Welcome!

This blog will be used in support of a Teaching and Learning Fellowship project in the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT):

"An Examination of the Use of Blended Learning to Support Improvement of Engagement and Retention of Part-time Postgraduate Level Students using Student Edited Podcasts"

A bit of a mouthful so hopefully what follows will provide a better description.

Firstly some background. The project will be carried out by Deirdre Lawless and Damian Gordon from the School of Computing in the Faculty of Science, DIT supported by Vincent O'Farrell and Claudia Igbrude from the Learning, Teaching and Technology Centre of the DIT.

The audience of the project will be part-time taught postgraduate students in the School of Computing. Part-time students must contend with a large number of logistical factors which may inhibit their ability to attend all required instruction sessions. The vast majority or students are in full-time employment and due to either family or work commitments may be unable to attend all classes. This can have a significant impact on the student learning experience. Students can quickly fall behind, become de-motivated and can increasingly seek deferrals from either examinations or the programme itself.

This project will investigate how a “Blended Learning” approach, combining traditional and online delivery, and specifically, the use of podcasting could be used to address some of the problems encountered. Teaching material and classroom sessions for selected core modules on two MSc programmes in the school of computing will be recorded and made available as podcasts. Students will be encouraged to annotate these podcasts and to develop companion podcasts which will support the transfer of knowledge between their classmates and will form the basis of a repository accessible to future cohorts.

The progress of the project will be recorded regularly on this blog.

We are looking forward to getting really started to with the project and hope to get some positive results to report soon.

Deirdre & Damian