My name is Wim Vandekerckhove, and I’m a Principal Lecturer from Faculty of Business. I used equipment provided by the 2014/2015 Seed fund as part of a digital research theme using Google Nexuses with my Business Ethics Course. Below I share some reflections.
The project
Last autumn, we ran a Greenwich Connect project on our 2nd year undergraduate Business Ethics course. We brought Nexus tablets into the class room to allow students to generate and share content. The course had covered topics which were discussed in 10 tutorial groups each week. At the beginning of a session tutors would ask for one or two volunteers, who would search and select web material relevant to that week’s topic and post the link via Branch software onto the Moodle site. Volunteering students did this while the other students did small-group work on the tutorial activity. Everyone would then engage in the class discussion. Towards the end of a tutorial, the volunteering students briefly presented the web material they had selected and posted on Moodle. This allowed for the student created content to be shared within the tutorial, and because posts from each tutorial were directly posted on Moodle, the content was also shared across tutorials. Over the eight weeks this project ran, a total of 108 posts were made. Students were encouraged to use the posted links when sourcing information for their coursework.
Feedback
We sought feedback twice. A first mid-term survey after the first assignment showed 21% had looked at the posts on Moodle and found them useful. Another 12% had looked but did not find them useful. However, 60% had not looked yet. In the second half of the term we further encouraged using the posts for the coursework. Whereas during the first half of the term we covered more varied business ethics topics, in the second half of the term we worked on various perspectives on whistleblowing. Students were writing an essay on that as their second piece of coursework. The end of term survey showed 74% had looked at the posted links and found them useful, compared to 8% who had looked but did not find them useful, and 18% who said they hadn’t looked. It is possible that the increased encouragement from teaching staff got more students to look at what their colleagues had posted. It is also likely that the more direct relevance of the post to the second assignment explains the steep rise in students finding the posts useful.
Challenges
Of course, this was not just an experiment in using TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) to allow students to generate and share content. It was also an experiment in getting a teaching team with varied perceptions of TEL to use it in a class room. There were five of us. I took an experimenter approach to this, so as far as I was concerned, this could not go wrong, whatever happened. We also had an TEL -fan – more precisely an Android fan – amongst us. There were also the TEL -sceptic, and the TEL -scared team member. Our fifth member was the TEL -neutral, willing to try it but not quite sure about what the point of all this was.
Lessons learnt
The TEL -fan thought it was dead cool. The TEL -neutral got very interested and enthusiastic after two weeks, but said it was not always easy to integrate into the tutorial. The TEL -scared didn’t believe they would get it to work but was surprised at how easy and smooth it went. Her tutorial groups actually made most of the posts. The TEL -sceptic found that students got some ‘good stuff’ but said it was nevertheless an unnecessary ‘gimmick’. I as the experimenter had expected a lot more resistance or at least reluctance from the team, and was surprised at the easy take up.
Some other evaluations from the teaching team show the pitfalls of using the tablets in the class room. One said that “after a few weeks students wanted to participate in the activity, not work on the Nexus.” Another agreed that “after a few weeks it was harder to get volunteers.” While another disagreed and saidstudents were not unwilling to create content but “students wanted to use their own devices” and that “the Nexus wasn’t the attraction we might have expected”. Finally a couple of us found that “there remained a disconnect between the tutorial activity and the presentation at the end.
Our learning points from this project were on the one hand that you don’t need a team of only TEL -enthusiasts to run an TEL -learning project. We also learned that more direct relevance of student generated content for coursework leads to more effective sharing, and that the sharing of student generated content both within and across tutorials were enriching. On the other hand, sharing within a tutorial needs to be carefully thought out and integrated as a tutorial activity rather than an add-on mini-event. Finally, students might be more willing to use their own devices to generate content rather than what teachers bring them.