JISC RSC YH Exchange News

A multimedia resource to help students and tutors overcome the challenges of group work has been awarded for its innovation in the Jorum learning and teaching competition.

‘Making Group-work work’, developed by LearnHigher, is itself a collaboration between the Universities of Brunel, Bradford and Leeds and involves a series of 10 video episodes, showing five students on the journey of a group project.

The episodes are accompanied by audio clips and discussion points to help learners explore listening and interpersonal skills, oral presentations and group work.

http://www.learnhighergroupwork.com/

The panel of judges was looking for exciting, innovative learning and teaching resources that have been created under a Creative Commons license. Winners were decided through a scoring system based on the appropriateness, engagement, effectiveness and reusability of each resource submitted.

Jorum is a JISC-funded online repository service for teaching and support staff in UK colleges and universities. It exists to encourage sharing, reuse and repurposing of learning and teaching materials created by the community for the community.

Louise Egan, Jorum communications officer, said: “The quality of entries received has been outstanding, with many resources submitted from a diverse range of projects. We were delighted to see the talent that exists in the creation of learning and teaching resources. These are exactly the kind of materials that we want to encourage people to share with other users through the Jorum online service.”

The winners were presented with their prizes, kindly sponsored by Intrallect at the ALT-C 2009 Gala Dinner on Wednesday 9th September.

Second prize went to a tutorial entitled ‘Introducing English as a Lingua Franca,’ an activity for students who are working in mixed language groups. The York St John University resource aims to help students raise their awareness of the use of English as a lingua franca and how they are using it in the classroom.

http://www.yorksj.ac.uk/learnteach/jorum/

‘Delivering student workshops,’ a series of resources by the University of Leeds, Reading and CATS Consulting Ltd, on behalf of LearnHigher, won the third prize. This series of resources takes tutors through step-by-step processes of planning a workshop, including suggested icebreakers and specific interactive activities, all supplemented by handouts, PowerPoint presentations and lesson plans.

http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/videoresources/reportwriting/

Access the learning and teaching resources created as part of the competition: http://tinyurl.com/JorumComp

Find out more about JISC’s involvement in Jorum: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/services/jorum.aspx

Explore what happened at the Association for Learning Technology conference: http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2009/