The yearly Learning and Teaching conference is a place and a space to share good practice across the year. It is also a great place to see what other schools and courses are up to. For example the education schools and health are always creating surprising and useful experiments to engage students and further teaching aims. The theme this year, and the title, Learning and Teaching conference: Teaching Excellence Through a Year of Challenge & Change, follows an exceptional year where within days the whole University had to deliver its lessons online. This has led to a surge in creativity and experimentation, with some of those changes here to stay and others dropped as we return to the bosom of face-to-face teaching.
What better example of Maintaining Teaching Excellence Through a Year of Challenge and Change than to show GCSE Prepper, and discuss how it has helped schools over a year of Lockdowns? We did a VERY quick walkthrough of the platform, discussing what it does and how we use AI and crowdmarking to make teachers’ lives easier. As part of the walkthrough we showed that realistic interface the students use to enter questions.
We also moved on to the project we are working on about our new development, called successive-relearning. We are working with academia to improve the answering of questions multiple times. Step one is to work on the the algorithm for seeing questions multiple times before you “master” it. And step two, is to add in the visual nudges and incentives for students to encourage more activity and improvement.
As an aside, the presentation to his esteemed colleagues also showed Sam’s singular lack of any skills around the subject of Chemistry – specifically nano-particles. A good lesson to everyone that if you are going to rehearse your answers, then make sure you do not cock up the order of the questions. And remember when you are doing this live in front of loads of people your brain freezes.
But on the plus side, we showed the application as a great example of what we academics call “Practice”, but our primary reason for showing was to engage academics across the board in this project and to get involved. And to this end we have already started talking…
Slides are below.
Video awaiting permission.
Do please check out GCSE Prepper project page or visit www.gcseprepper.co.uk.
