Fei Jiang and (behind her) Antigoni Kafkaridou, MA: DTCE graduates 2010-11

Congratulations to the 25 MA: DTCE students who graduated yesterday (14th December 2011)! 15 were on-campus and 10 from the distance learning version of the programme. They have all worked very hard and deserved their celebration yesterday.

Special congratulations to Mark Jasper and Deena El-Shamy who graduated with Distinction: the latter as a distance learning student.

Well done to all, from the MA: DTCE team!

Neil Ballantyne, MA: DTCE graduate, and his MyWordBook app

Neil Ballantyne, who works for the British Council in Hong Kong, announced this month that his MyWordBook app, developed to help Chinese speakers review basic English vocabulary, is the #1 reference app on Hong Kong iTunes (see this page). Neil worked on the app for his MA: DTCE dissertation project in 2010, an example of how DTCE students can use projects in their school, university or workplace to gain course credits. As Neil explains:

“Basically I was looking for a project to do for my dissertation and the global English team I was working for doing online teacher training wanted to develop a vocabulary app. The person doing the mobile projects at the time didn’t have the capacity so when I was looking for project ideas, he offered me the opportunity to scope out the app. I was able to do the research and propose concepts and take it forward….  The fact that I was looking for an MA project at the same time helped convince the director of the learner products to let me take the whole project on.”

The British Council have now partnered up with Cambridge University Press to help develop MyWordBook 2: “The main concept and look and feel remains the same but includes a lot of the functionality I wanted to get into v1 – adaptive learning, more practice activity types and the ability to download packs of words dependent on ability level and interest. We will do a soft launch of this in September and test the in app purchasing side of the app with a global launch after a month if all works ok. This version will be available on Android and for Java enabled phones as well as iOS so will get much more reach.”

The Blackboard 9 site for one of our course units, showing the Learning Resources page (click on the image to see a larger version if you are interested). We use a range of other environments in our distance learning, including videoconferencing, blogs, wikis, etc.

Several questions are often asked about the distance learning version of the degree. The two most common are:

Will my degree certificate indicate that I studied this course at a distance? No. We are aware that in some parts of the world, distance learning is treated as inferior to on-campus learning. We do not believe that this should be the case: all our students receive equal treatment and we have been involved with this kind of education for many years and know how to use a range of pedagogical techniques and technical tools to ensure equality between the two modes of study.  For that reason, all our graduates receive the same certification, that is, the MA: Digital Technologies, Communication and Education, regardless of whether they have studied on campus or online.

What software do I need to study online? We ask that you have regular access to a computer and that it has broadband internet access. If you only have dial-up, or irregular access to a computer, you will find it difficult to study with us online. Beyond that, however, the only software you really need is standard office tools – Word, Excel, a web browser, or similar tools on a Mac or Linux system. Videoconferencing systems, which we sometimes make use of (see pic above), and the VLEs or virtual learning environments like Blackboard and Moodle, all run through a normal web browser. We do ask, however, that you have a working microphone, headphones or speakers, and ideally, a webcam.

How long does it take? The recommended length of a distance learning course is three years.

If you have any further questions about studying on the MA: DTCE at a distance please do not hesitate to contact the Programme Director, Dr Andrew Whitworth, at andrew.whitworth@manchester.ac.uk.

The Manchester students’ contribution to the conference was however not limited to the content alone, as they joined 22 other students from Ireland and Norway to broadcast keynote speaker interviews, delegate vox-pops, and other materials live onto the web. The video and live broadcast production workshop was an international collaborative effort between Dublin City University (conference host) in Ireland, University College Lillehammer in Norway, and the MA DTCE programme at the University of Manchester. Students worked in teams to video interview esteemed academics such as Professor Michael Wesch and Professor Roy Pea of Stamford University, amongst others. They then operated cameras and audio and vision mixing equipment to create four live broadcasts on consecutive days.

MA DTCE students Meyi Scholar Okuo, Huiyu He, Kunle Arogundade, and Angela Henry on the broadcast set at the Diverse conference at DCU, Dublin.

This achievement is made even more remarkable as the students had not met each other until two days before the first live broadcast was scheduled for transmission. For lecturer and broadcast producer, Dr. Michael O’Donoghue, this was the third such live broadcast student workshop from the Diverse conference. “It’s the largest crew we’ve had for the live broadcasts, and by far the best all round experience. It’s great to see our students engaging in meaningful discussion with prominent academics, and using available video technologies and social media to put this out into the world – I’m very proud of them all”, he said. MA DTCE student Meyi Scholar Okuo added “Whilst the conference was demanding, the hands-on experience was truly inspiring and largely influenced my self-confidence”. Fellow student Angela Henry added “attending the conference gave me the opportunity to meet authors and people that you would make reference to in assignments – it fits in well with the MA DTCE in terms of using technology and communicating”. Though the Diverse conference is now over for 2011 the legacy of this activity continues. “I’m interviewing keynotes and filming at BERA at UCL in September and I hope to include a few of the broadcast crew members from Dublin on this and subsequent activities”, O’Donoghue commented.

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Drew at NTUST, Taipei

• May 3rd: National Chiayi University, Taiwan
• May 4th: National Taiwan University of Science and Technology [pictured]
• May 16th: Library and Information Studies Alumni event, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
• May 26th: (Keynote speech): Discovery: Building a UK metadata ecology, Wellcome Trust, London
• June 8th: Oxford University

This is an honour for the MA: DTCE team and reflects their experience and creative work with online and blended learning. The nomination drew particular attention to the innovative dissolving of the boundaries between online and face-to-face students and the wide range of assessment strategies, which include discussions, peer reviews, a role-playing game and a literature review.

Winners of the international competition will be notified in April 2011. Watch this space!

The resources are free to use by students and staff/faculty anywhere. They can be found by clicking on the tab at the top of this site, using the menu on the left or going to and bookmarking http://madigitaltechnologies.wordpress.com/infoliteracy. For more information e-mail Drew on andrew [dot] whitworth [at] manchester [dot] ac [dot] uk.