All portfolio items

This poster contains the abstracts for each of the five sessions.

The 2008 Owers Lecture, titled 'Can Diplomas Cure the ‘English Disease’?' was presented by Jamie Tuplin and Pete Williamson from Barking and Dagenham talked about their implementation of Diplomas and Engineering in particular, Mick Waters of QCA responded.

These are the slides we presented.

This is the output from the session 'Re-inventing institutional processes to support flexible learning'.

This is the slide I used for my opening statement:

This is the poster.

These are the slides I presented.

Abstract

This thesis presents my practice as an action researcher in higher education (HE) over a ten-year period, developing courses for students who were unable to take advantage of the existing provision in the institutions in which I worked.  The knowledge I gained and practices that I developed contributed to a series of cycles of action research and the conclusions I draw at the end of the thesis are used to propose a further cycle.  The curricula that I developed and delivered were designed for students who had a strong commitment to their work and wanted to improve it, but at the same time wanted to gain academic qualifications; the central premise behind this work being that, ‘work can form the basis for learning, which can then be accredited by higher education’.  Although study was based around the work that a student did, their employer had no formal relationship with the university offering the courses.  Students were attracted to a package that offered personalised and flexible learning at a cost that was affordable to them.  The contributions to knowledge that I make relate to the organisation of teaching, the nature of the innovative curriculum design and the collaborative curriculum change processes carried out.  Using this approach, learners make improvements in their work context to gain academic credit from the scholarly practices they have applied to inform and evaluate their activities.  The findings suggest that a curriculum design using a teaching and learning strategy based on action-inquiry, delivered entirely online, can be successful in enabling students to work full-time and gain academic credit at a full time rate.  However, the results also revealed that there are significant institutional barriers that need to be overcome to implement such a curriculum design that is radically different in having a non-traditional curriculum and unique ways of working.  The key recommendation from this body of work is that radical curriculum innovations in HE are more likely to be successful if a separate business unit is established with control over its own capability development.  By having control over processes, staffing, and a technical systems infrastructure, a separate business unit is able to respond to the new and different demands placed on it, developing its own culture and identity that fit with a new business model.

Powell (2013)

'Can we reverse the decline in schools' computing, especially with girls?' was the title for the 2009 Owers Lecture. Kate Sim presented her work teaching robotics with Prof Stephen Heppell responding.

At the University of Bolton we focussed on the effort to develop the use of our virtual learning environment, Moodle.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/staffroles/embedit.aspx

http://www.work-with-it.org.uk/EmbeddingWWIT/BoltonHEA.aspx

My application form.

These are my sildes.

These are my slides.

This was my presentation.

Reflection: I was rewarded to hear Richard Winter say that he had understood, from my presentation, how technology might contribute to the kind of creativity and diversity expected in the Patchwork approach to assessment.

These are the slides I presented.

These were my slides.

http://www.learningfrontiers.eu/?q=tel_project/TEL-MAP

Project Description

This proposal focuses on topic f) of call 5: exploratory/Roadmapping activities for fundamentally new forms of learning to support take-up of those new forms, via Awareness building and knowledge management on the results of EU RTD projects in TEL and socio-economic evaluations in education and for SMEs . We gather information on the current, desired and emerging position of TEL, and on awareness and appropriation (by educators and SMEs) of RTD results in TEL. We codify that information using state of the art knowledge management tools/ methods, at three levels of scale: 1) macro (political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental), 2) meso (organisation of education and training systems and institutions), and 3) micro (enacted paradigms of learning and teaching). Cutting across these levels of scale is the categorisation of changes as exogenous or endogenous relative to forms of learning and to the TEL community. This provides direct input to TEL-relevant decisions at all three levels, including economic, political, and research discussions. With a 10-year horizon, we co-develop a portfolio of stakeholder-specific roadmaps and influence maps, to gain insights into fundamentally new forms of Learning, Education and Training activities (LET) and into what makes for effective transfer and scalability. Our collaborative development approach leads to a Multi-perspective Dynamic Roadmap to track, anticipate and manage knowledge about new forms of LET and their impact on TEL. This extends established TEL Roadmapping methods in novel, powerful and cost-effective ways, with high potential for sustainability and for targeting each stakeholder s goals. Outcomes include well-grounded recommendations on TEL and LET innovations, plus a platform and a sustainable dynamic process that will foster collaboration and consensus-building across specialized communities and stakeholder groups.

These are my slides.

These are the slides I designed.

The organisers told me "The participants of the seminar were various specialists (directors of departments, university lectors, experts from local authorities, policy makers, authors of teaching and learning recourses) from the Ministry of Education, Vilnius Pedagogical University, the Centre of Special Pedagogy and Psychology, the Centre of Information Technologies in Education, our Education Development Centre, National Agency of School Evaluation, teachers from Lithuanian schools, special education schools and etc, and we call them experts according to the areas of their position and interest: primary education, special education, ICT implementation in education, curriculum, teachers’ training and professional development, quality of education etc."

These are my slides.