Abstract:

Lecture formats follow what has been referred to as the Instruction Paradigm, where the goal has been the transfer of knowledge from academic to student, in a one-way process. The instruction paradigm has its advantages and is well understood; it provides a structured method of course delivery and consumption by students. However, it also has drawbacks; there is minimal opportunity for student participation and engagement on a number of points, i.e. with their course lecturer, class peers or indeed with the actual content of the materials being delivered. As such, this method of delivery raises several important key questions:

1. Have students understood the material correctly?
2. Are students referencing and accessing relevant material for the course (considering 1)?
3. How can the plethora of resources discovered by students be used to benefit the entire student base?
4. How can the institution gather this information to benefit successive cohorts, inform library resources, and generally improve the development of the module?

DIVERSE (Development and Integration of Varying Educational Resources and Student Engagement), a tool developed by researchers at the University of Lincoln, investigates the use of ‘Resource Clouds’, for the peer-review and validation of subject specific lecture resources by students themselves. The Instruction Paradigm is an effective method for surface learning in lectures, that is, to memorise information, facts and concepts without reflection, but deeper understanding would rely on students engaging in self-directed study outside of the lecture environment. However, if students have failed to correctly understand lecture concepts then this could prove problematic.

DIVERSE works by allowing students to populate Resource Clouds for a specific subject topic, adding links to useful sources and materials for which they have discovered online, such as library book references, journal articles, webpage entries, blogs, images, etc. Their class peers can then vote on the relevance of these resources, to the thematic topic, thereby allowing students to gain direct feedback on materials they are using for study and revision. DIVERSE builds on allowing students to impact and direct their own learning in a more dynamic two-way process, and as such reinforces the notion of the student being the producer of knowledge, as opposed to just the consumer.

DIVERSE was initially trialled in three faculties at the University of Lincoln, of these faculties, a total of seven modules integrated and tested DIVERSE. Discussions with staff and students whom participated in using the DIVERSE tool identified three main beneficiaries: Students, Academics and Library Services. Using DIVERSE students were able to get direct peer feedback on the resources added to the cloud, making better use of these for revision and assessment preparation. The main benefit to academics surrounded their ability to be able to periodically check the resource clouds, to a) see what resources their students where adding, and b) see which resources where voted highest; thereby allowing the academic to use this information to re-address topics in the lecture, letting the students know if, based on their resource clouds, they were indeed researching the correct/relevant resources for that topic. Finally, resources added to the clouds informed library services of which journals and books were being used, allowing for more efficient resource allocation.

Keywords:

Engagement, Learning, Technology, VLE, OER, Resource Clouds.