AHEAD do some amazing work within the third level sector to create inclusive environments in education and employment for people with disabilities but a recent report from them drove home the scale of the problem that we are facing in third level

The most recent figures show 6.6% of the total student population in higher education registered with disability support services. That figure is brilliant yet alarming at the same time. It is brilliant because it represents a huge growth over the last 20 years. Before now those potential students would not get to higher education, they would struggle to complete second level and would be strongly discouraged about going on to third level even if they did get to complete second level. Having this level of growth in such a short space of time is a huge credit to the work that is going on at primary and second level, supporting those students and helping them achieve their potential through education. The knock on effect this support has on the families of those students is phenomenal and the importance of that cannot be overstatement. But the scary element of that 6.6% is that it only is a fraction of the real figure. The real figure is hidden because not all students choose to register with the services and some students may still not even realize that they a difficulty. For a variety of reasons they may not yet have received a diagnosis yet and as a result cannot avail of the services on offer. To give you a rough indication when AHEAD completed an anonymous survey with students 12% of respondents disclosed a disability.

Let’s break that down with some simple examples – most classes in higher education would have at least 50 in a class – that is 6 students with a disability in most classes. 300 students in a class is not unusual and that equates to 36 students. If a lecturer does not by default implement inclusive practices in their teaching they are excluding those students, at the very least they are putting them at a disadvantage.

Invisible disabilities

To make things a little more challenging not all disabilities are visible as a matter of fact very few are for a lecturer, particularly if they have large class sizes. As a result lecturers sometimes think – none of my students have a disability. Just based on the basic math’s outlined above there is somebody in every class that needs support.

My final point is in relation to the consequence of not having the support: – the most obvious consequence is students will struggle and potential fail their exams which can lead to drop in confidence and self esteem and an increase in pressure on the students. This can be more serious for people with a disability than those without a disability – looking at one particular disability Attention Deficit HyperActivity Disorder (ADHD) a study of nearly 22,000 Canadian adults found that the suicide rate for those with ADHD was nearly five times higher than those without ADHD.

So to conclude, in advance of the updated National Access Plan for education which is due for release in the coming days, the scale of the problem is much bigger than most people realize. It is not just the problem of the disability services in an institution – it is the problem of everyone in an institution.

Recently I had the pleasure of presenting at the Ireland UK MoodleMoot to share news about a Moodle plugin that we have developed to promote inclusivity with respect to assignments. The recording below gives all of the details along with a quick demo but in a quick summary this plugin enables students to create a structured plan for completing the assignment.

I would really be interested to hear your views on the plugin and welcome suggestions for improvements.

Earlier in the year there was a lot of interest in the plugin that we were building for Moodle that will provide the option for students and staff to contribute their posts on an “ideas board”, similar to commercial platforms such as Trello, Padlet and Lino where a student can add some text, link, image or YouTube video.

I’m delighted to share the news that Moodle Board is now available on the Brickfield Github and on the Moodle.org Plugin Database. 

Following feedback received on the initial post we have added some key features to help improve the plugin. In addition to all of the features mentioned in the original post, we have added the ability to upload a background image, to allow students and staff to rate posts (and the posts can be sorted based on their ratings) and students can be restricted from adding to the board after a particular date. 

I’d like to express huge thanks to both Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT) and University College London (UCL) for supporting the development of this plugin and Brickfield Education Labs for their stewardship of the development and maintenance of the project. This project is a great example of an inter institutional collaboration which created sustainable impact through open source development that will increase student engagement.

1. Introductions / Icebreakers

The most basic of them all – Ask your students to introduce themselves, provide a few lines of text, post a picture or a weblink to their portfolio page Something simple to get students engaged

2. Muddy points / Exit tickets

There are a variety of names for this approach but regardless of what you call it, asking students to post a note at the end of the class can be very helpful. Whether you are asking them if they had any “muddy points” (aspects of the class that they do not fully understand) or whether just asking for general feedback. Engaging the students in this way can help improve the learning experience for the student as well as to help the lecturer reflect on their teaching.

Using the “restrict access” feature of moodle a teacher can set up numerous boards at once but release them when required.

3. Crowdsourcing content

Post a link to a journal article and include a few lines of an introduction or post a youtube video or link to a website. Either way co-creating  content relative to your module with your students is a very effective way to engage your students

4. Zoom whiteboard

The Zoom whiteboard is a great tool when using breakout rooms. Students can use the whiteboards to share thoughts and reflections as a group. However sharing the whiteboard content with the rest of the class once the breakout rooms are over is not that easy.  Now a teacher using Moodle Board can create a board for each breakout group. These boards can then be shared with the entire class or be kept private for each group using the standard Moodle features

5. SWOC analysis

Strengths, weakness, opportunity and challenge analysis is a technique used to identify the external and internal factors that play a part in whether a business venture or project can reach its objectives. Whether students are doing a project individually or as a group a Moodle Boards can be used to create a SWOC analysis. Like the example above using the groups and grouping feature of Moodle allows the teacher to create a separate board for each group in one quick step by simply creating one Board activity and then choosing “separate groups” in the settings. 

For more details on Moodle”board” please visit How to Add a post-it Board to your Moodle course

Following our move from the text matching service TurnItIn to a rival product Urkund, the most common complaint that we received was the loss of “Feedback Studio” feature of TurnItIn and in particular the ability to easily provide audio feedback to students. Following consultation with our contacts in the Moodle community we concluded that having the ability to provide audio feedback directly to students directly through Moodle would be a very valuable addition to the core Moodle capabilities.

In Moodle 3.5 a new feature was added into core Moodle to provide webRTC audio and video recording into the atto editor (See https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-60848 ). This was initially written by Blindside Networks who work on the Bigbluebutton open source conferencing tool and contributed to the plugin database.

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We found relevant tickets on the issue on the Moodle tracker system and commented along with others that it was essential to have this also work in providing assignment feedback. We also encouraged members of the community to comment on and vote for this item if they thought it would be worthwhile.

Power of the community

Moodle HQ responded as you would expect and agreed to examine the potential of adding audio feedback into core. I’m delighted to report that 12 months later, thanks to the team in HQ we have a “patch” enabling us to provide audio feedback to students on their assignments for our Moodle 3.5 instance and audio feedback will be available as part of core for Moodle 3.6. See https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-27520

The video below illustrates how simple it now is to provide feedback directly through Moodle

This development is yet another example of the benefit of Open Source and the awesome Moodle community. I firmly believe that it would take significantly more time and persuasion to convince a commercial LMS provider to not only take on board users feedback but make significant changes to core product in such a short space of time. The community were able to investigate the code themselves, provide suggestions to Moodle HQ developers and troubleshoot problems as they arose. Of course that it not to mention that this significant enhancement is available at no extra cost to the end users once adopted into core.

I am delighted to announce that a consortium involving DCU led by Ilia State University in Georgia have been successful with our application for Erasmus funding for our project on Academic Integrity. The core objective of the project is to enhance the quality of teaching and learning processes that are based on the principles of academic integrity, supported by policies, mechanisms and tools that help prevent and detect cases of plagiarism in higher education institutions in Georgia. The three year project will involve the design of workshops and resources targeted at both staff and students and involves collaborating with 16 other partners from UK, Austria, Sweden and numerous institutions throughout Georgia.  

All resources resulting from this project will be made available openly under creative commons licence. Updates will be posted here and also on the website created specifically for this project (details to follow shortly)

A huge congratulations to the Y1 Feeback team in the final event of their National Forum funded project. I would strongly recommend to anyone teaching in higher education to visit to their project website.   Although targeted at first years, the learnings from this project are applicable to everyone.The two year long project culminated with a symposium last Friday, an excellent event with distinguished keynote speakers such as Prof David Carless,  Prof David Nicol, Prof Tansey Jessop and Dr Naomi Winstone.

I enjoyed each presentation with key takeaways for me from each one, with Naomi’s work on exporting assignment feedback to a students eportfolio being a standout takeaway for me personally. But aside from the aforementioned excellent speakers another element of this symposium was particular satisfying. It was, what  I believe will be the real legacy of this project, the diversity of speakers from across the partner institutions. It was not just the case of the usual suspects representing their institution but a mixture of new and experienced lecturers from a variety of disciplines presenting their work. The   National Forum projects have definitely raised the scholarship of teaching and learning across the sector but the Y1 Feedback in my opinion has lead the way in this respect in a very sustainable manner.

While the video below shows my personal contribution to this project, it is only one small piece of the jigsaw that made up this project. A huge congratulations to Lisa O’Regan and the project team. For more information visit http://www.y1feedback.ie