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The Oculus is open and in full use by our campus community. This is the first time our campus has ever seen a building dedicated completely to teaching.

There are two large state-of-the-art tiered lecture theatres, 12 other top quality flexible teaching spaces, study areas and a café.

Drop-in Sessions

We're hosting two drop-in sessions within the new Oculus building. These sessions are aimed at lecturers wishing to get familiar with the teaching equipment available within the building. Every room is equipped with a touch panel control system, laser projectors, visualisers, radio mics, wireless presentation and lecture capture. We want you to make the most of these facilities and the AV team will be around to answer any questions, as well as let you get hands on with the equipment.

The AV team will be joined by colleagues from ITS Academic Technology and IATL. They will be offering advice on the use of the tools and utilising the flexible teaching space.

The two sessions will be held as follows:

Week 3 - Wednesday 19th October - Room OC1.06 - 12-3pm
Week 4 - Wednesday 26th October - Room OC0.02 - 12-2pm

Do you want to scale up online learning? JISC have just launched three new guides with supporting checklists and a beta Online learning readiness tool to help you with the processes and decisions involved in scaling up online learning at an organisational level.

The JISC ():

• Takes you through some key questions which will identify your personal or teams readiness for creating, delivering or supporting online learning
• Offers a reflective process by providing a brief synopsis of your experience levels and will offer further resources to take you forward.
• Points you to key topic areas where you can review selected resources within our three guides and other resources

Please give JISC on your use of the tool so they can improve the user experience during any future developments of the service.

Three JISC guides indicate the barriers and actions you can take as well as illustrated examples from institutions that have developed useful approaches to overcoming the barriers. They are:

1. provides a strategic view of different models and the implications of implementing online learning at an institutional level. This guide will be of particular interest to senior managers such as pro vice chancellors and directors of learning and teaching.
2. helps you make decisions around curriculum design and to determine support needs when scaling up online learning.
3. provides guidance, resources and case studies around the use of technology to support online courses and distance learning programmes.

Each guide includes:

• A checklist of key questions that teams and individuals within an institution can use to consider what they need to do or change to scale up their online learning
• Key barriers and ways to overcome these
• Links to further resources and tools

Using JISC guides, checklists and the Online learning readiness tool, you and your colleagues can help ensure that online students receive as equitable a service and student experience as campus-based students. You may also be interested in the recent report ‘What makes a successful online learner?’ which found that:

• Online learners have a strong sense of responsibility for their own learning, which on the one hand gives them more flexibility and personal control but may lead in some cases to learning providers abdicating responsibility.
• Online learners can bring a range of attributes that impact on their success online including: previous experience, motivations and aspirations, self-efficacy, study habits, demographic factors and their own beliefs about online learning
• Emotions around the concept of ‘enjoyment and fun’ and ‘boredom, frustration and anger’ can have a significant impact on the success of an online learner and those that can develop an emotional ‘robustness’ are more likely to succeed.

Extended Classroom User Group

This term and next the central academic technology team will be combining the user groups of our centrally supported academic technology tools including Moodle, Mahara, Responseware, eStream and Collaborate. Moodle will continue to be the main item on the agenda with short news and updates on the other tools as well as the usual mix of demos and presentations from users. They plan to run the sessions with presentations for the first 90 minutes and the remaining 30 minutes for networking and 1:1 support and advice.

These meetings will take place in the Library Teaching Grid on the following Dates:

• Monday 17^th October 10am to 12 noon
• Monday 5^th December 2pm to 4pm
• Thursday 26^th January 2pm to 4pm
• Wednesday 8^th March 2pm to 4pm

Extended Classroom Support Workshops

They will continue to offer Extended Classroom Drop-in support workshop sessions every Wednesday 2-4pm from 28^th September to December 7^th this term in the Library Teaching Grid Collaboration space.