You may think that things have went quiet on the Collaborative Learning Space front at Barony Campus…
Spreading Clevertouch Further
On the 18th of June 2018, there has been another Clevertouch training session with teaching staff, which has sparked much interest, including the interactive-based Snowflake software for teaching staff on Campus.
Collaborative Space Site Survey
On the 19th of June 2018, Mediascape engineers carried out their site survey within the Kirkmichael room at the Campus, which have found no hiccups in progressing with the installation starting 30th of July over a 5-day period. More coverage of the installation coming soon!
Collaborative Learning Space Staff Training
The Collaborative Learning Space team have been busy looking at staff development training sessions at Barony Campus, delivery from the project team (Ali Hastie, Andrew Treadaway, Donald Brown, Doug Goldie and Karen Martyniuk) starts week commencing 20th of August with the Campuses teaching departments. A programme is being analysed as we speak and will need to be as engaging and interactive as possible in order to win hearts and minds of our expert teaching staff. More information on the staff training sessions coming soon!
Collaborative Learning Development
Analysis and development phases has already started with the Forestry department with Ali Hastie (e-Learning Developer) and Andrew Treadaway (Forestry Lecturer). First steps of analysis was to review the recent innovative and collaborative online Vet Nursing Graded Unit 1 project TEAM (Together Everyone Achieves More: https://goo.gl/w6e96q), which was developed by Ali Hastie and Emma Hudson (Vet Nursing Lecturer) and delivered to the HNC Vet Nursing students within the 2017-18 academic year in which produced outstanding results.
Within the Forestry department, two teaching units have been chosen to be developed for the Collaborative Learning Space;
- Tree Identification covering two courses – Certificate in Forestry and Advanced Certificate in Forestry and Arboriculture. Areas of analysis include (without giving too much away at the moment) and ideas taken from HNC Vet Nursing Graded Unit project formative team-based presentation peer-assessment within Moodle, the use of Microsoft Sway, H5P interactive activities within Moodle and Socrative.
Image above: Just the beginning of the Tree ID analysis phase - Pest and Diseases of Trees – Advanced Certificate in Forestry and Arboriculture student teams will collaborate on producing and sharing researched Padlets.
Donald Brown (Agriculture Lecturer) has some very interesting ideas for his Higher National Certificate in Agriculture students, NC Dairy Production course integrating student field trips with the Collaborative Learning Space:
- HNC Agric Livestock Growth Health & Welfare – According to Donald, for a number of years he has carried out an animal health topic by selecting a number of animal diseases and having their names put into a ‘hat’. With allowing the Agriculture students to select one topic each from the ‘hat’, the students would then create a 5-slide presentation (PowerPoint) and one sheet handout on specific features of diseases, causes, class of stock affected, symptoms transmission, control and prevention. As a formative assessment, the students would take their turn in presenting their topics to the class. Using the new Collaborative Learning Space, Donald will split the students into 4 groups and give each group two diseases to research and present (with the use of specific digital tools). Once trialed through the HNC Agriculture course, plans are afoot in spreading the digital tools and digital pedagogies to the NC Dairy Production course.
- HNC Agric Graded Unit 1 Action Plan – Donald has delivered the SQA Graded Unit 1 using the Moodle workshop (Peer-Assessment and Self-Assessment) activity for the past two academic years with increasing success. The HNC Agriculture students choose their own Graded Unit topics and locations in which the Action Plan assessment will lend itself to collaborative-based working.
- Planning field trips – Donald believes that he has full engagement from the students surrounding field trips to local farms when the onus of organising and planning has actually been put on the students. The students are tasked to figure out what they want to achieve from the trip and what questions to ask the host farmer. Again, this will lend itself well to using the Collaborative Learning Space.
We will keep you up-to-date with more development news from the Forestry and Agriculture departments.
Also, more exciting developments coming in from Barony’s Engineering department (Doug Goldie) and the new Vet Nursing Degree (Karen Martyniuk) programme very soon.
Enjoy this wonderful weather!