Monday 30 July 2012

UG-FLEX - thank you and good bye (well not quite.....)

The final steering group meeting took place on 16 July with a terrific presentation from Peter Chatterton, the external project evaluator.    A copy of the final report will shortly be available on the project webpage at www.gre.ac.uk/ils/ugflex and it is safe to say that the project ended on a very positive note and has generated a series of new initiatives and development going forward. 

Watch this space for news on the new academic calendar/framework!

A few days later the project hosted an "end of project" event at the Greenwich campus. The project manager gave a short presentation on the project's "story", but mainly it was an opportunity to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who had contributed their time, brain power and experiences to the project.


Tuesday 19 June 2012

UG-Flex at the 7th International Blended Learning Conference June 2012


Last week's session at the IBLC (University of Hertfordshire) went  well. I did a session with Rachel Forsyth and Marianne Sheppard called "Winning Hearts and Minds: tools and techniques to engage staff in curriculum change initatives".

More than 40 people took part and "gamely" tried out the Greenwich's "Snakes & Ladders" Interactive Workshop Tool and MMU's “Accreditation” game activity.  

It was a whistle stop introduction to the activity, since they only had 30 mins to try it out. Even so the feedback was extremely helpful and generally positive.


Group 1 Activity Output

Group 2 Activity Output




Group 3 Activity Output



It is clear that the Interactive Workshop Formula developed by Sally Alsford and Claire Eustance is proving to be an effective tool for getting people talking (my particular area of interest being to facilitate "creative conversations") and also as a means to convey and demonstrate how induction/transition cannot be a one off activity in the first week (Sally's area of expertise).


 
Contrary to some concerns voiced previously there were no comments along the lines of the “snakes and ladders” metaphor being a trifle "childish".  Participants were also really interested in thinking about how it could be used in other contexts.     Again the suggestion came up about post it notes, so all in all pretty positive. 

Guidance on the tools with templates are (or will be) available (shortly) on JISC's Design Studio: