Welcome to the first edition of Italics of 2012.
The papers in this issue evidence on-going work to position students at the centre of teaching and learning, affording them opportunities to become active partners in shaping their learning experience and to take ownership of the learning process. Authors describe the benefits to be gained from profiling the experience and expectations of students at the outset of a programme of study and of sharing that intelligence across the teaching team; provide us with examples of participative design in course content and assessment; and discuss a mechanism to facilitate the personalisation and customisation of module content and pathways of learning.
Lilley et al (University of Hertfordshire) reports on work in which a User-Centred Design methodology was applied to gain a deeper understanding of an undergraduate distance learning student population. In this instance the authors moved to distil and profile the experiences and expectations of the cohort into a number of discrete personas and in sharing these with the teaching staff attempted to make explicit the otherwise intuitive and differing ’sense’ of the student body held by individual staff. The authors hope that such shared intelligence can challenge some unfounded stereotyping and foster a collective understanding of who the students are and their motivation for study. Tutors then have a sound foundation upon which they can make informed adjustments to the delivery and assessment of materials building upon the strengths of the cohort while maintaining quality and standards.
Wen et al (University of Hull) discuss a framework for the personalisation and customisation of an e-learning environment to users’ choices of educational options in course delivery. In the proposed model semantic information of learning units and processes (e.g. the relationships among units) is described and integrated in terms of various requirements of users (both students and content deliverers). As a result instructional materials with a wide variety of executional options and conditions could be built and modified dynamically as an individual’s educational experience changes.
Devon et al (Glasgow Caledonian University) report on case studies which aimed to encourage students to be active contributors to the learning experiences of themselves and others, via the shared creation and use of student-generated multiple choice questions as facilitated by the PeerWise repository tool. Students use PeerWise to create and to explain their understanding of course related assessment questions, and to answer and comment upon questions created by their peers. The potential benefits of such activities in reinforcing reflection and understanding of material, supporting the establishment of a learning community characterised by collaborative learning and peer tutoring are outlined.
Dudman and Dekker (London Metropolitan University) evaluated the use of participative design in the provision of animated video snippets to support first year undergraduates in interview skills in a module on personal development in computing. Animated video snippets were made available in a blog encouraging students to consider issues relating to employment interviews before and after viewing; the students are also asked to indicate to what extent they felt the materials provided support. The design, delivery and evaluation of the use of video snippets, is discussed, and feedback from participants at each stage of development and deployment is considered. The authors propose that the adopted iterative design process incorporating suggestions and feedback from the students at each stage encouraged a sense of ownership and supported reflective practice.
Wade et al (University of Huddersfield) report on an action research project aimed at improving educational delivery within a postgraduate Information Systems Design module. The challenge was to engage with a largely international group of students drawn from distinct Computer Science and Business Studies backgrounds, thus presenting with diverse learning styles, a variety of learning experiences and different preconceptions about the nature of the subject. The solution offered by the authors is based upon the derivation and collation of domain specific pattern templates, a ‘pattern language’, to support the teaching of information systems design. The authors assert this approach to have yielded significant benefits for the module discussed and suggest that the approach may have wider applicability.
Programming remains a difficult subject for many students. This is acknowledged in the paper by Jenkins and Ademoye (Swansea Metropolitan University) who focus on translating reported improvements in students’ grasp of programming achieved via peer code reviews and collaborative learning approaches into a guide to be applied by an individual in reviewing their own code. The authors postulate that a checklist based individual code review process can provide a framework which allows students to proofread their own code prior to submission, promoting reflection and understanding and therefore improving performance. Toward this end pilot and follow-up studies were conducted at Swansea Metropolitan University. The authors report their findings here and offer some insightful observations.
Kerins (University of Chester) reflects on his experiences of attempting to set stimulating, practical assessment tasks appropriate for the summative assessment of final year Systems Analysis and Design students that are based upon real-world requirements, yet condensed and filtered to fit within an academic calendar and the resources available within a typical School of Computer Science. In this particular case, the situation is further complicated by the author having to make provision for a second cohort of students at a geographically separate campus who follow the same academic programme. In his paper the author details an evolutionary approach which fused internal resources and links to external ‘clients’ to provide realistic and dynamic scenarios. Further, the author and his colleagues have begun to collate the student-generated use cases, requirements specifications and system models submitted as assessment elements into a repository which the author is considering as offerings as exemplars for subsequent assessment tasks and from which each new cohort of students can build upon their predecessors’ knowledge and expertise and take more responsibility for their own project planning and delivery. This initiative also provides an opportunity for the development of in-house styles and standards which could be adopted within other modules of study and across cohorts.