List of Centres for Teaching & Learning / Digital Education teams from Alexandra Mihai

Most universities have their own units dedicated to supporting and enhancing learning and teaching. Their Twitter feeds often provide the first glimpse at interesting applications of technologies in teaching in these places. Alexandra Mihai has assembled an ever-growing list of these accounts to help you to connect with the wider Technology Enhanced Learning and Teaching world. (Something I learned is that Twitter gets thingy if you follow too many accounts at once so you may need to space it out)

Fundamental Design of Flood Management Educational Games Using Virtual Reality Technology from International Journal of Online and Biomedical Engineering

This seems somewhat pertinent at the moment – perhaps someone might share it with the PM’s empathy coach. Rismayani et al., researchers in Indonesia, developed and tested a mobile VR based flood simulation to help teach the residents of Makassar how to respond better to flooding. They outline the hardware and software design and approaches taken to working with the local community.

Ethics, EdTech, and the Rise of Contract Cheating from Academic Integrity in Canada

The question of how we deal with academic integrity and contract cheating is never far from the minds of institutional leaders. Ed Tech vendors make great promises but Brenna Clarke Grey argues that overreliance of these solutions are not the answer and what is needed are more robust cultural changes and better stewardship of student data.

Professional services staff digital insights survey from JISC

The shift to working from home due to the pandemic has profoundly affected ideas about how we work in tertiary education. The ripples of this will no doubt be felt for years to come. Jisc has recently released a report from a survey of UK professional staff shedding light on their experiences working online and considering options for doing it better. (It follows previous surveys of students and academics)

Aloud – Dubbing video into other languages from Google

Google’s Area 120 is their experimental hub. Their latest offering is Aloud, which offers to transcribe, translate and dub your videos into another language – currently Portuguese and Spanish with Hindi and Bahasa-Indonesian to come soon. The service is free but not yet widely available – you can register for early access. The dub is generated synthetically, there is little information about how the translation is done – if it’s Google Translate it could be interesting.

Colin Simpson has worked in education technology, teaching, learning design and academic development in the tertiary sector since 2003 and is employed by Monash University’s Education Innovation team. He is also one of the leaders of the TELedvisors Network. For more from Colin, follow him on Twitter @gamerlearner