JISC eFactor 2013

I presented at the JISC eFactor2013 this week and naturally took the opportunity to get along to as many of the other parallel workshops that I could oj the day. For my part I was presenting the work that I have been conducting using Augmented Reality with Aurasma; if you have not seen the JISC blog for this then please follow this link. The presentation seemed to go down very well with the audience who took the opportunity to take advantage of the handouts that I brought along to the event in that they all went.

Preparing as we are here at College for the transition to Moodle 2.4, I was particularly pleased to see presentation from Croydon College called ‘Mobile Phone’. Given the number of Smartphones owned by our students, having a reliable means of scaling Moodle to a mobile client has a very strong strong appeal for me. I was therefore very encouraged to learn that the embedded theme can simply be enabled for it to function and screen shots clearly demonstrated both reliability and accessibility, nice.

Flipped Classroom for City of Westminster College, for me turned out to be a really worthwhile session also. Flipped Classroom is of course only a new and it seems Americanism for what many of us, myself included, have been and continue trying to do with the vle; that is get it to work as a vle, not just a course management system. City of Westminster had taken this on and were able to show deployment, but more importantly report on outcomes, which included the very positive impact on course results, and even improvements to teaching profiles; now that’s interesting, I shall certainly be bringing that along future discussion with the Quality Team. And who were the target group that they managed to achieve all this with, well, not as many may expect level 3 IT students, instead level 2 Motor Vehicle; even more ammunition in the drive for change.

There were of course other parallel workshops at eFactor 2013, and if you are yet attend one of these events I would warmly recommend you getting along next year.

Bye for now