Transforming learning for a breadth of performance-based subjects

“Our experience with ClickView has gone from being on local desktops where students could access it in college but not at home, to being completely cloud-based, browser-based. Students can now access it on multiple platforms, including their phones.”

The college has seen more staff engage with ClickView over time, creating their own content or filming talks delivered by external visitors to students. Allan Holligan, Lecturer in Contemporary Art Practice at the college, explains. “I’ve been using it to record talks by our visiting artists programme and our artists in residence who introduce their practice to the students with an introductory talk. We record and upload those to ClickView and then link through Moodle to the various playlists.

Staff regularly embed ClickView videos directly into the VLE course pages, which helps keep students engaged with appropriate content. With so many potential distractions, Neil has also found interactive videos useful for retaining students’ attention. “Now staff members can sprinkle in questions, supplementary information, and add additional resources to the video. It means every three or four minutes the students get extra information or have the programme contextualised further to the specific unit of study.” Another bonus he describes is that staff can see in real time how a class is engaging with content, and identify knowledge gaps. “Teachers get very excited when they see the interactive videos and the analytics that are presented,” he says.

At Edinburgh College, “video is becoming more and more important for specific departments especially in relation to performance. In the Performing Arts department, Sport, Fitness, Contemporary Art, Film and TV…students need to be filmed and recorded doing specific elements to fulfil aspects of their course.” Several departments are real ClickView “success stories,” says Neil. The Performing Arts department and Music department have found a number of innovative ways to support learning and teaching. “The Music department at Sandhill campus uses it constantly. They have students who need to get comfortable with being filmed for performance…they’re able to film those students and then quickly get that content up on ClickView so students can access it and respond.”

Jo Turbitt, Curriculum Leader for Performing Arts, explains how the Dance and Drama staff use ClickView. “ClickView enables students to access programmes that have been on TV, while our staff use it to demonstrate other learning resources from across the world. We also use it to store assessment evidence…ClickView has been absolutely fundamental in making sure that assessment evidence is stored safely, securely, and can be used for external verification reports.”

ClickView supports the flipped classroom model in many ways. From a learning technologist’s perspective, “the biggest, most obvious benefit of the flipped classroom would be as a powerful tool to facilitate our distant learning courses, or our night courses where we have students who may never physically access the college,” says Neil. Jo offers a teacher’s perspective. “By flipping the classroom, students experience powerful blended learning…Students can see learning happening within the classroom, but also all around them…it encourages them to think beyond the idea of a learning environment being four walls and a teacher.”

Jo reflects on the biggest challenge to flipping the classroom. “Students expect you to be the leader, expect you to be the one giving them the knowledge…but they’re slowly but surely going, ‘Alright, okay. This isn’t going to be passive.’ It’s about getting them to believe they have something to contribute.”

“By flipping the classroom, students experience powerful blended learning.”

Jo Turbitt
Curriculum Leader for Performing Arts

Neil describes how the introduction of Single Sign-On (SSO) impacted the ClickView experience for Edinburgh College staff. “Before we had SSO for ClickView, everything had to go through the admin. Programmes had to be requested by a staff member, the admin would then edit that programme and it would go up on the library. Now staff have all the freedoms they want to edit, create and add descriptions of content they want. Knowing they have more ownership over that gets people a lot more invested.”

“We’ve had lots of positive feedback from colleagues about ClickView,” says Neil. “It’s something they enjoy using and the user interface is very easy to understand. I don’t think there’s any course that hasn’t benefited from having more dynamic video content.” Creating content banks in ClickView also has the potential to save staff time down the track, as Allan explains. “The educational benefit of using ClickView from my perspective is…building up an archive of work that we could repeat within the classroom, year on year. It’s really about that added value. Students like having access to the archive and they can dip in and out of it whenever they wish, which is useful.”

The future potential of ClickView is also exciting for staff. “I think ClickView holds a lot more opportunity than I’ve realised,” says Jo. “There’s a huge community out there on ClickView that I’ve not dabbled in yet…the global sharing of educational resources is so important and so valuable.”