TALL blog

Last night the University of Oxford celebrated the innovative use of digital technologies to support teaching, learning, research and outreach at its annual OxTALENT award ceremony. This year’s competition had a strong field of over 70 entries submitted by staff and students in the following categories:

• Use of WebLearn to support teaching, learning or outreach
• Innovative teaching with technology
• Academic podcasting
• Outreach & engagement
• Research posters
• Data visualisation
• Student IT innovation

As always, it was a pleasure to meet up with colleagues old and new from learning technology teams around the University and to see examples of digital projects undertaken by groups and individual staff and students across a wide range of the University’s academic departments, museums and supporting service. The University’s new Vice Chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson, was a guest speaker and in her closing address highlighted the importance of digital technologies for sharing the extraordinary resources of the University and the talent we have in teaching and research.

TALL would like to congratulate all recipients of the 2016 OxTALENT awards, in particular Professor Simon Benjamin, winner of the Innovative teaching with technology category. TALL helped Simon to realise his vision for teaching his first-year course on Vectors, Matrices and Determinants using a flipped classroom technique comprised of DIY videos and self-tests by providing an open Moodle platform, which enabled him to easily collate his teaching resources and to contribute to the University’s mission for global outreach by releasing his videos under Creative Commons and sharing them widely.

Further information about Simon’s course can be found in the Innovative teaching with technology post on the OxTALENT blog and details of all the 2016 winners, runners up and recipients of honourable mention can be found in the OxTALENT 2016: Roll of Honour.

Each year, the University of Oxford holds its OxTALENT Awards ceremony to recognise and reward excellence in teaching and learning supported by IT. This year’s event, hosted by Anne Trefethen, Melissa Highton and Dave Walters, was held on 18 June 2013.

It is always a pleasure to meet up with colleagues from learning technology teams around the University and to get the opportunity to see examples of how academic staff, researchers and students from across the University are making innovative use of technology and to have the opportunity to discuss their work with them. This year’s competition was no exception and saw prizes offered in the following categories:

Use of Technology for Outreach and Engagement
Use of WebLearn (the University’s VLE) to Support a Course or Programme of Study
Research Poster
Digital Image
Infographic
Open Education Initiative
Use of IT in the Classroom
Student IT Innovation

We would like to pass on our congratulations to all the 2013 OxTALENT award winners and mention in particular the part-time tutors of the Department for Continuing Education’s Weekly Classes Programme and our colleagues in the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Centre who both won prizes.

The Weekly Classes tutors were runners up in the Open Education Initiatives category for their contribution to the Jisc-funded Sesame project. This project, which was led by TALL, saw over 150 part-time tutors learn about open educational resources (OER) for teaching and learning and the creation of the open.conted.ox.ac.uk site, which contains a growing collection of over 2,000 online resources. The CPD Centre was runner up in the Use of WebLearn to Support a Course or Programme of Study category for their innovative use of the VLE to allow students to interact as peer reviewers on each other’s essay assignments.

For further information about all the 2013 winners and runners up, take a look at the OxTALENT blog.

Yesterday evening some of the TALL team attended the University’s annual OxTALENT awards ceremony and would like to convey our congratulations to Melissa Highton and her team at the Learning Technologies Group, who organised the event, and to all the winners of this year’s awards.

The OxTALENT awards are an annual competition celebrating the innovative use of IT in teaching and learning by academic staff and students at the University of Oxford. This year’s categories included:

1. Use of the University’s VLE to support a course or programme of study
2. Academic podcasting
3. Student podcasting
4. Student projects
5. Research project posters
6. Digital images
7. Use of technology in learning spaces

The awards opened with a welcome from Dr Stuart Lee, Director of the University’s Computing Services, and a fascinating presentation by Dr Chris Lintott on his Galaxy Zoo project, which is using the power of the public and the web to categorise hundreds of thousands of digital images drawn from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope archive.

It was also great to see the showcase of interesting projects taking place around the University including examples of innovative use of the VLE in both the sciences and humanities; a new media player, Belooga Media, which won the student project category; a classroom based voting system, which won the technology in learning spaces category; and not forgetting the smiling frog that won the digital image award!

The final award to be presented was the academic podcasting award, which was won by Dr Emma Smith for her very popular “Not Shakespeare” podcating series (which is available from the University of Oxford’s iTunes U site). Emma has also recently worked with the team at Continuing Education to develop a new ten-week online course on Shakespeare which includes part of the “Not Shakespeare” podcating series as an open educational resource.

Further information is available from the OxTALENT website.