Feedback response times are a critical lever for improving learner engagement and success. This module looks at how technology can support improved assessment and feedback methodologies and interventions, to lower turnaround time.

Taking photos, making videos and creating sound recordings is easy work for anyone with access to a smartphone or tablet. Once captured, image, video and audio files can be easily uploaded and stored online, edited, mixed with other evidence, shared for assessment and annotated for feedback....

Written text remains the most common way of providing feedback to learners on their outcomes and performance in assessment. Many digital tools are now available for creating and delivering written feedback in different formats and media, annotating, overwriting, converting speech to text,...

Technology-based assessment has become increasingly sophisticated in the design of tests. This is through automating the collection, and the immediacy of the presentation, of the results.

A recorded teaching session can provide real opportunities for improving your teaching practice, especially if you share it with colleagues in a quality circle or improvement group where you all watch each other's recordings to review and reflect upon them. This module looks at some of...

Digital note-taking tools exist to cover all of the situations when what you need is a platform for informal rough working: planning, preparing and structuring a task; making sketches and diagrams. They are the digital equivalents of the back of an envelope or a blank sheet of paper, but they...

Hashtags have become one of the most useful ways of finding and contributing to communities of practice. This module looks at what they are, how to use them and some sector groups clustered around particular hashtags.

Immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) make a distinctive contribution to learning and to individual learners that cannot be replicated by any other media currently available to educators. What makes it special for educational content creators is its ability to fully immerse the user...

Video is a powerful tool for teaching, learning and assessment. High quality recording capability built into mobile devices make it easy to create, edit and apply video to everyday practice. The resulting footage can be uploaded, shared and accessed on a number of sites and platforms.

Animated images can provide a way into a complex idea, enliven content, engage attention, consolidate, reinforce and make learning memorable. It can reveal the impossible and invisible – the structure of an atom or how a virus attacks the body.

Tailoring content and delivery to meet an individual learner's needs rather than taking everyone through the same programme at the same pace is an accepted goal of education, promoted by government policy and examined at inspection. Technology has allowed education to push back the...

The module looks at the use of technology to tailor content to meet the needs of a range of sensory, linguistic and cultural barriers. This can lead to better learner retention and outcomes and greatly improved learner engagement and experience.

Technology makes meaningful personalisation a practical reality. Assistive technology, with materials and resources designed for accessibility and inclusion provides the essential foundations to support learners with a disability or learning disadvantage. This module looks at the ways in...

Intermittent and disrupted attendance of learners is an early warning sign of potential drop out or underachievement. This module looks at the ways technology can help us to intervene early with effective solutions.

This module looks at why it's worth creating and delivering personalised learning pathways and how to make them work in practice. It follows on from the Personalised learning pathways module.

A fundamental requirement for effective learning is to understand and be understood. Inadequate language skills are a barrier at each stage of the learning journey. This module looks at the ways technology can transform the learning experience and outcomes for ESOL learners and those who...

Adopting digital technologies to collaborate and share practice beyond your own institution will enable you to: - find out what colleagues in other organisation's in the sector are doing in their teaching. - share, adapt and adopt good practice and learning objects and resources more...

Digital technologies have a particular value in their ability to be shared over distance and then viewed and worked on at different times. This allows content and resources to be adapted, improved, questioned, have examples added, have gaps and other incompletions filled, and so on, completed...

Producing effective online learning activities takes time, effort and creativity. This module looks at the process of creating learning resources with the intention that they are shareable resources; making them available to others, driving the concept of collaborative creation in your own...

This module looks at the practical issues of how to build synchronous online learning into a balanced programme of online and face-to-face learning. It examines the challenges of real-time online activity (technical, social and personal) and things you can do to ensure that learner experience...

Synchronised working uses technology to deliver learning normally done in a classroom or workshop, without having to be physically present in the room. Learners can observe and take notes, but also engage with the teacher and fellow students. All the benefits of working together,...

The culture that we grow up and live in can influence the way we prefer to communicate. This module looks at how we can draw on this rich diversity to improve the learning experience for all.

This module looks at the issue of reflecting and representing diversity through the lens of the Equality Act 2010's nine protected characteristics.

Digital technology enables us to create personalised pathways that provide a unique route to learning for all learners, particularly individuals who are less likely to benefit from mainstream options. This module looks at the characteristics and features of personalised learning and the...

The diversity of learners extends to differences in their levels of digital skills, experience and confidence. This module looks at ways to ensure that our teaching does not disadvantage those with existing low levels of digital skills.

This module looks at improving learner engagement by rethinking the use of technologies within the classroom. It examines the possibilities for involving learners actively in sessions, embedded in a carefully structured approach to teaching face-to-face through technology.

This module explores the notion of face-to-face learning in a physical space such as a classroom and the place of technology in emerging pedagogy. It describes a framework for considering the activities and intended outcomes of face-to-face interaction.

This module looks at ways to deal with technical problems that emerge while teaching. Technical problems can happen at awkward moments in a session. There are some quick and simple ways to try to resolve them, but if these don’t work then teachers can turn the situation into pedagogical...

The best basis for improving practice is evidence from research. This often just confirms our own experience. This module looks at metacognitive strategies and considers how technology might support their introduction into learning.

We all have a preferred set of tools, apps and software that we use for teaching and learning. Making sure you know how to use this to the best of its ability is the first step to effective teaching and learning with technology. Then, it’s time to extend your range. There are countless...

Technology improves productivity through working with others, by accessing and engaging with ideas and in improving the administration of life activities. As a consequence, when done well, it provides more time to pursue higher, perhaps more pleasurable things in life and improved general wellbeing.

In a world of competing voices, reputations for one's ideas are hard won and easily damaged and are only as good as the last contribution to a body of work. Consequently, professional standing as a teacher is important and can be managed through maintaining the quality of contributions to...

Using technology, like any other human activity, has an impact on the wider environment. Consumption and pollution from how our devices are made, used, and disposed of, is offset by the changes in environmental costs of behaviour changes that come from where and how those devices are used.

Confidence in your digital practice comes from success: success in improving your teaching and learning rather than being good with gadgets. This requires the capacity for personal critical reflection and a means to share what you did with colleagues, at your workplace and in wider...

Our online identities are the keys that unlock personal, social and commercial accounts and transactions. They create portraits of ourselves that others can access and by which they will judge us - as friends, colleagues, and potential employees. We explored the importance of a digital...

Using technology has taken teachers ability to interact with one another onto a global platform. The challenge is matching up the right audience with the content shared. It follows that extra care is needed when posting to a site where the audience isn't known.

Cyberbullying is generally understood as bullying that takes place over digital devices and uses the web to make the connections. The physical separation makes it easier for actions to be conceived as bullying even when it is unintentional as well as actions that are designed to cause hurt and...

The main cause of heightened health risks associated with using technology come from making compromises in the physical arrangements made in accessing devices. They are exacerbated by prolonged periods of concentration that suppresses awareness of time spent in poor posture and without breaks.

A digital identity is a chosen and created state by which a user presents themselves to the web and all it has to offer. It is defined in the accounts held, the actions, interactions and transactions carried out.

Each time we contribute to the web, in public spaces and in private spaces we share, we leave a trail for others to find. The modules Digital well-being for all (Part 1) and Digital well-being for all (Part 2) explored how this is done and how we might manage it for the best outcomes. In...

Communicating well is a skill in every aspect of life. Learners particularly need to learn how to collaborate and present their learning and accomplishments. Technology can help with making it easier to communicate in terms of its reach and immediacy but can also be a means to misreading what...

When we go online we build up, piece by piece, online identities that can have positive and negative outcomes for our well-being, our sense of self-worth and for our future prospects, all based on how others react and respond to our activity. Each time we contribute to the web, we add to an...

Homework traditionally follows classwork: a teacher introduces the subject matter then homework reinforces the learning. Now that facts and information are just a quick search away, learners need to know more than ever how to evaluate, understand and apply information. Flipped learning...

This module looks at how learners can create, edit and access contacts in preparation for sending and receiving online communications using four different methods. It also explores communicating text and including other digital content to individual and multiple recipients, and how to initiate...

Knowing how to choose the right tool or app for a task is a key skill for life and work. It requires more than understanding the broad purpose and technical capabilities of tools and packages. It calls on a learner’s ability to analyse a problem, plan an activity, monitor progress and...

Peer learning is learning with and from each other. Its meaning is more tightly defined as it being mutual learning between classmates of equal knowledge.

An increasingly important definition views learning as a change in long-term memory. Theories of effective teaching and learning focus on enabling the progressive acquisition of knowledge by learners. This module looks at Barak Rosenshine’s widely used Principles of Instruction. They...

Remote working from home takes place beyond the reach of the reassuring formal structures and patterns of teaching and learning and the professional and social interaction with colleagues and learners that goes with it.

Wellbeing refers to our sense of self and our ability to live our lives as closely as possible to the way we want to. Digital wellbeing describes the contribution of technology to wellbeing and includes home working and remote learning, but there are potential risks to wellbeing in using technology.

This module is related to the Effective teaching and learning online module because supporting learning is a feature of effective TLA. With online learning, similar to learners in traditional content, support is needed to ensure learners can be successful.

It is difficult for teachers to maintain effective oversight of learning activity during remote online working. Records of learner logins can’t show if a learner was engaged in learning and making progress, or even physically present at a device.

Synchronous learning occurs when the teacher and learners are present in real time. Meeting face-to-face remains central to most statutory and higher education. Asynchronous learning allows learners to choose the time and place at which they learn. It depends on access to resources rather to a...

Using technology well in supporting remote learning can maintain most learning activity affected in closing the physical classroom. Some subjects, such as: joinery painting and hairdressing are harder to replace, especially, those that are lab or workshop based or programmes such as counselling...

This module looks at how to improve the elements of an organisation's digital technology strategy that relate to accessibility and its significance for bringing about change in teaching and learning practice.

Legislation for accessibility changed in a very positive way with The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations (2018). This module looks at how to stay on the right side of these regulations.

This module follows on from the module Creating inclusive content: Principles. It shows how the principles from Creating inclusive content: Principles can be applied to create resources that are good for all users.

This module looks at an individual's digital context based on personal access to the appropriate technology, their awareness of it, and the digital skills to make use of them.

This module looks at a broad classification of learning disabilities and the forms of technology that are best suited to overcome the associated challenges to learning.

This module looks at using technology to support the learning activities of SLDD learners who are working towards living independently.

This module explores the use of spoken text through devices such as e-readers and eBooks to overcome barriers to learning for a range of learners, not only those with a sight impairment.

A useful definition of Blended Learning is the “combination of face-to-face learning and dynamic digital activities and content that facilitate anytime/anyplace learning.” (Jisc, 2017). This module follows on from the New forms and formats for face-to-face learning module and looks...

This module is the first of a pair, with the New forms and formats for Blended Learning module following on. This module looks at how changes in pedagogical thinking and our understanding of learning give the opportunity to renew the way we use technology in face-to-face learning.

This module explores the range of accessibility assistance, from common mainstream software, apps and tools, through to the specialist or bespoke technology for complex individual needs, and its implications for teaching and learning practice.

This module shows some principles of good practice for creating content that meets the needs of learners with a disability or learning disadvantage.

This module considers how issues of equitable access to digital technologies can have an impact on the quality of learning and how this may be redressed.

This module looks at the impact on teaching strategy of learners who bring their own devices. This has implications for users of assistive technology and for those learners who prefer to work on their own devices.

Using videos, structured sets of annotated still images and sound recordings can be a great way to provide feedback. This is particularly true when the work you are assessing is an event or performance of a task: when you want to know how well an apprentice changed a washer, not how well they...

Polling tools have stretched far beyond their original function of carrying out surveys and reporting results. Anyone who bought goods or services online will have encountered them; they underpin user satisfaction reporting across the board in the burgeoning online retail market, from...