TALL blog

Although the Cascade project has been technically complete for over a year, its legacy is definitely alive and well in the Department.  As we are in the middle of extending online assignment submission and VLE support for courses to even more of our offerings, it is timely to be able to share the video case study developed by JISC as part of their publication Learning in a Digital Age – extending opportunities for lifelong learning.  As well as the video below, there is more about the project in the publication itself.

In particular it is a great overview of how we are using technology to continue our historical Departmental mission, something that would not be possible without all the great contributions from our academics, support staff and students.

For several  years now we have had a comprehensive Online support site for our students, designed to provide them with somewhere to go to for help before they phone up our IT support guys with questions we have already told them the answers to in 5 places, as well as other bits of useful information we think students might want to know.  Several years ago now as part of the JISC funded Isthmus project we created a set of resources around what we then called “new media literacies” (yes we were trying to support digital literacies before they even had a name….).  This was a pretty basic set of resources covering areas such as online information sources, citation tools, searching online, we branded it learning support and didn’t give it much further thought.

Rolling forward to our termly review of course delivery we were looking at the stats for our support site, and realised that with the exception of obvious lures such as our 2 minute guide to Moodle (ave time spent on page 1 min 56) and logging into your course, the most visited pages are largely from the “digital literacies” subsection of the site.

I don’t think we can draw any major conclusions from this, but you can at least say our students increasingly don’ t seek help with basic IT skills, but may be looking to improve their wider skill set.