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Personal development and well-being is not an area that most people immediately associate with Lynda.com but there are actually a number of courses that directly focus on topics like well-being, happiness, resilience, work-life balance and positivity.
Arianna Huffington has created a range of courses for Lynda.com which look at all aspects of well-being including meditation, sleep, unplugging from tech, letting go and gratitude. If you are interested in meditation, there is also one specifically on mindfulness. There are also two courses on building resilience, one general one and one looking at more specifically at resilience in the face of setbacks. There is also a stress management course and one on balancing work and life.
We’ve put together all these courses and more into a playlist to make it easier for you to access them. Don’t feel you have to watch them all, dip in and out and see what resonates with you. Don’t forget that you can use the Lynda.com app on your phone or tablet to download videos to watch (or just listen to) offline as well.
This three-hour session aims to help you leverage some simple software tools to kick-start your literature review.
The course will start with an review of library and literature searching techniques including creating appropriate search strategies and using appropriate databases.
We will explore the use of Firefox with Zotero for building a database of literature – the bibliographic database – and some Zotero plugins that will give us useful added functionality.
We will learn how to annotate PDFs from Zotero and how to extract and report on annotations to produce rich reports of the literature.
This is a bring your own device session and if you bring a laptop with an up-to-date installation of Firefox you will be able to install the software to be used and practise the techniques described.
There are no pre-requisites for this course.
Book a place from April 16 (student)
Book a place from April 16 (staff)
Most courses take place in computer workrooms so there is no need to bring your own device. However, you should bring your own (fully charged!) laptop for Kick-starting your literature review and all R sessions.
If you can’t attend any of the dates or there is no date available for the course you want, enrol on our Moodle course to be notified of future sessions.
For a full list of all courses and workshops visit the student course catalogue or the staff course catalogue. Visit the student booking system or staff booking system to book.
The Digital Skills Training at IOE programme offers training in a wide range of apps including: blogging, mind mapping, infographics, screencasting, live polling, Microsoft Sway, SharePoint, Office 2013 applications, Endnote and more. Bookings are open to all UCL staff and students. Visit IT for IOE IT Course Bookings for the full schedule and to book. The IT for IOE training updates newsletter is now available in Microsoft Sway format.
Don’t forget, we have a vast range of high-quality video-based courses available at Lynda.com. These cover technical skills but also business, personal and creative skills as well. Visit the UCL Lynda.com page to find out more.
Not sure what you need or have a more specific issue you would like help with? Come along to one of the Digital Skills Development drop ins if you want more individual support.
Icarus – a simulation tool developed by UCL School of Management academics – has won 1st prize in the ‘Best use of simulations or virtual environments for learning’ category at the 2017 Learning Technologies Awards.
Lynsie Chew, Programme Director (MSc Professional Accountancy), and Alan Parkinson, Deputy Director (Education), who initiated and managed the simulator, attended the awards on 29 November where they were awarded Gold 1st place in their category.
The simulator, which is used in teaching on the School’s MSc Professional Accountancy, simulates running an airport, with users able to control a wide-range of aspects including variables such as the number of runways and the rent charged on retail units.
Icarus was one of six simulators shortlisted at the 2017 awards.
The UCL MSc in Professional Accountancy, in partnership with global accountancy body ACCA, is unique in its virtual availability to students located around the world.
The University approached Unicorn and LAS to design and build a complex and highly immersive simulation which would allow groups of learners from around the world to collaborate and work in teams over different time zones. This was ICARUS – a sophisticated, multi-layered, immersive and above all, realistic business simulation. The judges felt that the choice of an airport as the focus was inspired because of the wide range of businesses and services and the complexities they introduce, that contribute to its success or otherwise. Particularly impressive was the ease with which the simulation can be customised and updated with real world events as they happen and how the impact of what may appear as an isolated incident can affect different parts of the business in very different ways.
Focusing on demonstrable learner engagement and tangible outcomes required to secure the future of the programme, this project has been an unprecedented success: it boasts a 40% rise in uptake, and 95% student pass rate.
This post is an amalgamation of content from the following sites:
Arne Hofmann and Helen Matthews from the UCL Joint Faculty (Arts and Humanities and Social and Historical Science) have hit on a successful format for a practice sharing session. Speakers make brief presentations and then disperse to ‘stations’ around the room so that participants can circulate and discuss. At the end of the event is a plenary discussion.
The third event in this series had a digital education focus. Sanjay Karia who heads up IT for SLASH kindly contributed display screens for the stations. I matchmade colleagues in Digital Education with the presenters based on interest; they made notes of the conversations (using MS Teams as recommended by IT for SLASH) and I largely owe this blogpost to them.
The splendid presenters and their presentations, some of which include links to examples of student work:
Here are some of the themes from the event.
How should students be inducted to new technical platforms? For some cohorts this was hardly an issues and staff soon felt comfortable abandoning the training session at the beginning of the module in favour of a drop-in as the deadline approached. However, there are disciplinary differences and not all groups can be guaranteed to have somebody particularly comfortable with using technologies, so the drop-ins are important. Based on my own experience inducting some large cohorts to Mahara, if it’s done at all then it’s best done when the students have some vision about what they want to do there – i.e. not at the very start of the module, and close enough to the deadline that there is no hiatus between the induction and putting the knowledge to use. In addition, students seemed to know less about copyright and intellectual property than the technologies, so some modules had incorporated sessions on those.
How do we assess digital multimodal work? Formative assessment was considered very worthwhile, especially where students were new to the activity. Currently there is sometimes a criterion related to appropriate use of the mode or format, such as “use of text formatting and good quality images and/or multimedia which clearly enhance the text”. Often there is an element of writing in the work which would be run through Turnitin according to departmental policy. I think it is probably fair to say that (like most of the sector) we are in transition to explicitly recognising the distinctive qualities of digital multimodal composition. I have seen how, in many cases, new and potentially challenging practices need to be eased through teaching committees by anchoring them to the accepted standards and criteria – at least for the first few iterations. With time and experience comes new awareness and recognition of distinctive practices which work well in a given context. Jakob’s slides are particularly detailed on this – the BASc have been giving this kind of thing consideration from day one.
Where should digital multimodal work be positioned in the curriculum? There was a general sense that modularisation tends to isolate digital activities within programmes. This could lead either to them not being built upon (where they happened early) or having their academic validity questioned (where they happened later). Support includes showing students exemplars of blogs and creating opportunities for them to carry out guided marking to help them grasp standards and apply the assessment criteria to their own work.
What if students question the academic validity of a digital activity? Where new forms of digital assessment are introduced later in a programme, expect students to query whether it is really necessary for their degree. The challenge, summarised by Mark, is to pre-emptively “tackle student perception” by advocating for the activity in terms of student learning and success. Archaeology in the World saw their evaluation questionnaire results slowly improve as the tutors learned to advocate for the activity, and students came to recognise that it “really made me think and synthesise in a new way”.
When can students’ work be public? In cases like the Wikipedia event, the work is born public. In other cases this is something to be negotiated with students – but there is often groundwork to do beforehand. Students need guidance to use media that is itself licensed to be made public. Where the work happens in groups, licensing their work needs to be a joint and unanimous decision with a take-down policy.
How can different skills levels be accommodated? The intermediate Russian language students were at different levels, which meant that multimedia production such as recordings of poetry read aloud helped them practice speaking (one of the four skills of modern language learning), and the individualised recorded feedback they were given helped them with listening (another of the skills). VoiceThread brought a privacy and timeliness to the feedback which had not previously existed – exposing students to the risk of embedding their mistakes. Another approach to different skills levels is to create groups of students on the assumption that they will either sustain each other in acquiring the skills or divide the labour according to skills, and a third is to give extra guidance to students who need it (as with the Finnish-English Wikipedia Translatathon).
How can the new practice be made to work first time? When the Arena Centre pioneered large scale use of the Moodle Workshop activity for peer feedback, they worked closely with Digital Education – we made those early deadlines our own, and together we prepared for different contingencies. As well as working closely with Digital Education, Geography subjected their digital examination to a number of rigorous checks involving academic and professional services colleagues, students, and internal and external examiners. Digital Education has produced the Baseline to support the quality aspects – these are not intuitive. One participant remarked to me later that he had been skeptical, bordering on resentful, of the Baseline until he started working through it, at which point he realised how useful it is.
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There are a few things I’d change about how I organised the event. One is that either it should be extended by half an hour (to two hours) or else the number of speakers should be reduced. As it was, we overran and I was very sad to have to cut off a very interesting plenary discussion just as colleagues were beginning to really want to talk with each other. Another is that teaching languages has a distinct set of needs which justify a dedicated event. I might also consider asking the presenters to circulate rather than the participants (though I can see pros and cons there).
That aside, it was a lively, spontaneous, humorous, sophisticated event which balanced different sets of needs – educational, disciplinary, colleagues and students. It is so often the case that when colleagues have the opportunity to seek each other out based on mutual interest, the fruits soon make themselves evident. One participant told me he went from the event straight to his department’s Staff Student Consultative Committee where he proposed an idea which was accepted. “That’s impact”, he said.
