The APT STAIRS project's aim has been to promote the use of new collaborative technologies to enhance teaching and learning practice. This has involved working with four main stakeholder groups in the Bloomsbury Colleges: students, teachers, researchers and administrators. In particular, the project aimed to bridge the technological divide between these users by implementing a simple, step-by-step approach to adopting new tools. As part of this process, new methodologies in learning, teaching, research and administration were developed.

The Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction (ARGOSI) project aimed to provide a novel and engaging alternative to traditional student induction. Through the use of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), which combines a series of collaborative challenges within an unfolding storyline, it aimed to provide a mechanism for new students to make friends, orientate themselves to the City of Manchester and learn basic information literacy skills.

ARGOSI used a user-centred development methodology to produce the ARG software coupled with a mixed-methods research methodology to evaluate the project. The project workflow consisted of an initial concept design leading to a development strategy including iterative testing, during which phase the project software, game design and artefacts were refined.

The ASEL project examined the use of audio, i.e. the recording and transmission of speech, to support, enhance and personalise the learner experience at the University of Bradford and the University of Hertfordshire. It set out specifically to explore and evaluate the use of audio in three key areas of teaching and learning: self reflection and self assessment, formative and summative feedback, and collaborative learning.  The team was particularly interested in the changes in practice for both lecturers and learners that take place when audio is introduced into these key areas. They also examined how audio could be used within some of the new and emerging technologies such as wikis and social networking spaces to support teaching and learning.

Awesome wanted to develop technology that put learning and learners first and make a significant, practical difference to dissertation students and their supervisors, free students from the confusion and anxiety that blights the dissertation writing process and make best use of the time available to supervisors. The result is ADE, a dynamic, online networking environment for students and tutors to share resources, generic advice, examples and specific feedback at each stage of a dissertation project.

The Content Integration Project (CIP) piloted a software solution to institutional information integration at the University of Bristol by extending an existing prototype CIP tool developed previously in 2007. In the CIP pilot, the team integrated central, institutional databases with localised and external content using Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technology. The team showed this type of approach leads to excellent opportunities for the customisation (at departmental level) and personalisation (at individual level) in the use of research data.

The eTutor project explored two ideas about the possible future direction of technology enhanced learning. The first was that learning content and resources would be primarily sourced from the internet, rather than being created locally. The second was that online learning would be delivered using learning environments assembled from freely available web 2.0 services, rather than using a VLE. The broad aim of the eTutor project, then, was to explore the possibility of creating an effective online learning environment from currently available Web 2.0 services and social networking software, and to use this environment to deliver quality assured learning modules using existing online content and resources sourced globally.

Flourish's overall aims were to ease the administrative burden experienced by learning, teaching and research practitioners at the University of Cumbria through the use of a flexible learning system, PebblePad.  Flourish encouraged staff to use the PebblePad personal learning system to aggregate records of learning and achievement into e-portfolios to be used for professional purposes, including professional accreditation and academic qualification and to then store and reflect upon evidence of their development.

As a consequence of the activities involved in meeting these aims, Flourish was able to identify the challenges that arise when a personal learning system is used for continuing professional development and to determine successful approaches to introducing a personal learning system for CPD.

Gold Dust was built on some by-products of the JISC Users & Innovation funded ticTOCs [link to ticTOCS website] project, plus the work of several other projects and research, with the aim of testing the delivery of highly relevant, personalised current awareness content of a variety of kinds to academics, ultimately without the need for any input by those academics in the personalisation process.

The Gold Dust project explored effective means of providing academics and researchers with highly relevant, personalised and automated current awareness content. It sought to take advantage of the increasing use of RSS feeds as a means of alerting users to the availability of new material. The project was very aware, however, of the perils of information overload which can be triggered by such alerting services. To counter this very real source of frustration, Gold Dust researched methods of effectively selecting relevant material from the flood of information.

The project set out to create an online system that services the needs of a group of disparate healthcare professionals involved in the delivery of the undergraduate medical curriculum at Manchester. The challenge lay in creating a system that would allow these users to contribute to an ongoing review of the medical curriculum whilst offering the chance to network and build an online community of practice. The aims of the project were broadly met, with the project team creating an online system called e-llaborate which offers social networking capability in a closed community, combined with collaborative reviewing and editing of documents in discreet group spaces, linked to task-related forums, chat rooms and resources.
 

The M3 Project explored the potential of integrating Second Life and Twitter with an existing Moodle course. Twitter is a convergent technology that allows learners a choice of communication platforms for connecting to their online course and frees them from the need to be always sitting at a computer. Twitter can also bridge the ‘in-world’ (SL) environment with the ‘outside world’ of Moodle, and M3 investigated whether the short messages (Tweets) encouraged in-course participation from learners.

The MACFOB project has successfully achieved its aim of developing a web-based multimedia annotation tool to meet the important and pervasive user need of making multimedia web resources (e.g. podcasts) easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for students, teachers and other users.

This has been accomplished through developing the application Synote which supports the collaborative creation, editing and viewing of synchronised notes, bookmarks, tags, links images and text captions. To help explain this new approach, the project has invented two new technical terms: ‘Synnotation’ to denote a synchronised annotation and ‘Synmark’ to denote a synchronised bookmark that can contain a title, note, tags and links. Synote can work with a wide range of multimedia sources hosted anywhere on the web and stores the annotations separately on the Synote server, which has the capability of hosting annotations of millions of hours of recordings. Users can repurpose the same recordings for many different teaching and learning scenarios.
 

MOOSE focused on modelling the pedagogical aspects of students’ learning in groups in SL and on the facilitation required for productive learning activities to occur. The overall approach involved several developmental stages: developing the training guides for participants and moderators, training tutors and students in basic technical and moderation skills, technical development of artefacts, designing and developing learning activities in SL (SL-tivities), carrying out in-world learning sessions and researching into student engagement in SL-tivities

The Open Habitat (OH) project was a partnership between the University of Oxford, Leeds Metropolitan University, Kings College London and a small number of consultants with the aim of exploring the use of Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) for teaching and learning. These MUVEs are commonly known as Virtual Worlds in which individuals in a 3D environment are represented as an ‘avatar’. The most familiar of these environments is Second Life which was extensively but not exclusively used by this project.

Open Habitat found that a diverse mix of factors, some technical but mostly cultural/pedagogical came into play when attempting to run successful sessions in MUVEs. Most significantly, the nature of the environment engendered a non-traditional relationship between student and teacher in which the ‘expert’ worked alongside the students rather than being a font of knowledge.

PERSoNA (Personal Engagement with Repositories through Social Networking Applications) is a component of the developing repository infrastructure at Leeds Metropolitan University which builds on issues initially identified by another JISC Users and Innovations Project, Streamline [link to Streamline] as well as technical ones. Building a community of trust around repository use by integrating social networking technologies to facilitate collaboration, community building and the sharing and signposting of digital content - could alleviate some of the issues and facilitate intuitive, communal interaction with the repository both for placing material into and for retrieving material from the repository from a variety of appropriate locations on the web.

The Planet (Pattern Language Network for Web 2.0 in Learning) project aimed to develop and demonstrate an effective community-based mechanism for capturing and sharing successful practice, based on the pattern approach. A pattern describes an effective solution to a recurrent problem embedded in a specific context and is characterised by being drawn from successful practice rather than from theory. To achieve its aims the project worked with a wide range of educational practitioners to develop an effective process for pattern capture. The overall approach of the project was to invite practitioners to provide case studies of their successful practices, particularly around web 2.0 and education. These practitioners then attended a series of workshops designed to facilitate the process of identifying and refining potential patterns evident in that practice. The case studies and emerging patterns were captured, stored and edited through a community wiki-based platform, which provides templates to guide practitioners, together with shared editing and commenting facilities.

An increasing number of curricula use Problem-Based Learning (PBL). Existing campus-based PBL carries a legacy of limitations from its paper-based nature. Such cases therefore have limited use in developing clinical reasoning, and are often unrealistic for emulating real life. More significantly, at a time when PBL has become a central tenet of many curricula, it is already under threat from the movement towards more self-directed learning and the migration of students from campus-based to more workplace-based learning. This has drastically reduced the opportunities for using what is fundamentally a collaborative learning method.

The PREVIEW project is an innovative response to address the difficulties of distributed collaborative problem-based learning and also to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded by 3-dimensional multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs). Particular potential benefits for PBL are the increased authenticity of a simulated real-world environment and the open-ended nature of in-world activity.

The overall aim of the project was to pilot the use of Next Generation Technologies to enable students to collect and present multimedia artefacts to facilitate reflective learning. Four case studies were performed across a range of disciplines, two studies evaluated the approach with first year undergraduate students (Medicine and Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds) and two studies evaluated the approach with postgraduate students (ICT in Education at the University of Leeds and Dietetics at Leeds Metropolitan University).

The SkillClouds project investigated whether tags and tag clouds might be a visually appealing way of aggregating and presenting skills information to students and a user-centred design approach to ensure that SkillClouds met the needs of students was adopted. Based on their research with students, a system was built that: (i) presents skills information in an accessible format; (ii) reflects the different stages that students are at in their skills journey and (iii) offers a high level of personalisation.

Sounds Good was initially a small project exploring the use of digital audio to give assessment feedback based at Leeds Metropolitan University. The main aim was to test the hypothesis that using digital audio for feedback can benefit staff and students by saving assessors’ time (speaking the feedback rather than writing it) and providing richer feedback to students (speech is a richer medium than written text). Sounds Good 2 was a ‘benefits realisation’ initiative for a second stage, which ran until February 2009. In this phase the work at Leeds Met expanded and audio feedback was introduced to three other higher education institutions: Newman University College, Birmingham; University of Northampton; York St John University.

The project aimed to develop generic desktop and web-based tools to support repository functions and to increase the focus on staff development activities and support to increase awareness and encourage use. The tools developed include an automatic metadata generation tool that completes as much of the metadata as possible from documentation associated with a learning object, including suggesting key words to the user and resource discovery tools, which recommend additional resources based on closeness of objects to the original search results. In addition, we contributed to a variety of widgets, developed with the PERSoNA project, to demonstrate the use of social networking tools to promote sharing of resources through the repository.

The aim of the project was to create a fully functioning suite of facilities dedicated to journal current awareness, based upon RSS feeds and Web 2.0 technologies.  This ‘TOCosphere’ will enable the smart aggregation, recombination, synthesis, output and reuse of standardised journal TOC RSS feeds and their content. Through developing the ticTOCs service, populating the service’s database of feeds, working in partnership with publishers and testing with users the team identified that there is a need for TOC feeds to have a standardised structure and content. A Recommendations Working Group (RWG) was created to draft a set of recommendations for publishers to implement which will not only benefit the publishers but more importantly, the end user.

UKAN-SKILLS built on previous grant work both within the Tees Valley (centred on University of Teesside Library & Information Services) and at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada (UPEI). The main aim of the project was to produce demonstration versions of online ‘skills development maps’ for a range of different approaches to skills development. To do this, the project team engaged in ‘dialogues’ with academic staff in programmes in local FE colleges. The Project collaborated with Janet A. Hale of curriculummapping101.com and Rubicon International to use Rubicon's Atlas online curriculum mapping software to host the skills development maps (as well as demonstrating such software to a British audience).