I have received in the post today a certificate recognizing me as a Fellow if the Higher Education Academy as evidence of my “expertise and commitment to enhancing and supporting the student learning experience”.
This certificate is linked to a post-graduate course I have taken last year focusing on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. The course gave me a more methodological approach to the teaching process which I have applied when upgrading the design of the new media course I teach in Belgium at Katho.
I had a video guest lecture to Florida Southern College, to the class of Dr Chris Fenner. I talked about the Olympic Movement and new media from a historical perspective. Questions about the impact of emerging technologies on society in general and the Olympic experience in particular were asked.
Unlike my previous guest lectures, given to the University of Missouri-Columbia or the University of Kansas, that were done via Skype, we used a browser-based solution: TokBox. Some technical difficulties made things more challenging but the sound and video quality when the internet connection functioned at full speed were very good. The platform also enabled embedding a Slideshare presentation reducing thus the hassle of figuring out how to present additional material while keeping the video on screen.
The presentation is below:
I believe the class was a novelty for the students as well as for the college as a whole. Students engaged with me both by answering and asking questions and they seemed to genuinely enjoy the lecture. This shows that there is some great potential in integrating live video into traditional in-class, on-campus lectures.
Many thanks to Chris Fenner and James Lynch for making this possible.
Back in May when in Lausanne, Switzerland I blogged and tweeted live from IOC’s first ever International Forum on Sport, Peace and Development (IFSPD). Just recently my review of the same event has been published in Culture @ the Olympics.
