The COWL (Coventry Online Writing Laboratory) project is organised into three main phases. The first three months will comprise a project definition phase during which current practice at Coventry and elsewhere will be reviewed in order to establish a baseline against which project impact can be evaluated. This will also allow us to refine and clarify the project vision and complete a full project plan for ourselves and JISC.
The second phase will comprise a pilot implementation of the new curriculum delivery approach in two areas of the university: paramedic science and economics. These two groups of students represent “extremes” of the contexts in which learners find themselves. The paramedic students are in a highly mobile, work-based situation, studying online with relatively little attendance at the university. Many are mature students. The students are also highly dispersed. However the professional standards they are required to meet lay emphasis on clear communication in all forms, including writing. The economists are predominantly full-time students studying face-to-face and in the 18-23 age bracket.The project will explore the affordances of a range technological interventions in the academic writing teaching and learning arena. These will include ways of giving timely and cost-effective feedback on students’ writing (rubric-based schemes, screencasting, audio feedback etc.), supporting students and their discipline-based tutors via the provision of structured online content and opportunities for online discussion, podcasting and other means of engaging students studying away from Coventry, development of online one-to-one support sessions and so on. COWL will be fully integrated into CUOnline, the university’s online learning platform.In the third phase we will commence cross-university implementation of the curriculum delivery system which has been improved in the light of results from the pilot phase.
The implementation will be across all appropriate areas of CAW’s work. The following three maps/models illustrate the route that the COWL project will take in enhancing curriculum delivery at the Centre for Academic Writing (CAW).
8 responses so far ↓
Mary Deane // Oct 17th 2008 at 4:02 pm
It is very useful to have this information in one place online. I would like to ask whether Mark Garratt (Paramedics) and Jon Guest (Economics) will be attending the forthcoming planning meeting for this project?
Thank you,
Mary.
David Morris // Oct 17th 2008 at 4:14 pm
They are certainly on the mailing list! Dates soon.
Billy Brick // Nov 13th 2008 at 7:09 am
Here are the screencasting websites I mentioned yesterday:
http://www.flowgram.com/ - This is the first one, to my knowledge, and must be about 6 months old. The other two below do similar things but I’ve not looked at them in any detail. I have group of students at the end of Nov who will be doing presentations using one of these tools so I should know a bit more by then.
http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/
http://www.screentoaster.com/
This site is a list of free screencapure software:
http://desktoppublishing.com/graphutilcapt.html
I will probably be holding a Camtasia workshop in April funded by the LLAS subject centre but I could run one earlier han that if anyone is interested in exploring it’s functionality and potential.
Finally, this is an excellent link to free resources:
http://sites.google.com/site/technologyenhancedlearning/Home
Regards
Billy
John Tutchings // Dec 13th 2008 at 12:35 am
I am blown away by Flowgram, not just for this project but as a general e-learning tool. If a picture is worth a thousand then the P value(as in the P word) of this tool is clear, adding annotation to a url enhances the url a million times.
As in the famous razor advert I was so impressed I (not quite bought but) asked the company about hosting their product locally. I will keep you informed if I hear anything.
The hosting locally is quite important as it is a lot safer if the university retains some form of control over any of its data or urls. This will be true of almost any university and needs to be considered with in the scope of the project.
John Tutchings // Dec 15th 2008 at 10:19 am
I got a reply from Flowgram
Hi John,
We are hard at work adding various privacy modes for Flowgram and will be doing a release soon. Whitelists and other forms of group privacy should go a long way towards addressing concerns. We could offer a self hosted licence version if there is sufficient demand and willingness to pay…would love to learn more about your interest.
Best
Abhay
feedback@flowgram.com
Billy Brick // Jan 20th 2009 at 3:50 pm
John
It blew me away too. The only problem is that it runs a bit slow at times but I’m sure they’ll rectify that soon.
I’ve been experimenting with Screencast-o-matic which does the same job as Camtasia but it’s web-based and, at the moment at least, it’s free.
Billy
Mary // Feb 9th 2009 at 10:54 am
Hi,
At the recent Steering Group meeting we disucssed the possibility of creating sub-sections of the Project website for the workpackages. I’ve got some useful material for the Pedagogy workpackage that I’d like to link/upload. However, I can add it to general docs or archives if that’s more convenient?
Best wishes,
Mary.
cdu043 // Feb 10th 2009 at 11:34 am
Hi
I’m now an administrator on the site, so can set this up, but would like to have a brief discussion at the project board on Tuesday to check how workpackage leaders want to see this on the site. We can then get these live.
Sharon
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