Introduction to TEL tips at the RAU
To the best of our knowledge, TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) tips started at the RAU in May 2018 with a series of tips about accessibility, keyboard shortcuts, and supporting students with their presentations and assignment submissions. The tips are now a weekly feature and have been through a number of facelifts, so this made it high time for two members of the Learning Technology Team, Pip McDonald (@pipmcdonald) and Lisa Mustoe (@lisamustoe), to open the lid and explore the old and the new.
The Origins of TEL Tips
Our original creator has moved on but Senior Learning Technologist, Chantal Schipper, recalls the original plan – to provide short, timely tips on using technology for teaching. They were (and still are) emailed to all RAU Academics on a weekly basis and then stored in an online database. The aim being to support academics in using the tools they need to teach and assess, as well as to share more informal “did you know you can do this?” tips.
Favourite Tips
The whole team contribute to writing the tips and, as a flavour, Lisa and Pip looked back through for their favourites:
Pip: Having worked with Zoom since 2020 to support transnational online delivery, it was helpful to keep up to date with any new developments in Zoom. I have always felt enthusiastic about the pedagogic potential of using a whiteboard tool to enhance interactive sessions. As a result, I was keen to explore the extent to which it could help to make the interactive sessions more engaging for students. I was aware of the range of whiteboard tools including the whiteboard by Microsoft, the whiteboard available in Teams, Google Jamboard, Mural, and Miro. In January 2022, as part of the RAU’s research seminar series organised by the Knowledge Exchange and Research Team, Lisa Williams van Dijk and David Main delivered a presentation exploring online tools for collaboration. They demonstrated how ow students had used the whiteboard tools Miro and Wonder.Me. A recording of the seminar can be accessed here.
When Zoom announced that they were upgrading the whiteboard feature, particularly with the opportunity for asynchronous access, I was excited to see how the new whiteboard feature would be developed and how we can explore the tool at the RAU. It is possible to create a whiteboard before a scheduled live meeting takes place that can be accessed during the live meeting and accessed after the class (Brown, 2022). A range of content can be created including images, drawings, shapes, text, sticky notes, colour. A TEL Tip was created and a short video here. One of the ways that the whiteboard feature in Zoom was used was to explore social annotation. Social annotation can be defined as “…reading and thinking together” (Centre for Teaching Innovation, 2022).
The second TEL Tip that felt significant for me was the tip exploring live transcription in Zoom. The TEL Tip can be accessed here. This tip was created to ensure that the interactive sessions for transnational contexts were accessible in a digital capacity. A short video on Panopto can be accessed here. Exploring how to provide students with the options to switch captions on or off and how they can access the transcript during a meeting and after the session were explored. How can we create an inclusive online learning environment compliant with the WCAG 2.1 guidelines? (W3C, MIT, ERCIM, Keio & Beihang, 2017-2018).
Lisa: As the newest member of the team, I didn’t work through the pandemic at the RAU, but I am really struck by a tip that went out in March 2020. Entitled ‘Getting up to speed with online delivery’, it conveys the poignancy of events that were overtaking ‘normal’ life. Our colleagues at that time shared a tip with links to their new and existing support pages and they were scheduling training sessions to help everyone cope and survive. It feels quite emotional to dip back into that time and to sense the care that was there for everyone as they prepared to face the unknown.
How Have Tips Evolved?
Although well established with academic staff, we were missing a large proportion of our colleagues – and of course a huge opportunity to share tips more widely. Starting in March of this year, we decided change the flavour of ‘TEL’ tips to ‘TECH’ tips on alternate weeks, and to roll them out to all staff. The obvious next step was to include students in the TECH tips. We piggy-backed onto our new staff and student newsletters to deliver TECH tips, seeing this as a great way to get ‘read’ without overfilling unsuspecting in-boxes!
What is a TECH Tip?
With Lisa picking up the initial TECH tip project, Pip asked the all-important question – ‘What is a TECH tip?’.
Lisa: I see them as being more generic than our TEL tips. TECH tips share resources and skills that could benefit anyone working digitally. These can be digital skills, accessibility tips, looking after hardware, and being nice to each other through the medium of cyber!
TEL tips are more focused on the skills and systems needed to teach and assess, so handy for our academic staff who tend to focus on core digital tools for education, like Panopto, Turnitin, and the VLE. TECH tips are for everyone, including (I’d like to think) those that aren’t working on computers daily. I hope that a regular nudge of TECH digital skills can promote a culture of investing in ourselves!
Why are TEL & TECH Tips Important?
We often receive feedback from individuals about the value of tips and we would like to survey our audience in the future, but, for now, here are our thoughts.
Pip: It is always important to define what digital literacy means in our own context (JISC, 2014). For the RAU, perhaps it is possible to locate both TEL and TECH Tips within a wider need to develop digital literacy. “Digital literacies are those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society” (JISC, 2014).
Micro learning has been argued to beneficial in a pedagogic capacity -“It is not surprising then that the benefits of microlearning in training and performance development contexts are well documented as workers need to be able to learn new skills and knowledge quickly to apply them to specific tasks or situations on the job” (Corbeil, Corbeil & Khan, 2021: p3).
Lisa: They come with the best intentions to help others ‘win’ a little in a fast moving, busy world where time is key, and every interaction is an opportunity to make a difference. Also, they can be accessed whenever someone has the time (no live meeting attendance required!). Some of the benefits include:
- Saving time (productivity tips)
- Building confidence (developing digital skills)
- Better digital accessibility (sharing best practice)
- Fostering student engagement and retention (sharing sound pedagogical tools and approaches/ supporting student TEL skills)
- Strong community (signposting that we’re here to help)
What Next?
Well, tips continue, and we are never short of ideas to share! In future blogs we’ll be looking at the ‘life’ of tips and we might even share what happens when one goes wrong!
Check out the TEL & TECH Tips database here (for RAU staff and students).
Bibliography
Brown, M., (2022) Introducing Zoom Whiteboard, A New Visual Collaboration Solution https://blog.zoom.us. Zoom blog [blog] April 19. Available at: Zoom https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-digital-whiteboard-collaboration/ [Accessed 16 August 2022]
Centre for Teaching Innovation (2022) Social Annotation (Online) Available at: https://teaching.cornell.edu/learning-technologies/collaboration-tools/social-annotation [Accessed 20 June 2022]
Corbeil, M. E., Corbeil, J. R., & Khan, B. H., (eds) (2021) (Microlearning in the Digital Age The Design and Delivery of Learning in Snippets (New York & London: Routledge).
Eclipse Digital Imaging Inc (2021) Computer mouse Help (Online) Available at: https://www.presentermedia.com/powerpoint-clipart/computer-mouse-help-pid-6513 [Accessed 23 August 2022]
Eclipse Digital Imaging Inc (2021) Stick Figure Contact Support (Online) Available at: https://www.presentermedia.com/powerpoint-clipart/stick-figure-contact-support-button-pid-5645 [Accessed 23 August 2022]
Eclipse Digital Imaging Inc (2021) Figure Walking Into Computer (Online) Available at: https://www.presentermedia.com/powerpoint-clipart/stick-figure-contact-support-button-pid-5645 [Accessed 23 August 2022]
JISC (2014) Developing Digital Literacies (Online) Available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-digital-literacies [Accessed 16 August 2022]
McDonald, P. (2022) Indiana Jones and the Annotators of the Lost Ark. Exploring the Possibilities of Social Annotation in the Technology-enhanced Transnational Learning Context (TETL). RIDE 2022, the Centre for Online and Distance Education, University of London. June 2022. Online.
McDonald, P., (2022) Zoom Live Transcription Video Updated June 2022 (Online) Available at: https://rau.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=e553d23d-6057-4690-b3b4-aec400b65ed6 [Accessed 16 August 2022]
McDonald, P., (2022) Digital Arks & Distance Metaphor. Indiana Jones & the Annotators of the Lost Ark. Exploring Social Annotation in the Technology-enhanced Transnational Learning (TETL) Context. Digitalrau.wordpress.com. Digital Transformation Blog [blog] 20 June 2022. Available at: https://digitalrau.wordpress.com/2022/06/20/digital-arks-distance-metaphor-indiana-jones-the-annotators-of-the-lost-ark-exploring-social-annotation-in-the-technology-enhanced-transnational-learning-tetl-context/ [Accessed 20 June 2022]
McDonald, P., (2022) New Upgraded Zoom Whiteboard (Online) Available at: https://rau.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=92d6e02c-8b82-43af-98bd-ae940116492b [Accessed 16 August 2022]
MIT, ERCIM., Keio., & Beihang,, 2018-2019 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 W3C Recommendation 05 June 2018 (Online) Available at: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ [Accessed 16 August 2022]
Royal Agricultural University (RAU) Learning Technology Team (2022) TEL & TECH Tip Database (Online) Available at: https://gateway.rau.ac.uk/mod/data/view.php?d=67 [Accessed 16 August 2022]
University of London (2022) CODE 2022 – Parallel J: Digital classroom (Online) Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=opQhHmcGmIc&feature=youtu.be [Accessed 16 August 2022]
Van Dijk, L., W., & Main., D. (2022) Online Tools for Collaboration. Royal Agricultural University (RAU) (Online) Available at: https://rau.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=1ab113d2-773a-4d2b-8375-ae2e009d93a1 [Accessed 16 August 2022]
Digital Transformation at RAU 