EdTechPosium

Background: Simulation is recognised internationally as a safe and effective way to teach health students. There are limitations to this learning experience, however, due to the static nature of mannequins and the complexity of the learning required.
The evolution of spatial mapping technology and 3D applications has the potential to change nurse education and advance physical assessment skills. While immersive technologies have been explored for their application in medical training, there is sparse research exploring how these technologies can be used to advance nurse education.
Objective: The aim of the study was to explore students’ perspectives of learning through spatial mapping technology and how this emerging technology can enhance nurse education.
Methods: Second-year nursing students were recruited to explore the educational application of augmented reality. Participants were required to undertake a nursing assessment and documentation of a projected holographic patient based on a developed case study.
Discussion: Nurse education requires the integration of complex concepts of physiology, adaptive expertise and collaborative practice. These technologies can transform health education to provide meaningful education by applying the instructional theory of whole-task training, via the domains of active, constructive, intentional, authentic and co-operative transfer of learning.

Show-and-tell and discussion on tools to help with development and QA of Moodle sites

This talk will centre on the findings of a recent Moodle project undertaken between VerveEd and BAE Systems Australia. The project involved the creation of an aviation related, maths and physics Moodle course which learners could use in a self-directed capacity. Development of the course shed light on a number of instructional design and technical challenges, which talk attendees who work with the latest web technologies, will find valuable to learn from. Attendees of this talk will learn from the following talking points:

• The technical and pedagogical challenges of using key HTML5 web technologies in conjunction with H5P and Moodle core functionality.
• How the combination of Google’s and Moodle’s UI frameworks can compliment each other to create feature rich course templates which dynamically load H5P content.
• Ways to load H5P content on a course homepage to avoid nested navigation issues.
• Why the flexibility/usability tradeoff’ design principle needs consideration when creating courses that avoid vendor lock-in.
• How the backup/restore features of Moodle helps to update some course resources but how other resources need workarounds.
• When Moodle courses utilising additional web technologies require special development measures to work offline or in deployed circumstances.

Want to take your training from boring to mesmerising? There are 12 things that you can focus on. In this talk, you'll see these spectacular variables in action and learn how to apply them to eLearning courses. Be sure to bring problems and something to write with, because this whirlwind of words is bound to shake something loose.

** Notes from this presentation are available at https://www.rickyvuckovic.com/lti


In summary: In this session Ricky will explain the steps needed to develop an external tool or activity using the LTI (learning tools interoperability) format and provide specific code examples and live demonstrations. Some parts will be easier to understand if you already know some basic web coding (e.g. PHP, Python, web forms).
 
It is rare for a Learning Management System (LMS) to have every feature an institution needs, and it’s common to extend these systems with external tools to handle tasks such as lecture recordings, library resources, and portfolios.
An emerging standard for developing external tools for use inside an LMS is the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) format, and many of these tools can be linked to from within a course without needing LMS administrator access or installing extra plugins.
Despite its growing popularity and having its core specifications accessible freely online, there is a severe lack of guidance available for designing a simple and complete LTI activity that can launch from an LMS such as Moodle and return grades back to it.
This makes it difficult to learn how to begin developing an external tool, and it is very hard to reverse-engineer and debug an LTI data transfer that is three levels deep in encryption.
This session explains the practical steps needed to develop an external tool or activity using the LTI format. It combines an overview of the LTI framework with specific code examples and live demonstrations. This session is suitable for anybody keen to develop their own LTI tools, and some parts will be easier to understand if you already know some basic web coding (e.g. PHP, Python, web forms).

Educational leaders and aspirant educational leaders aim to influence teachers in their schools. Teachers themselves have the greatest in-school impact on student learning. Postgraduate courses are increasingly in online modes of learning. This session explores and examines students (leaders) ways of adapting, adopting and ignoring the invitation to communities of practice in this mode. Strategies are explored in the design and development for this student demographic and presses on the stakes at play for educational leaders to engage with communities of practice in a digital space.

We cannot avoid disruptive change in schooling since our context, our resources and our mission are evolving rapidly. Appropriate technology strategy must reflect emerging pedagogies, curriculum alignment and business alignment. Who gets a say on educational technology? How do technical decisions enact the values and culture of a school? When we imagine the way that our youngest users experience technology we can easily be mistaken. To understand this more sensitively we must engage children as stakeholders, and conventional user-consultation must change. In this session we discuss a case study in major change in a large K-12 school. We unpack the linkage between values, methodology and results: values such as connectedness and community, methodologies for engaging stakeholders ranging from young children to technical professionals, and results in the readiness and excitement for change.

Play is a fantastic way to incentivise learning, but it is rarely seen in the nursing classroom. This pilot project shows the potential of gaming to provide an engaging, entertaining, and effective way to challenge students from multiple generations to team up in friendly competition, communicate, and learn.

In summary: In this case study of the redesign of TAFE NSW’s student management system, Scott will provide examples of how the training team have navigated the challenges of providing training in new systems while maintaining the old, as they work with teachers, managers, and support staff across the organisation.
The Student Management Services (SMS) Project is a major undertaking at TAFE NSW. The SMS Program will support our students by creating a consistent student experience throughout the end-to-end student cycle. As part of this process, TAFE NSW needs to educate its staff how to use new systems as they come online, while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the existing systems. In this session, the Training Team of the SMS Project will present you with a case study of how they have navigated (and are still navigating) these challenges to provide the new skill sets across the state to a wide range of teachers, managers, and support staff.

360 cameras have been around for a while but last year the flood gates opened with super cheap and somewhat decent cameras available. By purchasing a less than $1000 360 camera — I have discovered a number of use cases apart from the obvious VR360 video. Together with a video editor, a 360 camera is a tool to capture interesting points of view with ability for post panning, zooming, tilting, rolling and extreme fisheye effects. By sharing experiments from capturing Indonesian shadow puppetry with views of both sides of the puppet screen to post editing a simple bicycle ride along a cycle path, you may see new possibilities for 360 video in learning and teaching for describing place and new points of view.

In summary: Teachers are radically changing the game with hands-on, challenging and fruitful professional learning experiences in highly sociable settings (PD in the pub?!) In this presentation we share some of the creative kinds of teacher professional learning across our schools. 
It’s no lie that there are many teachers who bluntly refuse to incorporate digital technologies and edtech into their daily teaching and learning, despite a curriculum that actually demands it. There are multiple figures to point the blame at for this, but that won’t do anyone any favours. Rightly or wrongly, teachers count themselves amongst the most overworked and undervalued workers in this country, so the notion of 1) learning about something they still see as a fad or irrelevant (i.e. edtech) and 2) doing it in their own time (or even at their own cost - gasp!) seems like a ridiculous idea, right?
Well, hopefully no. Teachers are changing the game with professional development in the edtech sphere and bringing teachers long since thought to have written of the virtues of edtech back into the fold. We’ll explain how and why and suggest ways this could be improved, so that students aren’t left behind. Looking at combining hands-on, challenging and fruitful professional learning experiences in highly sociable experiences (did someone say PD in the PUB?), gain an insight into what is and isn’t working, and how teachers are spinning the archaic and mind-numbing traditional professional learning experiences on its head through the use of edtech, to serendipitously learn more about edtech.

How can we support the development of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in tertiary education? The answer is simple - give them the opportunity to grow in a supported learning environment which caters for their cultural needs. What does that look like? The Yurauna Centre at CIT Reid offers a more holistic approach to education for students and provides opportunities for further learning beyond the classroom.

e-Exams are increasingly of interest to higher education providers. However e-Exams fit for the employability needs of 21st century graduates demands that we leverage the sophisticated affordances of ICT for authentic assessments but such e-exams must also be scalable and robust.

This session continues on from our e-Exams work previously explored at EdTechPosium in 2017, this time reporting on the third phase of work in the national 'Transforming Exams' project.

Live trials of a 'robust' online e-exam approach that uses Moodle were conducted at Monash University in semester 1 2018. Capabilities for a greater degree of authentic assessment via the use of a range of e-tools of the trade were combined with computer marked Moodle-based quizzes. However these are no ordinary Moodle quizzes! The live trials showed success with the custom developed e-Exam platform using a client-server Moodle working in a hybrid online-offline manner. The system withstood network outages, even total loss of connectivity during the exam session without loss of student's response data and without interruption to working time.

We will explore key system design features and outline students' feedback on their experience of the e-exam sessions.
Further information:
e-Exams project TransformingExams.com
e-Exams will be explored in depth with multiple speakers at a full day Symposium, Sat 24 Nov 2018, Melbourne. More info ta.vu/eexamsym

Group work for students can generate for them both the best and worst aspects of their higher education experience. Within this session I will demonstrate two exercises and a couple of resources that any instructor can use to strengthen the formation of student groups, make explicit some parts of the function of student groups that are far too often tacit, and radically heighten the chance of success of student groups. Be warned, if you are a Moodle/technology enabled teaching addict, this is a totally non-technological approach!

What would higher education be like if all high-schoolers could write simple software, type at high speed, handle data and apply computational thinking? The Australian Curriculum for Digital Technologies (AC:DT) is now a discrete curriculum for students from pre-school to year 10. Students are also undertaking standardised testing online and this is affecting skill development. In the session, we will describe the AC:DT and standardised online testing and share discussions on the impact for students transitioning into higher education.

In this presentation we will outline the processes, challenges and lessons learnt in designing and delivering an online English Language course to a cohort of students with a pre-intermediate level of English at a South-East Asian military university.
Design: Our students were in a remote location. While familiar with phone apps, they came to the course with low levels of knowledge of laptops, desktops, and web-based learning contexts.
Develop: The course was designed in Moodle and delivered predominantly in a synchronous face-to-face mode using Adobe Connect. In developing the course, we employed pedagogical principles related to second language learning to underpin the task design in Moodle. We will discuss how this informed the choice of activities and resources in Moodle, and how Adobe Connect was used to maximise student engagement.
Play: The online environment itself initially seemed daunting and complex to the teachers, as well as the students; however, a clear outcome of the course was that the online experience of learning in a virtual environment should develop student confidence and autonomy, providing familiarity and playfulness to enhance student participation and commitment. In turn, this led to our ability to use the available tools to create more varied and engaging activities.

iLesson is a learning application that makes creating short animated lessons very quick and easy. It uses the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard to enhance the integration with supporting LMSs. As a simple alternative to the native Moodle lesson activity, iLesson allows instructors to build an interactive lesson centered around a video on the fly. iLesson aims to increase student engagement and retention by bringing four major learning activities all together in one place: (1) “Watch” displays an online video hosted in major sharing websites such as Youtube or Vimeo; (2) “Check” presents a series of short questions that serve as knowledge checkpoints; (3) “Explore” provides additional resources relevant to the lesson; and (4) “Discuss” allows learners and instructors participate in a virtual class discussion.

The use of audio-visual feedback has great potential for scaffolding new skills and helping to reduce feelings of isolation, especially in flexible online self-paced study formats. In 2017, Dr Stephanie Kizimchuk redesigned the assessment for the online self-paced (FLX-mode) format of the first year foundation unit at the University of Canberra. She then introduced audio-visual feedback use among both her students and staff in a pilot within the unit. Last year, Dr Kizimchuk presented ‘The Importance of Being Present: Redesigning for audio-visual feedback by both students and staff’, where she explored the context, pedagogic reasons, opportunities, challenges, and principles for best practice in the use of audio-visual feedback in the lead up to implementing the pilot. As a follow up, in this current session Dr Kizimchuk will report back on the results of both the pilot and the expansion of audio-visual feedback use to the main unit cohort. The session will briefly cover the pilot’s context and pedagogic design, share and explore the results stemming from the implementation of audio-visual feedback, and include recommendations for practical adoption and incorporation of this technology into teaching and learning contexts.

To enhance the ability of students to solve ill-structured problems and generate creative solutions, experience in solving problems is essential. Two main factors have to be considered to provide this experience: authentic situations and reflective feedback. This presentation suggests using an eLearning environment based on gamification to provide students with sufficient experience in solving problems as well as teaching them how to reflect on their problems.

Learning design theories and methodologies often emphasise student-centred and empathetic designs (see Morris and Warman, 2015). Part of this thinking, together with the embedded pedagogical approaches of LMS’s such as Moodle, often land itself to streamlined, linear designs of courses and their course sites (Sancar and Cagiltay, 2008). Linear designs have been argued to reduce students’ cognitive loads which lead to a more positive learner experience (Kuhlmann, 2012). However, as pointed out by some critiques, are we nurturing students to be more knowledgeable but less critical and creative? Designing courses for adult learners should consider Andragogic principles in which learners are provided with self-directed, autonomous learning experiences and opportunities to explore and problem solve rather than be content centred (Knowles in Cercone, 2008). Non-linear or exploratory course design caters for this type of user experience and can be used to further foster and develop the design thinking process. In our presentation, we look to apply learning design and user experience principles to build exploratory course sites that balances between students’ cognitive loads with exploration and curation. Rather than advocating a non-linear approach to design, the term "exploration" is used to encourage educators and designers to think beyond the binary. We will present a number of examples of courses in which this form of design has been applied and where exploration opportunities were provided to learners. We will also discuss how activities can be designed to encourage exploration and be incorporated within course design.

Having worked in education overseas for a decade, I arrived in Canberra and was surprised at how little technology and game play was used in the classroom. This started a journey of design, develop and play! In 2014 Quizling entered the App Store, and what was an app for my high school classroom, became a hit in primary school, and with adults.
I now work with national institutions like the NGA, NLA and the Royal Australian Mint, with schools around Australia, and with corporations who have content they want to engage people with. The pedagogy behind quizzes make a simple game an excellent educational tool for all ages, that combines great design and game play with increased engagement, retention and attitudes to learning. Supported by research, this presentation will demonstrate the power of game play, the importance of questioning and show how an idea for my classroom, has led to great learning.