CELT | Good Practice Exchange
Transcript for Blended Learning with Nick Hall
“My name is Nick Hall. I work in Hollings faculty in the department of Apparel. I like to take a blended approach, so I integrate technologies into my teaching. So my focus is still on delivery, face-to-face because I believe that is still the core thing of what lecturers do and do really well. But I like to use learning technologies integrated into my practice in order to help the students develop their learning further and develop independent learning outside of the time I have with them.
What I focus on is using things like video-casting, podcasting and other methods or recording what we do in the classroom, to allow students to review, repeat, revise what we have done in the classroom.So if they happen to miss a lecture for legitimate reasons, if they have missed something that we were talking about in a lengthy two hour lecture that they want to consider again, they can use these videocasts or podcasts to listen back, watch back or review what we have done in class. I find that really enhances their experience and also helps with a really flexible feeling in the lectures and delivery.
Audio feedback, I've found has two key effects. The first I'll give is a personal effect, which is when you are dealing with large volumes of students, audio feedback takes a lot less time when you are reviewing each paper without damaging the quality of the feedback that you are giving. For the student, what I have found is really excellent on it is that if you think about what you… I use Turnitin for it and that gives you three minutes of audio feedback for each paper… and if you think about the amount of feedback you can give in three minutes whilst talking it is a lot more intense than a summative written type of feedback.It is a lot more detailed.Butwhat I really find helps is that with audio feedback you are recording you intonation, a bit more feeling about what you really felt about the work.
The big thing for me is that it buts back a lot of time. So by doing these recordings, so I am lecturing anyway so literally with the podcasting I am just recording what I am doing in the first place, and what I find that does is reduce the amount of question on individual basis, because these generic forms answer a lot of the teething troubles or simple questions that they have got but enabling that to review what we have done at any time. It solves that problem which is fantastic because it allows me to focus on writing great lectures and doing what we should be doing. For the student, across the board, it really supports their learning, whether they are struggling or whether they are an excellent student. It allows them to review their learning at their own pace, to make sure that their notes are accurate, to revise what we have been talking about if they have forgotten about it, so it really supports this process of them learning independently and building their learning outside of class.
Actually, the original reason I introduced blended learning approaches into my teaching is because I am dyslexic. And because I have developed a lot of my own learning practices to cope with dyslexia over the years, I've found that introducing this kind of visual learning that is multisensory, so we have got audio, video, and we've got face-to-face going on hand in hand with each other, that it really helps dyslexic students to focus on what they are doing and to absorb their learning in small bites. Because it tends to be with dyslexia that your attention span in slightly smaller than other people.It is difficult to concentrate sometimes so a two hour lecture is your worst nightmare.You know, you have got to sit there and concentrate, and listen to everything, and make notes rapidly, and that is actually very difficult. So two things that it does:
- it allows people to review things in bite size, those that would like to do that at their own pace. A lot of dyslexic students actually get audio recorders as part of their support package, but it can be very embarrassing for them to come up to the front and ask if they can leave an audio recording device next to me, so I do that for them so they don’t have to do that, and post it for them, and edit it if I need to.
- it allows them to methodologically approach their learning in different ways, and particularly the visual aspects. I find are incredibly helpful for that.
So, I have found that this blended learning approach not only really develops the learning of dyslexic students but in an inclusive way, the visuals the audio, the multisensory method, really enhances the top end of students as well and the middle. I have found that all of my student are basically moving up a grade band based on this approach.”