SALT Conference 2018

The 2018 SALT conference was held on the Bay Campus on the 18th July 2018 (full details on conference website).

They keynote was delivered by Professor Sally Ann Bradley from AdvanceHE in which she spoke about the importance of CPD for all and the massive variety of activities that count as CPD. From presenting at a conference right down to conversations around the kettle, if it has a positive impact on your work it is a good CPD opportunity. Sally emphasised the benefits of changing your practice based upon CPD for students.

Practice makes perfect – Online methods of summative and formative assessment

The first talk I attended was presented by Angharad Thomas in which she discussed her use of Blackboard and Numbas quizzes. Her experience using regular formative assessments led to strong engagement from students and positive results in summative assessments. As part of the development of these assessments, cheating and plagarism was taken into account. Anghard uses randomised question banks to ensure that students get similar but not the exact same questions and also uses functionality in Numbas to present the same questions but with different variables. She has also randomised the order of the questions so that each student gets the similar questions but in different orders so that it makes it more difficult for them to work together.

Angharad was confident that her assessments were robust and impactful on student outcomes. While there is some reluctance to trust online only summative assessments, there are  methods that can be used to reduce the chance of cheating by students. Question banks are an important tool. As long as the questions have been written with the same rigor, it should not matter which questions each student gets and should be a fair assessment.

Brexit-Monks: Inspiring Student Engagement with the Medieval Past through Curriculum Design

Taking advice from Sally during her keynote, I decided to attend a talk from someone from a completely different field to the one I normally work in. I was interested to find out what methods were being used in History to engage students in a topic.

Charlie Rozier spoke about his use of blogs and discussion forums to engage students. He used blogs to help students learn core skills such as research and appraisal of sources. These posts were marked and acted as formative assessments. He also held structured debates using forums, posing questions and splitting the students into groups to take different sides of an argument. Peer review was used to wrap up these discussions and debates.

Charlie’s recommendation was to have regular debates and discussions to continuously develop the students core skills.

Afternoon sessions

I attended a session which was made up of 2 presentations and 4 lightning talks. The first presentation was about teaching oracy to students to improve their persuasion and argument technique. The main thrust of the talk was that courses teach the ability to use PowerPoint and deliver a presentation but not the more detailed skills to persuade and debate and get the result they want from the presentation.

The secon talk was about assessment. Using Blackboard, ten quizzes are set, one per week of a module. The final score is the total of the top 5 results and therefore students can decide to just do 5 and take the risk or to do more and better their chances of getting a good score. They could also complete quizzes for topics they struggled with more to help revision. The results of this method were that students felt less pressure on individual quizzes and instead were able to focus on the one’s they did complete.

The first lightning talk discussed the development of a construction management course by working with industry to identify what skills and knowledge that is lacking in graduates. As students become more savvy about what employers want, they will naturally seek out courses that give them the right knowledge and skills and therefore engaging with industry will probably become a more regular occurance during course development. It will also lead to a change in the way courses are delivered as many skills will not be best taught in the traditional lecture theatre.

The second talk was about dvelopment of a flipped classroom course and the third was “lament to the lecture theatre”. Both discussed the way education is changing and that students having access to the internet via phones and even watches is fundamentally chaging the way teaching is carried out. Instead of standing and speaking to a hundred students as an expert, academic staff should now teach the skills needed to find and appraise sources of information from a wide variety of locations.

Conclusion

Overall I found the conference quite interesting. While there was nothing I found totally new, it did give me a chance to see some of the proposals for the course I’m working on in action in other parts of the University and therefore colleagues I can work with when exploring these ideas and taking them to the next step.