With this academic year beginning to draw to a close, it’s time to reflect on teaching methods employed, how effective they’ve been, and what small changes could make a big difference next time around.

When putting the case for a new teaching method or technology, it’s better to show than to tell. In your role as a learning technologist, you may introduce colleagues to new tools and techniques to use on their courses. Here are some ideas on how to support your case for new digital resources.

Embrace the questions that your colleagues will have about the new technology you want to introduce, and demonstrate the efficacy of technology enhanced learning at the same time: Use a classroom response system to engage your colleagues throughout your presentation or training session. This way you can check that their understanding of the new technology or method is keeping pace with your delivery at every stage.

Pearson’s response system, Learning Catalytics, is a bring your own device system that shows how in-class responses can help identify student knowledge gaps, facilitate peer-to-peer learning or spark an interesting debate.

Learn more about learning catalytics

What about when you know the benefits of the technology enhanced learning that you want faculty to implement, but your colleagues need more convincing? As you might expect, it comes down to the data and research that you can present. Here are some of the ways in which our learning technology is designed to offer you the data that you need.

Your institution may be striving for a higher rating on the Teaching Excellence Framework, working to ensure that individual departments are offering a consistently strong student experience, or driving to maintain great student feedback from years prior.

With our digital resources, your lecturers can generate actionable data measuring increased engagement - for example, with reading a core text, attendance and responses in lectures, or time spent on assignments - improved results and increased retention. Lecturers will be enabled to spot early warning signs such as a lack of time spent on reading or homework, or be able to identify topics on which where students are struggling before the assessment. We can help you map our tools against TEF measures to support their adoption by your academic colleagues.

Our learning tools are developed using a research-based approach. Learning design principles are applied from the very start of the product development process, so that our resources incorporate principles such as scaffolding, knowledge retention and adaptivity.

We use our Efficacy Framework to measure technology’s impact on learning. We constantly evaluate effectiveness for learners and continually improve our resources. We pilot new technologies, like Revel, and our existing technologies, like MyLab & Mastering, using different pedagogical techniques, and we’d love to work with more learning technologists to ensure that we're developing our technologies in ways that will tangibly benefit educators and learners.

View the evidence for our homework and assessment technology

When you’re in a learning technology team that works across an institution, you see first-hand the variety of relationships between teaching staff and technology. Early adopter academics prioritise testing and learning from a wide range of resources, and at the other extreme, others may be too apprehensive or oversubscribed to go beyond uploading course materials to the VLE. Creating a consistent student experience in this setting, for a variety of departments and levels of study, requires simple solutions that quickly demonstrate a positive impact on learning.

The Learning Catalytics classroom response system can be used in all subjects, on courses delivered online or on campus. You don’t need physical clickers; students use their own devices, and we offer campus-wide licensing. There are various advantages to using this tool in teaching – from instant insight to enabling peer-to-peer instruction. This allows academics desiring to innovate to use Learning Catalytics to support a completely flipped classroom approach or engage distance learners with lectures in real time, while others can use it to ask a sense-checking questions during lectures.

We offer training and integration support for all new users. If you want to go into more depth, our training consultants offer a wide range of expertise and case study examples on how to get the most from each resource in a variety of teaching settings.

Learn more about our digital solutions, and how you can pilot our latest innovation, Revel™.

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References

Bergmann, J. & Sams, A. (2012). Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. International Society for Technology in Education