the more technical training courses we also offer. We devised an Escape Game to offer a playful and problem-solving approach to choosing and implementing online marking. We aim to empower staff to feel more comfortable and confident with these particular learning technologies and to then be more likely to take advantage of more focused Help and Training. Our presentation fits with the themes: Empowerment in Learning Technology, and also Learning Spaces.

We have been designing a number of interventions to support the implementation of online submission and marking. We work at Faculty and School level to support and train academic staff who set up dropboxes and manage processes, as well as training academic staff in the procedures of marking. Understanding and choosing which method to use can be complex, and requires flexibility, understanding and problem-solving skills.

Andrew Walsh has experimented with playful library inductions (Walsh, 2015) including escape games while Bassford et al. (Bassford et al., 2016) used an escape game as an interactive crime scene. Loughborough College devised the Enigma Escape Game as professional training for staff covering 100 identified embedded skills.

In this session we will discuss the process by which we created an Escape Game to train staff in issues relating to online marking, report on its initial implementation, and offer a portion of the game for delegates to play. We will draw on a couple of frameworks that have been developed for designing them, such as Clarke et al. at the Coventry DMLL (Clarke et al., 2016) as well as discussing building a puzzle taxonomy to support continuous iteration of games.

References

Bassford, M., O’Sullivan, A., Crisp, A., Bacon, J. & Fowler, M. 2016 ‘CrashEd–A Live Immersive, Learning Experience Embedding STEM Subjects in a Realistic, Interactive Crime Scene’, Research in Learning Technology, vol. 24, no. 1, pp 30089, viewed 25 March 2017 <http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v24.300>

Clarke, S., Arnab, S., Morini, L., Wood, O., Green, K., Masters, A., Bourazeri, A. 2016, ‘EscapED: A framework for creating live-action, interactive games for higher/further education learning and soft skills development’ In Proceedings of the European Conference on Games-based Learning, 2016, pp. 968-972

Loughborough College (2015), Enigma. Available at http://www.loucoll.ac.uk/enigma/ [Accessed 25 Mach 2017]

Walsh, A. 2015, ‘Playful Information Literacy: Play and information Literacy in Higher Education’, Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education, vol. 7, no. 1, pp 80-94, viewed 25 March 2017 <http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/26752/>

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