An Advanced Guide to using Social Media and the Web to Communicate and Measure your Research Impact - 1 day course: Wednesday, 25th January 2017



Andy Tattersall



Claire Beecroft

 Many academics and professionals are already using social media tools such as Twitter, blogging and ResearchGate as part of their work. Some are using the tools daily, whilst most just dip in and out of using them for a variety of reasons. Whilst Twitter and ResearchGate are useful, they are just a small part of a large set of tools that academics can use to communicate and network. Andy Tattersall and Claire Beecroft are running a one day workshop that helps academics and professionals make better use of the tools they may already be using.


Some academics are using the wrong tools and others just not getting the best out of them. Open access, data re-use and scholarly communications are opening up a myriad of further options on how research can be archived, shared and re-used, and the workshop will look at the options available to transform any academic into a modern digital academic.

Course Overview

This one day course will show academics and professionals who will have some experience of using some of these tools but are not quite sure how to maximise them and what other options exist. We will show you how to get more from your mobile device from presentations to conference calling, from taking polls to making videos, and how you can truly be a digital academic fit for the 21st Century.


We will look at the options around self-archiving and the benefits, barriers and pitfalls for doing so. The workshop will also look at different ways of communicating and sharing your research with special attention to infographics, video, podcasting and animation.
Communicating research is only part of the story and we will look at how altmetrics can be employed to show what is being said about your research and how you should respond. We will also explore the ethical and practical issues around open peer review and public comments and how you can deal with them.


Who will benefit from this course?
This short course will benefit a wide range of people including (but not exclusive of):

• Researchers;
• Masters and PhD Students;
• Research Support Staff and Managers;

Course Materials

A copy of all course materials will be provided on USB (including presentations).  Participants are asked to provide their own laptop/tablet for the duration of the course


Date and Times
1-day course:  Wednesday, 25th January 2017
Start:  9:30 am
Finish: 4:30 pm

Fees

£TBC - Early Bird Rate for confirmed bookings received on or before Sunday, 27th November 2016
£TBC - Standard Rate for confirmed bookings received on or after Monday, 28th November 2016
Last Booking date for this course is midnight on Wednesday, 11th January 2017

Booking and Payment

Provisional bookings are now being accepted. Please email scharr-scu@sheffield.ac.uk to reserve your place. You will then be contacted when the course has gone live on the Online Store, where all our bookings are processed.

All our bookings are processed via our Online Store. Payment is by Credit/Debit Card or PayPal. If you are a UK organisation and would prefer to be invoiced, then please select this option on our Online Store and ensure that all invoice details are provided (contact email address, full address, purchase order number) and also forward a copy of the Purchase Order to scharr-scu@sheffield.ac.uk.
If you have any queries regarding our booking process then please do not hesitate to contact us.

Meals and Accommodation

The course fee includes lunch and refreshments throughout the day plus all course materials provided on USB and teaching fees.  NB:  Accommodation is NOT included.
If you have any particular dietary or access requirements then please contact the Short Course Unit with your requirements at the time of booking.

Venue

Halifax Hall Hotel & Conference Centre

Endcliffe Vale Road, Sheffield, S10 3ER.
www.halifaxhall.co.uk

Contact

For further information please do not hesitate to contact the Short Course Unit via email at scharr-scu@sheffield.ac.uk


 Tel +44 (0)114 222 2968

Sheffield University Learning and Teaching Conference - From MOOC Student to MOOC Tutor

Last week myself and Claire Beecroft delivered a presentation at the University of Sheffield's own Learning and Teaching Conference. The conference is held every year in January and this year's theme was based on the use of technology in teaching. We delivered a session in parallel with two other ScHARR colleagues, e-Learning lead Chris Blackmore and university teacher Katie Powell on the MOOCs we've run at ScHARR. Our session reflected on our own journey from being students on MOOCs to finally running three of our own.




The abstract of the session can be read below.

What is this about?
The session explains the journey taken by University Teacher Claire Beecroft alongside her colleague, Information Specialist Andy Tattersall that started as MOOC students to delivering the University of Sheffield’s first MOOCs. Claire and Andy discovered MOOCs back in the early summer of 2012 and were impressed by the technologies driving them and the potential for such courses in their own department. Coming from information backgrounds and with a past record in innovation and creativity, Claire and Andy formed part of the core ScHARR MOOCs team. Working closely with learning technologists, University teachers, marketing professionals all led by the Director of Teaching at ScHARR the first MOOCs were run in June 2013. Claire is the Assistant Course Director for the Health Technologies Assessment MOOC which started in October 2013.
 
How will colleagues benefit?
Colleagues will benefit by seeing what a MOOC timeline looks like, the implementation of technologies along the way to create and organise one and eventually promote and facilitate it. We will give an overview of the tools, skills and infrastructure to deliver a MOOC and to maintain a healthy level of engagement with students. Colleagues will benefit from discovering the pitfalls, myths and benefits of incorporating technologies into a MOOC by colleagues who have balanced their own learning curve on a challenging and relatively new way of delivering learning.

New Paper in Health Information and Libraries Journal by ScHARR IR

After 70 sessions, numerous versions on our campus and much further, four conference appearances and a few articles and workshops, the ScHARR Bite Size model reaches the heady heights of academic publishing in a journal paper. Learn something new in 20 minutes: Bite Size sessions to support research and teaching authored by Andy Tattersall, Claire 

Beecroft and Jenny Freeman is in the latest issue of the Health Information and Libraries journal.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hir.12033/abstract

Hear more about the paper from the authors

listen to ‘Learn something new in 20 minutes: Bite Size sessions to support research and teaching’ on Audioboo

Keywords:

education and training;

instructional design;

knowledge transfer;

professional development;

teaching

Abstract

The School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) at The University of Sheffield run an innovative series of informal 20-minute Bite Size sessions to help staff and students teach, research, collaborate and communicate more effectively. The sessions have two clear strands: one focused on teaching and the other on research. The remit is not to teach people how to use something in their work or study, but to let them know why they should use it and how they can employ it. By introducing participants to the possibilities and how they can apply ideas and technologies in their work and study in an enthusiastic manner, it is possible to send them away with at least the intention to explore and experiment. The evidence shows that this organic approach is working – staff and students are starting to use many of the tools that Bite Size has covered. Any kind of widespread change within organisations can be hard to deliver, but by bringing champions on your side and delivering sessions in a convenient, informal and timely manner; good practice and ideas can spread naturally.

Health Information and Libraries Journal and IR success!

Image from Health Information and Libraries Journal

Some great news relating to the writing activities of Information Resources Group here at ScHARR.  We were delighted to discover that 4 of our papers featured in the top 50 downloads from Health Information and Libraries Journal and 2 contributed to the 2012 Impact Factor:

Booth, A. and Beecroft, C. (2010), The SPECTRAL project: a training needs analysis for providers of clinical question answering services. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 27: 198–207.

Papaioannou, D., Sutton, A., Carroll, C., Booth, A. and Wong, R. (2010), Literature searching for social science systematic reviews: consideration of a range of search techniques. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 27: 114–122. 

Sutton, A. (2012), Increasing impact in a time of decreasing budgets [Editorial]. Health Information & Libraries Journal Virtual Issue 2012.

Sutton, A. and Booth, A. (2012), What type of leader am I?: a training needs analysis of health library and information managers. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 29: 39–46.

Sutton, A. and Grant, M. J. (2011), Cost-effective ways of delivering enquiry services: a rapid review. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 28: 249–255.

Woods, H. B. (2012), Know your RO from your AE? Learning styles in practice. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 29: 172–176. 

What's it like to be a MOOC Student?

Image used under a Creative Commons By Attribution Licence  © Claire Beecroft

Time for a bit of reflective practice! Four members of ScHARR (with three of us based at ScHARR Library) have just completed the E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC. The course was hosted on the MOOC behemoth Coursera and was facilitated by Jeremy Knox, Siân Bayne, Hamish Macleod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair, all from the University of Edinburgh.
The MOOC looked at the contrasting ideas of utopian and dystopian futures, how technology impacts on learning and culture and the concept of what it means to be human in the modern world.
The course was run over five weeks and was a mixture of synchronous content in the form of Google Hangouts by the course tutors reflecting on the previous week’s materials, while most of the content was delivered as asynchronous learning with the idea of students self-directing their learning. This was mostly formed around a core collection of videos and text, with supplementary reading for students wanting to delve deeper into a topic.

The course had over 41,000 students enroll, although evidence seemed to show that about 20% were active participants; 'active' meaning that they had communicated using one of the various social platforms associated with the course. The majority had some form of higher education background and were based in the U.S or Western Europe. Communication by the course hosts and students was predominantly via Social Media, in particular Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. More formal communication by course leaders and students occurred within the Coursera discussion forums for the EDC MOOC.
After five weeks, students were expected to submit a digital artefact that captured an idea or concept from the course materials. The artefact could be anything from text to video, from images to audio, including tools such as YouTube and Prezi as dominant mediums of delivery. Each submission was peer-reviewed by three students, although each student had the option to review more than three artefacts. Each ScHARR participant marked four submissions; the marking system was as follows:
 
0 = does not achieve this, or achieves it only minimally
1 = achieves this in part
2 = achieves this fully or almost fully

Students who got a mark higher than 1.5 received a distinction.


Claire Beecroft @beakybeecroft

I really enjoyed the MOOC and it appealed to the way I like to learn - it was largely video-based and the workload was as heavy or light as you wanted it to be. I aimed to do all the ‘core’ activities, but didn’t manage much of the optional stuff, such as participating in forums and blogging, though I did use the Twitter hashtag and found this very useful - one evening while scanning the tweets I noticed a just-tweeted tweet about a programme starting on BBC4 about ‘Google and the World Brain’- I tuned into iPlayer just as the programme started and watched all 1.5 hours of it - it was so interesting and eye-opening and frankly, worrying. I’d have never heard about it without that tweet.

I was a little surprised at the initial reaction of many students who complained about feeling ‘overwhelmed’ by the volume and diversity of content being generated by the MOOC - we knew that 40,000 had registered, so I wasn’t really surprised at all - I was happy to take a random/scatty approach and to stick to key platforms (mainly Google+ and Twitter) that I use regularly and like.

I would have like to have hung-out at the Hangouts, but these were timed just as I usually start the Friday-night scramble to get to nursery and after-school club.
Although I did watch a little of them on the recording, I think watching live and being able to participate (or at least try to) would have been much more fun.

What I liked the most was that the course really emphasised theoretical perspectives around e-Learning - anyone hoping to learn ‘skills’ would have been disappointed, but that’s not what I need - I wanted to be forced to use my tired, lazy brain- and I was! I also felt they did a good job of hinting and guiding us towards the links between the videos/readings and online learning, but never spelt them out - that was our job and the ‘digital artefact’ task was our chance to provide some proof that we’d gotten our heads around the theme of the MOOC. I also liked the very loose format of the assessed work, and for me the peer-marking system worked well and seemed reasonably fair- having 3 markers gave most of us a fair hearing from our peers I think (but then I got a 2, so I would say that...).

There is lots that we can learn from how they ran their MOOC, from their canny approach in ‘curating’ rather than ‘creating’ content (they didn’t give away any of their own materials as such, just signposted us to existing web-based resources authored or produced by others), to their assessment methods. I also think they were actually pretty brave to stick their head above the parapet and take on a properly Massive, Open and Online Course - the incident at Georgia Tech, just days after the MOOC started, shows just how wrong a MOOC can go, and how immediate and public the consequences can be.

I worked mostly in the evenings, and almost entirely on my new iPad (I had a problem with my iPad-produced Prezi so I fell at the final hurdle of doing the MOOC entirely on it, dang!) and although it was hard to fit it all in, I’ve signed up for 2 more Coursera MOOCs and I’ve got my eye on an edX one too - I just wish the OU would hurry up and launch Futurelearn- something to look forward to...

 



Chris Blackmore @chrisblackmore
The size of the cohort was an interesting factor - as a learner, I felt rather anonymous, and unconnected to fellow learners. I made very few postings to the discussion forum, and there was little or no sense of community from the forums, in my experience (there was more of a community from the twitter hashtag #edcmooc). This may have been exacerbated by the fact that I wasn’t able to attend the scheduled Google Hangouts. Notably, a group of us set up and attended our own Hangouts to reflect on the course.
The assessment task was to create a digital artefact, which was a wide brief and gave sufficient leeway to create a submission at the last minute! My submission wasn’t as closely related to course materials as it might be, and that was probably a reflection of insufficient time devoted to watching videos and reading texts - I did find it difficult to put in the requisite amount of time to my studies. This is a reflection of the fact that I was primarily doing the MOOC out of curiosity, to see what doing a MOOC felt like, and that I was fitting it in around work and family life.
The peer assessment seemed to work quite well - my own feedback was interesting and informative, and hopefully the feedback I gave was useful. I did find myself being quite generous in my assessments of peers’ submissions.
It was nice to receive confirmation that I had “passed” the MOOC and would receive some kind of official confirmation of this; on reflection, I am not convinced my low level of participation merited a pass, and I presumably wouldn’t have passed a credit-bearing University module with this level of participation. So there are question marks for me on how to monitor the engagement level of students in a valid way and give appropriate feedback and credit.

Angie Rees @angiefelangie
When I signed up for this MOOC it sounded interesting and really relevant to me but I wasn’t at all sure that I had the time for it. However I decided to sign up and see how things went and now I’m very glad I did.

From the first week I liked the format of the course - and the Coursera software it was run in. The format of four weekly videos plus some core and optional reading wasn’t too demanding and the content on the whole was relevant, interesting and often entertaining.

One area of the course which I didn’t make the most of was the social networking side of things. I posted just a few times to twitter, didn’t blog and wasn’t able to make any of the hangouts. I signed up for the facebook page but didn’t really use it. I think this was mainly due to time constraints but also the fact that the huge array of tools people where using to communicate was a bit bewildering and I often didn’t know where to start or what was the ‘right’ place to be participating online. That said within the University we got our own mini network of MOOC-ers going and our online Friday google hangouts where a very useful way of staying connected with at least some of the other participants on the course and getting some sort of feedback and peer comment etc.

I had a huge disaster with the final assignment - I had chosen to do an animation using the online tool Xtranormal. Unfortunately some changes I made to it in the last hour before the deadline failed to render in time and the whole thing was lost. With 12 minutes to go before hand in I frantically created a Prezi using the dialogue from my animation and uploaded it.
The peer comments I received were broadly positive which I was pleased about - especially considering how last-minute the whole thing was. I was delighted to get a distinction but feel it was not quite merited in my case. But hey, I’m not complaining.

My participation in the MOOC was as much about trying out a MOOC as it was about actually learning something - and I think I got a lot out of it on both counts. I’m certainly interested in doing more MOOCs and would love to be involved in designing and teaching one.
The bottom line: a really good learning experience and I would love to do more. 
 


Andy Tattersall @andy_tattersall
If someone had asked me what to expect from this MOOC in terms of delivery and communication I would have been wide of the mark. I expected there would be an awful lot of communication using Twitter, especially taking into consideration the course material. I certainly didn’t expect that it would be so self driven, and that there would be so many students enrolled. 41,000 is a tremendous number of students, but then again MOOCs are badged as being massive. Even though only a percentage of students were active it still made for a lot of white noise. In amongst all of the Twitter, Google+ and Facebook chatter, there were the discussion forums, which was at times could feel overwhelming if you allowed it to. Add the hundreds of EDC MOOC specific blogs and posts on other blogs it soon became apparent that even the most efficient and time-rich of students would struggle to stay on top of it all.

Nevertheless, conversations did take place and people did respond and retweet some of my communications and thoughts, whilst I found myself Tweeting at fellow students in the live Google Hangouts - these were moments that broke down the non-stop stream of edc consciousness into useful chunks. These moments brought the whole course back to the human/student perspective as we shared ideas and resources. The blog posts were very useful in that some captured the week’s material and ideas in one succinct piece of writing, the only downside is that you were open to ‘Chinese Whispers’ and could misunderstand what was being delivered on the real EDC platform.

The Google Hangouts were very useful as the five course tutors reflected on the previous week in a very informal and friendly manner. It gave a useful dimension to the course in that you got to see and communicate with the course tutors. It lead the four of us in ScHARR - alongside another colleague in Law, Ian Loasby -  to host our own Google Hangouts to chat about the course, and MOOCs in general.

The assessment was interesting, and I really enjoyed creating my digital artefact as it gave me the opportunity to try a new piece of animation software out. I was able to put in experiences and knowledge of my own alongside what I had learned from the MOOC. The artefact took longer than I would have liked, and it was soon evident some students had put greatly varying amounts of time to make their artefact, which again reflects the nature of the course. Unlike a paid for traditional course, there was no obligation to create a large piece of work or any kind of work for that matter, with some creating outstanding artefacts and others not so. The peer review process was interesting and the guidelines to the review process fairly easy to follow, so those who had never assessed academic work were aided somewhat. I was impressed not by what my reviewers had said of my work (although it was mostly very positive) but the standard of the reviewing, I felt like I was being assessed by university teachers.

I found the whole experience a bit of an eye-opener, not just for how the course was run, but how many people participated and how they communicated. From the work I assessed to how I was assessed and how many fellow students I communicated with, I got a real feeling I was studying alongside mostly fellow university staff and students. It left me thinking of the potential of MOOCs as I feel they have yet to breakout beyond the academic firewall, and go far beyond the West geographically. It also had me contemplating the downside of MOOCs, in that the bigger they are, the more potential for noise and a feeling of being overwhelmed. It left me with more questions than answers, but also a feeling of excitement as something great is going to happen. Each MOOC will be different from the next one, to how it is run to how students engage with each other. The range of tools and abilities do not make for a level playing field, but it does allow students to contribute what they like, and that the more you put in the more you should get out, even so you don’t have to feel obliged to put a lot in to get something out - this is no bad thing right now. 

More of IR in action at Internet Librarian International

Following on from Andy & Claire's post about "Video Saved The Library Star", Anna and I are also hot-footing it to Internet Librarian International next week to present about

Using blogs, Twitter & wikis to deliver e-learning.

The session covers a pilot we ran in one of our FOLIOz e-learning courses to deliver the materials via a Web 2.0 technology of the participants choosing, allowing us to deliver real "anytime, anyplace" type learning.  We'll be reporting on how it went, what the learners thought, and what we plan to do next!

A guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities

The London School of Economics and Political Science have published a great guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities, available to download from: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/29/twitter-guide/

Want to know more about using Twitter and other social Web tools to improve your academic profile? Why not attend Andy and Claire's Altmetrics workshop on 1st August, for more details see: https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cs07t1qbodjt05vosg0ud555668/106337290367079526327

Posted by Anthea