Scotland’s Rural College’s (SRUC) Barony Campus,Dumfries E-Learning Team has been shortlisted for a prestigious College Development Network Annual Awards – under the category of ‘Learning and Teaching’.
The prestigious awards celebrate the outstanding projects and initiatives taking place in colleges across Scotland recognising the talent, skills and achievements of the staff and learners. The winners will be announced at the black tie event on Thursday 26 November at Glasgow’s Grand Central Hotel.
SRUC is one of three finalists in the ‘Learning and Teaching Award’ which recognises the implementation of creative ideas to improve the quality and effectiveness of learning, teaching and assessment. SRUC will go head to head with Forth Valley College and North East Scotland College.
SRUC Barony created an innovative new approach using the existing and popular online platforms of Moodle and Mahara, to support HNC Equine Studies students at both the Barony and their West Lothian based Oatridge campus, in collecting evidence of their work and collating into an online portfolio.
Previously the assessment of the practical elements of the course was done on paper and was complex to understand and complete for both students and staff. The newly created online model guides students through the stages of the practical assessment, allowing them to seek peer review and feedback, and to submit their evidence online. Students were able to seek additional support via text, video conference and downloadable step-by-step guides.
The new approach led to a 41% increase in the pass rate for the practical element of the HNC. The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) has also recognised the value of this approach and plans to role it our more widely across other courses and sectors.
SRUC Barony’s E-Learning Developer Ali Hastie led the project and commented: “My colleagues and I are overwhelmed that the project has been recognised for an award at the prestigious College Development Network Annual Awards. This is recognition of the project team’s hard work, dedication and passion in improving the teaching and learning experience for our students. We are extremely proud to have particular interest from SQA who wish to use the Equine Graded Unit project’s model and framework within Scotland’s education sector.
“Both the staff and students adopted the model and really pushed the boundaries, surpassing the project team’s expectations. It has been very rewarding to see the HNC students produce outstanding digitally enhanced rich e-Portfolio collections, which included the use of mobile Apps and practical based videos for assessment, and to see the HND Equine students embrace their role as anonymous online peer assessment ‘Digipals’.”
SRUC’s Barony Campus delivers a range of courses – for more information visit http://www.sruc.ac.uk/info/120392/
More information on the Online Graded Unit Report can be found at http://goo.gl/U3I4Ww