Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Iain Stewart et al.
Although 50% of the respondents noticed some impact on the presentation due to the capture
process, all respondents wanted the activity continued.
There was no clear preference for the video or the audio synchronised slides. The preference
tended to vary with usage as those who expressed a preference for the video tended to use it to
catch up on a missed lecture or to see the gestures, visual cues and other interactions which
were not necessarily available from the audio content. The students who preferred the audio
synchronised slides preferred it as a resource to review a particular element of the lecture.
The learning style question showed that many students did not recognise that they had a
particular learning style but after further discussion the majority described a process where they
would take a section of content and review and summarise the content until they were
comfortable with the concept. This suggested an alignment with the reflective category as defined
by Honey and Mumford (1992). Discussion showed that their approach was also strongly biased
towards a logical sequential development of ideas and in addition in certain circumstances they
would study in groups or apply other active learning activities. Overall it appeared that rather than
having a particular learning style, many of the students were adapting their learning strategy to
the content that was available and the nature of the subject being studied. This is consistent with
the detailed discussion of the fragmented nature of much learning styles research in the work of
Coffield et al (2004).
One of the key points that came back from the review was that the students really appreciated the
availability of the resources but felt that it was still very much a one way “broadcast” learning
experience. The Blackboard VLE was also considered to be a limiting factor as it is generally
structured to act a repository for content and so allows the media and other resources to be mounted
on the VLE but does not really support integration between them.
2. Students in the Web 2.0 multiplatform environment
In the last few years the software technologies generally described as Web 2.0 have moved to the
fore in student’s interaction with web based content. From an educational perspective there are
several elements of the Web 2.0 environment which can be considered to be useful (Ullrich et al.
2008). The one key feature is ability for users to comment on content and to link to other content
allows for the establishment of a community around certain content and encourages discussion of and
interaction with the content. The students also have a desire to work with web 2.0 technologies
(Andone, 2007) which are an increasing element of their online environment.
It is also recognised that the net generation of “Digital Natives” (Prensky 2001) often have a different
way of interacting with content. In particular Stone coined the term “continuous partial attention”
(Stone 1998) to describe the way in which many users of the content will be running several activities
in parallel and focussing on a particular one when it requires attention. The prototype described
earlier allowed some element of this to happen as students described how they would run a lecture in
a window while accessing other content and then switch their focus to the lecture when a particular
point arose.
Students are also no longer tied to the desktop/laptop environment and often access educational
content when they are able to fit it into their increasingly busy lifestyles (Evans,2008) so it is important
that the content can be formatted and optimised to run on a range of mobile platforms. This was done
by several of the students on the module who downloaded the content and converted it to different
formats to run on their mobile devices. It is important to note that the target class was technically
literate and was studying in an area where this sort of skill would be common. It is not appropriate to
assume that this level of ability is present in the general student body.
3. Development of the specification of an integrated resource.
Based on the analysis from the previous activities the following specification was drawn up for the
prototype integrated resource.
The system should be easy for staff to use.
The system should not impact significantly on the ability of the lecturer to present the material in a
manner that suits their lecture style.
The presented content should be available in a variety of formats suitable for a range of delivery
platforms.
805