Day 1 #ALTC 2015

Posted on September 8, 2015 by David Hopkins

This 10th ALT Conference is possibly the largest yet, hosted at the Universty of Manchester, over 3 days with 4 invited keynote speakers, 185 sessions (although some look to have been cancelled), and over 500 expected delegates.

Kicking us off today was an impressive session from Steve Wheeler and two of his students; Becca Smallshaw and Kate Bartlett. Steve covered the kinds of subjects I’ve heard him speak about before, but he stopped short of the usual keynote and handed it over to Becca and Kate. Using the time with them to talk about the expectations and experiences of students, they both handed the alien, and probably quite nerve wracking, experience of 500+ people hanging on their every word extremely well.

I spoke with Steve afterwards and he took great pains to explain that this part of the keynote was not scripted or rehearsed, that Becca and Kate knew very little of his slides; they kind of knew what he might ask them, but not in details. They were free to answer openly and honestly, which for me makes their performance and answers all the more credible and insightful. huge respect to them both for standing there today in front of us!

Covering aspects of student engagement, assessmet, coursework, technology (obviously), social and digital footprints, etc. the insight from Becca and Kate into what a student looks for should give the rest of us something to think about as we gear up to a new academic year.

As promised, here are my sketchnotes from Steve’s session:

Image souce: David Hopkins (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

I’m sorry to say I didn’t make any more notes until the afternoon session presented by my old colleauges from Leicester. Nick Gretton and Matt Mobbs presented their workshop around the statistics of Leicester’s successful FutureLearn MOOCs and focussed it around the activity of designing ad evaluating online courses from a similar theory.

In teams we were asked to design ILOs and assessment criteria for a fictional1 week, 2 hour MOOC, on how to ride a bike. Unfortunately time was against us, we were not able to share our work with the other groups, but a good discussion occurred towards the end around the sbuject of the value of MOOCs (financial ad pedagogical) as well as the impact they have (institutionall and globally).

Again, here are my sketches – sorry I didnt’ get it all down, my sore throat and lack of sleep was really beginning to take it’s toll!

Image source: David Hopkins (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Anyway, on to Day two tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll be back up to full strength. If anyone is interested, this is my workstation in the hotel roo; not easy, but effective none the less.