It's week 11. 

Thank you to everyone who submitted a 1-page plan, and before I say anything more - if you haven't got around to it, that dropbox will stay available until Monday 22nd, so please use it. We genuinely want everyone to achieve their potential in the final assessment, but if you don't use the opportunities to get feedback from us, we can't give you advice on improving your work. I'm looking forward to looking at what has been submitted and I'm aiming to get feedback to each of you individually by Friday or failing that after the weekend. I'll send an announcement to say the feedback is ready, and you'll find it in the same place where you submitted. I hope this formative assessment has been helpful in focussing on this part of the final assessment and also lets you have a practice run at submitting to the Moodle dropbox. If you didn't make it to the webinar last week, do watch it over and try the marking exercise yourself. If you are unsure of anything, do use the assessment drop-in on Thursdays to ask anything - there are no stupid questions. 

The other piece of house-keeping I wanted to mention is the feedback Padlet - I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on the module so far. You'll find the link at the top of the Moodle page and it is totally anonymous. Please be clear about your feedback and I'd welcome any suggestions for improvements. 

So, what I really wanted to talk about today is reflection. You'll notice that the final, summative submission is called a Final Reflective Report. So what does the reflection bit of that title mean? Well it doesn't mean navel gazing nor does it mean a random stream of consciousness of whatever thoughts pass through your mind. A reflection in this context is something that is usually quite structured - with a beginning, middle and end. So for example, if you are producing something for part 1 of the assessment - the map of your learning, say something about how you learned during your group task how to turn a Powerpoint presentation into a video - you could briefly describe the situation, your group had slides but you all decided that you wanted the viewer to have a really streamlined experience where the didn't need to download files, so it would look better as a video. However, you were feeling a bit out of your depth because you had no experience of video production, but one of your group shared their screen and showed you how to export a Powerpoint into a video file and it looked really easy. They went ahead and did it because that was quicker, but on reflection it probably would have been better if you'd tried to do it yourself as you've now forgotten which bit of Powerpoint you go to to do this, but you think that you could probably  to find it again, or even look it up, and now at least you know it's possible and that gives you more confidence. In the future you plan to do this for your learners and the next thing you'd like to learn is how to embed that video into a webpage. Indeed, you then link this in part 1 of your assessment into part 3, your action plan where you add an intention to learn more about video formats and how you can embed them into your teaching materials. Now that might be a bit of a tortuous example, but hopefully it gives you the idea of what reflection can look like. We ask for reflection in nearly all the modules through out the BOE and it is good to get into the habit, and it comes from a very strong research background of being a reflective practioner. There are some subjects and professions where reflection is baked into becoming a practioner - health is one for example, teaching is another. These are both areas where we experience our practice as evolving, developing and always learning - so there are always incidents - good and bad - which give us opportunities to reflect, learn and improve. So returning to my little example, you may have perceived the structure behind it. Models of reflection

Hello, we're in double digits, it's week 10, 

And you have until next Sunday to submit a plan for how you are going to approach the third part of the final assessment: your digital strategy. This is just a draft plan, and it should be no longer than a page, if you are doing it in a text format, or about 500 words. You can of course, submit in any format - 500 spoken words, a video, a presentation, a diagram. With alternative formats I always advise though to be mindful of guiding your reader, or listener or viewer though your ideas carefully. What should they look at first? What is the sequence of thought? What background do they need to know in order to understand the context? This is particularly important when it comes to static visuals - remember Don't Make Me Think? and how we skim read websites, missing most of the content? And there is a big difference between, for example, a mindmap you use as a process to work through your thoughts, and a mindmap you are using to communicate your ideas to a third party. Think about dual coding and how you can use visuals and audio to get your point across more elegantly. Of course, this is appropriate for your final submission too, and any work you do on the the BOE, and hopefully this applies to your own work. 

This week the webinar will be about the final assessment. I'll be sharing some exemplars of work by previous students and asking you to consider how you would mark them. This has been found to be a powerful way to improve students' assessment literacy - basically put yourself in the shoes of the markers to see what they are looking for. Giving feedback on someone else's work is one of the most powerful ways of improving your own work because it helps you get your head out of your own context and see better what the general principles of the assessment are.  If you can't come to the webinar on the day, try to watch it back, doing the exercises as you go. If you want to send anything to me afterwards to look at, or you want to post on Teams about what you would have done, please do so.

This is also the last week that has a topic aligned to it. Open Education and global communities. These are big topics and we'll be coming back to them in later modules. Open education can be a bit hard to grasp - because it encompasses so many different things. It's also been somewhat diluted by promises of free and open education such as MOOCS, but they don't always turn out to be as accessible or equitable as promised. Open education can be about reusing resources - so if you show your learners a YouTube video created by someone else, that's open education. If you search for images with Creative Commons licences to use in your teaching, then that's open education. If you talk and share anything about your teaching with others, particularly people outside your institution or company, then that's open education. If you share anything you've made with others to reuse, that's open education. It is a powerful movement for equity and playing our part is important. 

In previous years, learners on this module fedback that they would have preferred access to the content earlier, so this year I've made the units available earlier so you have plenty of time to rework them into your context and prepare your final report. I know, as a result, it probably feels like there has been a lot to cover in a short period of time. So if you haven't kept on top of the reading in the topics, please don't worry, there is time. From now until your final submission deadline, there is no new content. You'll also be receiving an email from the university asking you to complete an evaluation survey - please fill this in, it's really important for us to keep listening to you and improving our work. If you have pressing feedback that you'd like to be addressed this term, please get in contact with Scott who is the class representative.  

That's it for me. 

Ha

Hello, it's week 9,

This week's topic is got two prongs to it - criticality in education technology and algorithms. In many ways, the readings about algorithms are an example of how to be critical about education technology. For me, I see being critical as being about not making assumptions or taking anything for granted. Everything is up for question: education, technology, the way you are being taught, the tools - everything. To be questioning sometimes requires being a bit brave - sticking your neck out and asking awkward questions, particularly when others present a taken-for-granted fact, with no dispute or provision of evidence. This can be in the media talking about online learning being 'inferior' to face-to-face, or less work for educators. Or it can be well-meaning colleagues perpetuating myths like digital natives when they say younger learners have some innate ability to work with technology (they don't), or that new or different tools are always better than the ones we have. The readings in the week 9 topic explore the ideas of some scholars who are critical in their engagement with education technology. 

Algorithms are the recipes that technologies use to operate - it's a big word for what is basically a list of instructions which machines blindly follow. Of course those instructions have been created by humans, and as a result embed all of our blind spots, biases and tendencies to make errors. With the increasing complexity of technologies, it gets harder to see through to these instructions and the implications of the choices made by coders. It's not that we need to know how to code - although you will get an opportunity to learn in a PgDip module next year - it's about taking a step back and questioning whether the functionality which some tools and platforms offer bring with them implicit ideas about what learning and teaching should be like. So criticality is key here. There are no right or wrong answers or opinions, but there are uninformed and unsubstantiated opinions and this is one of the things will we be keeping an eye on in your future work. To make a claim, to take a position, you have to demonstrate that you understand the broad picture, that things are not always clear-cut, but that drawing on other people's work, particularly peer-reviewed research such as journal articles, you argue in favour or against something. In some ways, we have to follow a formula, a series of instructions or algorithm when engaging with and communicating academic ideas. Whether it is speaking, writing or other forms of communication, we need evidence to show that we're not just making it up. 

If critical thinking is a core skill we want you to develop in your studies with us, there is also another skill - that isreflection. As a work-based programme, we ask you to constantly reflect on what you are doing, how you experiement, what happens when you try thing and you've learned and how this will impact on your future work. It's a cycle and, like academic communication, there is a knack to reflection too. I know some of you will have encountered reflective practice and writing in your own work or previous studies. If not, don't be put off by the term reflection which sounds a bit intimate or vague. We look for reflection in the final report for this module and in most of the summative assessments in other BOE modules, but we'll be giving you guidance and for this week's workshop we'll take a look at some simple models in diagram form to help you structure your thoughts. Part 1 of your summative report - the Map of Learning - in particular needs to have a reflective element. Do come along to the webinar if you can so you can make a head start on that. 

There's just two weeks left before you need to put in a one page plan for part three of the final report - your action plan. Do watch back last week's webinar for an overview of what we are looking for in that plan. Remember it's forma