Menu

Technology Enhanced Learning Team

News menu

E-Learning Newsletter – June 2018

5 July 2018 Posted in: News Tagged: By: Technology Enhanced Learning Team

Show me your true colours

Dr Weronika Fernando, Teaching Fellow at the Language Centre in SLLF, has recently had a fascinating article published in Assessing Writing which analyses the use of Queen Mary’s QMPlus Hub as a platform to help scaffold students towards academic writing assessment. The paper analyses this process and found that considered usage of online platforms helped to make writing composition processes more explicit and offered rich opportunities for formative assessment practices. If you would like to read more about Weronika’s use of QMplus Hub and her findings about teaching academic writing, click here to find the full article.

 

TurningPoint for Audience Response at QMUL

For many academic users at our recent ‘Engaging Large Cohorts’ event which focussed particularly on audience response systems, one common concern amongst academic users was the lack of university wide support for our main hardware solution TurningPoint. Gill Ritchie from the ELU and staff from schools who make heavy use of the system have been working hard to rectify some of the issues with TurningPoint at QMUL. This includes ensuring that the latest version of the TurningPoint software is installed on all teaching space computers and that receivers are available in some of the larger rooms for the next academic year. We appreciate the effort of everyone involved in this work and hope that these steps will help those of you who wish to keep using TurningPoint hardware. We are still looking at options for a bring-your-own-device audience voting system and we hope to make further announcements about this in the next few months, watch this space!

 

How can our learning spaces be more flexible?

With learning spaces being such a premium in HE institutions, there is a requirement for them to be multipurpose. The study of learning spaces has recently attracted greater attention and a number of universities have experimented with using spaces flexibly, conducting ethnographic studies and gathering feedback to evaluate the learning and engagement in them. Richard Chantler visited the HEA Flexible Learning Symposium and gave his thoughts here.

 

 

QMplus update 9th of July – Final Reminder

We would like to remind all users that QMplus and QMplus Hub will both be unavailable on Monday 9th of July from 07:00 – 14:00 (TBC). Please note that during that time there will be no access to either. Please check this page for an update on the new features to QMplus that you can look forward to and here for details of what is coming in QMplus Hub.

 

Support and training going into the new academic year

As we enter the summer months, our scheduled workshop programme is now finished. We will resume workshops towards the end of August. These will be advertised on our website and booked through our course booking system.

Our upgrade to QMplus in July will not bring any major new features or differences to the look and feel of the system. For seasoned users, QMplus will not feel terribly different. Perhaps this is a chance to explore some of the existing functionality in more depth? Would you like to find out more about the tools available for online grading and feedback? How about exploring what Q-Review has to offer beyond just recordings of lectures? Interested in what QMplus Hub has to offer? If you and your team would like a session on a specific topic, we are very happy to arrange something for you. Please get in touch with us.

For those of you who have super-admin access to QMplus, we’ll be getting in touch shortly to let you know about your annual mandatory refresher training.

We will also be continuing our drop-in sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1-2pm. These are open to anyone with questions about anything related to technology in teaching but may be particularly useful for those of you in charge of the rollover for your school, getting all the module areas ready for next year. For more in depth conversations, book an appointment with a member of the team through our Book a Learning Technologist service.

Return to top