TEL at Plymouth

A TEL action plan has been developed as part of the University’s Teaching and Learning Strategy[1] to address the requirements of the University’s strategies and priorities whilst maximising the effectiveness of institutional investment into TEL and to exploit the outputs and outcomes from our externally funded projects. It aligns the University with the HEFCE strategy, JISC vision and the Higher Ambitions Report as this alignment will assist in aligning the University with best practice from the HE sector

The primary activities arising from the mapping of priorities in the TEL action plan are:

1. aligning UoP TEL services to national recommendations and good practice in areas such as e-assessment, e-portfolio, podcasting and exploiting web2.0 technologies;
2. the use of OER and the introduction of a Learning Object Economy;
3. further utilisation of TEL in assessment processes, including feedback;
4. enhanced and co-ordinated staff development across the University to support the embedding of TEL and associated pedagogies;
5. assisting the University in creating digitally literate students and staff.

The activities, projects and initiatives identified support the development of approaches to on-demand and flexible delivery and are shown below.

A number of the activities shown in Figure 1 are existing or proposed, centrally funded projects, such as

• the UPMedia Project, a new, extensible, media service platform to bring together and showcase all the University’s film/video content in one ‘channel’ on its extranet site and feed other sites such as iTunesU;
• UPmedia has a dual role in that it will also provide an essential service to support a number of key TEL initiatives as shown below;
• the Lecture Capture project to allow recording of lecture and on-the-fly creation of video material, for storage in UPMedia;
• e-portfolio initiative, the University is currently deploying PebblePad as its ePortfolio solution;
• Teaching and Learning Repository, this builds on the JISC funded UPlaCe Repository project and is being extended and expanded to provide a repository solution for Teaching and Learning outputs.

In order to fully capitalise on the institutional investment in these, and other areas, it is essential to investigate and exploit best practice in a number of aligned initiatives which will maximise the impact of the current and proposed TEL activities in order to enhance inclusivity, flexibility and choice for students while ensuring staff have access to a wide range of tools and resources to enhance learning.

Areas for the Building Capacity project

The areas highlighted under the Building Capacity Programme and as being strategically important to delivering and supporting the University TEL agenda are:

• Digital Literacy. The University wishes to implement the LLida audit tool to capture the Plymouth TEL experience, to allow UoP to build on this experience and to share the findings with the sector.
• Podcasting. Processes will need to be investigated and developed to support both academic and professional support staff in the creation, use and embedding of podcasts in order to create a range of Teaching and Learning materials and to encourage a culture of Media Enhanced Learning.
• Computer Aided Assessment. The University currently uses QuestionMark Perception (QMP) as its main CAA tool. Whilst QMP has proven to be successful for summative assessments in a formal setting there is a requirement to investigate and deliver a range of CAA options suitable for the creation of formative assessments, quizzes and feedback. An integrated approach is required allowing academic staff to be guided through the choice of suitable tools and to be able to access support materials both in the technical use of the these tools and their pedagogic applications to assist in the use of effective, efficient and diverse forms of assessment.
• E-Portfolio. Plymouth wishes to build on its experience of deploying an e-portfolio solution and work to embed its application throughout the institution as a core facility for students and staff.

By investigating multiple but interrelated areas within the Plymouth Building Capacity Project it will be possible deploy a number of Projects and Services’ artefacts across the institution and provide feedback to improve the artefacts themselves. By using high profile areas linked to strategic projects, such as UPMedia, of the adoption of artefacts will be highly visible.  Integrating the Plymouth Building Capacity Project into a range of other projects and activities will allow the investigation of models successful uptake and identify (and develop, if required) institutional processes that will ease deployment of JISC outputs, and share these with Services.

It is expected, that once the adoption, adaptation and use of JISC artefacts is demonstrated at Plymouth, this experience will be disseminated across the region and into the HE  and HEinFE sectors. The Plymouth project will demonstrate the value of using senior institutional staff as ‘business change agents’ in the institution’s adoption of JISC outputs.

Plymouth intend to build and enhance their existing partnerships in JISC projects and to fully participate in the established networks across the sector to assist in the take-up of outputs, drawing upon a small group of strategically aware staff from institutions.

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[1] http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/files/extranet/docs/web/teachingandlearningstrategy2009to2012.pdf