We are almost there! Today is the final JISC programme meeting, and I am on my way to Birmingham (literally typing this blog in a train). I am looking forward to meeting JISC folks and other Strand B project leaders and sharing the EEVS findings with them. I like the idea of 'marketplace'  - great metaphor for for resource-sharing!

Amanda will be following the event from Australia (via email updates), where she has recently started her mini research sabbatical (lucky her!) 

Reflecting back on project experience, I can say that it was tough, (in combination with teaching, research and other activities) but definitely rewarding, as we found some really interesting things which  we were able to build into a coherent story at the end. Equally important -  we learned couple of useful things on the way...

Big thank you to JISC guys and gals who definitely 'kept us on our toes' throughout the project with frequent project updates and progress meetings, and yes - that was helpful!

Finally, while this is a formal end of the project, we are already booked for many other EEVS-related events and activities : HeLF in London at the end of October, HETL in Florida in January, local dissemination at Hertfordshire, to name a few....

So, the EEVS will continue to live for at least another 6 months - in the meantime, please visit our Design Studio page and feel free to re-use some of the resources we created. 

Ciao !

M&A

We're well into the final stages of the qualitative data analysis for EEVS here. We have been reviewing the themes and sub-themes of the staff interviews conducted in the past few months. We also have the qualitative comments added by staff to the end of the questionnaire. Plenty of thoughtful objective and subjective opionions expressed, which we are looking forward to sharing with colleagues at ALT-C.

EEVS @ IBLC etc.

Summer is almost here, marking is finished, preliminary EEVS data analysis is complete and we are starting to report on some initial findings !
Last week we presented on EEVS at the Seventh International Blended Learning Conference (IBLC). This gave us an opportunity to share preliminary findings from our project not only with our colleagues from iTEAM and UH, but also with Lisa, Marianne  and others from the JISC Assessment and Feedback team. We got some interesting feedback from the audience and some good suggestions for further analysis. For example, our colleague Steve Bennett from the School of Computer Science suggested that we could look at the (potentially) changing attitudes of our student bloggers as they progressed with their reflections - the longitudinal aspects of collected data will definitely be something interesting to look at and interpret!
This week we are presenting  preliminary findings at the internal L&T forum where we will meet again with our  colleagues from the iTEAM project. Other than that, we are both pleased with the work we have done so far, and looking forward to publish some of that after we complete the analysis and report. In addition to promised outcomes, we seem to be creating more and more interesting resources that have potential to be re-used by other similar 'technology adoption' projects e.g. students questionnaire, staff questionnaire, staff interview questions, methodology based on 'reflective blogs', instructions for student bloggers etc All these we intend to share via out Design Studio page. More to follow soon...

EEVS poster

It was good to catch up with some of the other Strand B projects on Tuesday April 24th in Birmingham at the JISC Learning and Teaching Experts meeting. Seven of us were there with posters from our projects. We had the opportunity to talk about the emerging findings from our projects in a session which saw all the 70+ delegates taking time to walk round and discuss the work we're undertaking. My only regret? Not enough time to hear what everyone else is doing and their early findings!

As usual it was a packed schedule and an ecellent opportunity to explore aother areas where learning technologies are being exploited in HE and FE. Thanks to Sarah, Marianne and Lisa and the team for their hard work in setting it up and organising the day.

Interim report

Phew ! We managed to publish the interim report on time, despite all other things going on in the background (teaching, marking, open days, programme validation events etc).

Writing report was a good experience as it reminded us of  how much we achieved in the last 5-6 months! We collected vast amounts of data through staff interviews, students' blogs, campus-wide questionnaire, and also, by listening to what our students and colleagues have to say about the technology...  Most importantly, we got a really good spread of data across different subject groups (e.g. business, computer science, law, engineering, life sciences, psychology, other humanities, creative arts etc)  so it will be really interesting to compare and contrast findings across different disciplines. We are both really looking forward to a well-deserved break over Easter holidays, and to a start of more focused data analysis in April. Happy Easter to everyone!

EEVS progress

We've been rather quiet on the blog recently as we have focused on our  student questionnaire and reviewing the student input to their narrative blogs on using EVS.

We are both very excited that the numbers particpating in the survey have grown over the past 3 weeks, the total participant list has climbed to 565 students. This has been achieved in 2 main ways. First of all, we asked the students completing their EVS blogs what would motivate them to take part and they all chose the options of Amazon vouchers as their main motivator. So we have included a prize draw for one large Amazon voucher and 6 smaller ones for any students who take part in the survey and include their name and email address on the final page. Secondly, we have asked our network of local School based champions and leaders for EVS to email their students and to place the call to take part in the survey where the students are going to come across it. This might be on a Programme website or via a specific module email list. We included a question on the survey asking participants for the specific School they are registered in and because we are using the BOS software we can see at a glance online which Schools are well represented.

 Our next steps are to follow up the academic staff in interview and questionnaire and then to spend some time analysing our data.

Meeting with iTEAM

Yesterday we had a good, productive meeting with our colleagues from the iTEAM project. The iTEAM guys  are doing some great work in the area of EVS deployment and adoption across the University, while Amanda and I concentrate on collecting, analysing and making sense of an ever increasing amount of data coming from students and staff using EVS. The way we work with the iTEAM is based on two-way information sharing on our work in progress: the issues they experience and lessons learned from 'the trenches'  provide direction and focus for our data collection and analysis, while our progressive findings help them in tuning their strategy and implementation. So, for example, we had a very interesting discussion on whether or not the University should adopt a single type of a handset ... More on this to come in our preliminary findings and reports ... Stay tuned!

Considering the student reflections

We've started looking at the data from some of the student reflections. These are mainly blogs. Typically the information is structured in a conversational way so the first action to prepare for the data analysis was to draw up a large spreadsheet on which the topics for reflection have been identified and then to cut and paste the students' personal comments into this.

So far this has been quite manageable and we can both access the spreadsheet and see what has been recorded there. We may consider using NVivo software later to review themes that arise.

 One non-native English speaking student offered to do a series of  podcasts for us reflecting on the questions we raised. I was pleased to sit and listen to it as he raised a number of issues about his experience of the use of EVS in class. He felt more confident about recording his answers for aural feedback than writing them down.  One comment caught my attention especially, that he would prefer a paper question sheet because he worries he cannot read fast enough to respond to the questions when there is a test. He also likes to go back and review his answers if possible and of course that is not possible with EVS.
 It set me wondering if this is a common concern among non-native speakers of English and could contribute to stress in classes which use a lot of EVS for asking direct questions of students or for testing. Has anyone else come across this?

Reviewing our methodology

January 20th
A local meeting of one of the Strand A cluster groups at the University of Hertfordshire gave me a useful opportunity to meet up and hear from some of these projects and to share our progress in Strand B EEVS so far. Following on from the 2-minute review I gave online at  the JISC swapshop on Monday January 16th I could elaborate further on our methodology and our experiences of the student input to date.

Feedback from peers and their 'critical friend' Peter Bullen offered a valuable conversation in terms of how we can manage the outputs from our students who have enthusiastically contributed  their reflections on EVS use.

Our work so far and what is coming next

It is hard to believe that already four months have gone by since the beginning of the project! Needless to say we were very busy, collecting data, reading, talking to colleagues and thinking (!). This is in addition to all other work that we both do in our respective schools. Although we work in different schools and on different sites we try to have regular weekly meetings, face-to-face or via skype. In this blog, we will summarise what we have done so far and what we are doing next…

Our work so far has been focused on three areas: literature review, data collection and selection of methodology.

A simple google scholar title search produced more than 750 conference or journal papers related to the use of EVS (a.k.a. clickers, PRS, response system, e-voting etc.) for learning, assessment or feedback! However very few of those articles focus on institutional issues and subject differences, and are mainly concerned with pedagogical implications (e.g. improved in-class interactions, engagement in large groups etc.) Therefore, it looks like our work will start to address an obvious gap in this area of literature!

Our data is coming from different directions: we have (or will have soon in some cases) reflections from around 30 students ‘bloggers’ from 8 different schools. They all recorded their experiences in using EVS in their respective subjects in ‘real-time’ over a period of 3-4 weeks either via textual blog, podcast or vlog. This is in addition to reports and interviews from around 10 staff members who led the EVS deployment in their respective schools in previous academic year.

Last but not least, we though long and hard about the right methodology for this work and agreed that a combination of grounded theory research and case-study approach is the best way forward for this. Glynis Cousin’s  book on Researching learning in higher education was a very useful resource in helping us make this decision…

We are currently focusing on the following three areas: finalizing a student questionnaire (to be administered via BOS to potentially more than 4000 students across the university); analyzing data that we already have (from students, staff and literature); planning further focus groups and interviews with other stakeholders…

If this looks like too much work, well, yes it is! But we enjoy working together and hope to make some sense from the copious amounts of data that we seem to be accumulating and make a useful contribution to the sector!

And yes, we keep in touch with out “big brother”, iTEAM project.  In fact we just got an invitation to participate in their cluster meeting this week!

From now on we will post regular updates and would welcome comments from other projects and JISC community!