Internal Projects

Oxford Brookes University Business School is keen to develop teaching evidence-based practice and research into teaching practices within the School. The following projects have recently been conducted within the Business School.

Tom Elsworth: Foundations of Business's digital enhancement project

Objective

To address some of the technical and operational issues around large-module teaching during 2009/2010 and so develop and test a new model of Virtual Learning Environment application to the module that could be available from the start of the new degrees in 2010.

Proposed outcomes

Administrative and material savings;
Improved student use of Brookes Virtual throughout their time at Brookes;
Improved student access to feedback, especially from final assignments;
Improved early diagnosis and consolidation of learning by continuous assessment and feedback of outcomes into seminar sessions the following week.

Contact:

Richard Mohun: Re-designing lecture-seminar sessions using Articulate Presenter

Objective

To provide an example of an alternative way to design the structure and delivery of teaching on undergraduate and postgraduate modules.

Proposed outcomes

To research best practice in designing online lectures;
To identify and prepare a suitable online lecture;
To link/incorporate additional online reference and support materials for the lecture;
To produce a formative online test at the end of the lecture;
To design a face-to-face seminar/workshop session to follow the online lecture;
To evaluate the method with students;
To calculate the time to produce various elements of an online lecture.

Rationale

Many modules have a basic structure each week of a one-hour lecture followed by a one-hour (or longer) seminar or workshop session that relates to the subject matter of the lecture. Students are expected to contribute to discussion and consideration of the content of the lecture, but usually have no prior reading around the material and insufficient time in a one hour lecture to digest the material to contribute in a meaningful way.

An alternative approach, making use of e-learning, would be to provide the lecture on-line using software which allows the synchronisation of audio with slides and other facilities to produce engaging content; along with formative test questions at the end for the student to gauge their learning and recognise areas where they need to develop their understanding further.

Students would listen and engage with the online lecture and content in the week prior to the associated seminar/workshop session.

An online lecture also allows students to listen at their own pace and to listen again when they want to – this could be of particular benefit to students whose first language is not English.

Contact:

The Business School's Pedagogic Research Centre is led by Professor Margaret Price. Current projects include:

Investigating assessment literacy in Oxford Brookes University's learning communities: what is it and how can it be developed?

This is a joint ASKe/OCSLD project on assessment literacy. The research project contains two strands that will run simultaneously over two years and overlap in parts, drawing on the same dataset. The first strand is an evaluation of the implementation of the Brookes Assessment Compact, a directive on assessments, assessment processes and design, for both staff and students. The second strand is an in-depth study of the development of assessment literary of which understanding the Compact forms a part. The first year of the second strand is to focus on undergraduate students, the second year on postgraduate students.