Case study: Using Xerte to enhance asynchronous learning
The International Pathway College
Phil Martin and Dawn Genner Lowson
Phil Martin and Dawn Genner Lowson outline how they are continuing to use Xerte to create interactive materials with built-in feedback to support asynchronous learning. Students are provided with preparatory information and tasks within Xerte objects and they are expected to engage with these prior to live sessions. This support a 'flipped classroom' model, allowing more time to be devoted to discussion and a focus on higher-order thinking skills.
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Transcript
On our languages study skills module in the IPC, we use Xerte to just flip out as much as we could and free up the live session time for discussion and just get those higher order thinking skills. Now, for anyone who hasn't dipped their toes in the Xerte pond yet, this is basically a platform that enables us to write interactive, quite colourful, cool materials that can embed in the VLE. And we decided to put all of our information transmission onto Xerte objects. So there's a lot of rewriting to do. And so the live sessions were no PowerPoints, no information transmission at all, pure discussion. And we manage a teaching team, so we're designing materials to other people to go in and teach. And they they don't have the security of PowerPoint to fall back, too. We're also asking we're also relying on the fact that students would actually have done the materials, done all the prep work prior to the live sessions. Otherwise, we're just left with 2 hours of some quite sterile discussion questions.
So I moved out of this role pretty much just at the time we were going to see if it bore some fruit and Dawn took over from my position. So I'm going to hand over to her and she can explain what has actually turned out to be to have made the cut.
Hi everyone. So when I took over, I decided to keep Xerte because after speaking to the teaching team, it had positive feedback and I could just see straight away it looked really neat and tidy. Prevents our Google site page from being too cluttered by having everything on one page. From a student point of view, for many of the tasks they're doing, they can get instant feedback. They can download their responses as well and bring them to the lesson. One of the changes I made was to add a bit more task review into the lesson so that there is a clearer connection. Because for some of our students they weren't always seeing that connection. If students haven't prepared, they are asked to leave. So there is a clear consequence for them. You need to prepare. It's part of being a good student. And then come to class with that. We also reduced the length of some of the listenings because in the recordings they needed to watch for too long. the odds of them actually completing it were getting smaller. So we reduced the length for some of those. Students and teachers have both given feedback. Engagement has been really good. So I'm happy and although Xerte was new to me, it's definitely worth having to play around with. And it's something that we'll be sticking with.
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