Presenter profiles - Track P: John Koushappas, Betty Sinyinza

John Koushappas, Betty Sinyinza: Wikis

John Koushappas

John Koushappas, Learning Technologist, Educational Development Unit, CLTE

John supports the University’s core e-Learning technologies: Oasisplus, Turnitin and Middlesex Wikis. Middlesex wikis have experienced substantial growth in the last two years, each year seeing an increase of over 60% in demand. John has been developing the use of the technology within the University, implementing robust administration, sound pedagogy and providing training and induction to staff and students. He is also working on research into the value of wikis in Higher Education.

Betty Sinyinza

Betty Sinyinza, Learning Technologist, Educational Development Unit, CLTE

Betty supports the University’s core e-Learning technologies: Oasisplus, Turnitin and Middlesex Wikis. Betty is interested in exploring the digital literacy skills required for students to successfully use and participate in online learning, focussing on the skills needed to fully engage with web 2.0 technology including turning dialogues into meaningful information.







Middlesex University Learning and Teaching Conference 2011: e-Assessment: Untangling the (k)nots - 28th June, 2011

Staff Development Workshop: Wikis – Time: 1:00pm – 1:30pm – Location: Room C118

Facilitators: John Koushappas and Betty Sinyinza

A wiki is a powerful online collaboration tool which can facilitate group work and team building.

Used for group assignments, it can facilitate the development of a wide range of social and professional skills in students, improving their employability.

Wiki usage is gathering pace as an online collaborative tool in education because of its unique ability to always display the latest version of the material being written by a team of authors.

It is a tool which is very simple to learn and to use.

The workshop will quickly cover how wikis can be used in e-Assessment scenarios, and participants will get hands-on experience of using a wiki to develop a page using the built-in page editor.

The workshop will be a fast, fun taster of what can be achieved by a team. Come and join us.

Presenter profile - Track F: Carl James Reynolds

Carl James Reynolds: From Tasks to eRequirements

I am a principal lecturer in the School Engineering and Information Sciences, a university Teaching Fellow and Director of u/g Computing and Multimedia Technology programmes. My area of teaching is in uses of networks for business and communication (Network Support Technologies) and I have taught on many multimedia/computing modules over the last 15 years at Middlesex. I take pride in ensuring that my feedback on submitted work is fast and useful (normally within a week) and that students have several opportunities to fail assignments in the formative stages of the work. I supervise many student projects and have a passion for audio synthesis and controller technology for all media processing. I am also involved in a great deal of outreach and  marketing work and find that involvement with schools and international students gives me greater insights into the diversity of our student intake, their backgrounds and experience.

Currently my assignments for year 3 students involve working for a medium sized international company in a consultancy role, ensuring that the company makes effective use of emerging technologies. Working with the students and the company has given me greater insights into areas such as requirements analysis and also into the need for change management and sensitivity to institutional culture.

My session is about eliciting information from the participants about the practice and culture of assessment by use of role play and interrogation. This will allow a rich picture to be developed which will help in the design and prototyping of assessment tools that support existing practice. The results will be published online at the beginning of September.

As an e-coordinator, I have tried over the last year a mixture of marking for each of my assignments. I have found that for short formative pieces of work and  logbooks that marking electronic copies is fast and effective, with students very happy to receive generic feedback via e-mail and more specific feedback in lab session or at the end of lectures. I have found that standardising file formats is important and will be using PDF for next year.