This year’s Joint Technology-Enhanced Learning (JTEL) European Summer School was organized together with Federica Web Learning and the EMMA project (European Multiple MOOC Aggregator) which are both from Università di Napoli Federico ii. The EmployID members, Carmen Wolf from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Oliver Blunk from Ruhr-University of Bochum (RUB) attended in a double-role as PhD candidates and workshop leaders. Graham Attwell and Artemis Travlou from Pontydysgu joined the summer school to lead a workshop on Labour Market information and to exchange research results and ideas around that Learning Analytics and MOOCs.
The main topics of the summer school were MOOCs, Learning Analytics, open data, inquiry based learning and improving scientific work through workshops on paper writing, reviewing, networking (with social media), presenting or pitching a thesis and project acquisition. It was a very good combination between current research dissemination and soft-skills empowerment for young researchers.
Especially interesting for EmployID were the following workshops:
- “Emergent roles of MOOC mentors” by Steven White and Manuel Leon Urrutia. This matched well our work around facilitation and how facilitators are working and supported in MOOCs.
- “Infographics – data vizualisation” by Ana Loureiro and Silvia Castro. This provided an opportunity to test a tool for visualizing research results in a more modern and appealing way.
- Build a successful dissemination strategy to share and promote your TEL research” by Maria Perifanou, Mikhail Fominykh and Ana Loureiro. In this workshop we learned about dissemination strategies and content curation and tools to support this.
On Wednesday, 8th July 2015 the workshop on “Facilitation for your PhD project through Technology-Enhanced Peer Coaching” was led by Carmen Wolf and Oliver Blunk. The workshop was about how EmployID understands peer coaching and how it could provide support for PhD research. After a short introduction of the underlying theories of peer coaching through a role play and prompting as a way of scaffolding peer-coaching for users, the task for the group was to create paper prototypes for any phase and role in the peer coaching they chose building on requirements that EmployID had already identified from evaluations from an internal peer coaching group. Overall, the participants brought up a number of great ideas for a peer-coaching tool, which we will definitely consider in our design, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank the participants again. The workshop ended with an offer of further peer coaching training in the form of an online course and to establish a peer coaching group of their own.
On Thursday, 9th July 2015 Graham Attwell and Artemis Travlou presented a workshop on the “The challenge of open data for careers and education”. The workshop looked at the development of open data, issues in using the data and the potential in different areas including for careers guidance and for employment advisers. They demonstrated the UK LMI for All application and how this was being used by the EmployID project.
Besides the possibility to contribute by disseminating project results and learning more about Technology-Enhanced Learning and its community it was a perfect occasion to exchange with other European PhD candidates and young researchers their own work and difficulties. It was useful for creating new ideas, networking and it of course was very much fun.
