E for Enhancement

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The E for Enhancement conference was held in April in Cardiff. It was focussed on Welsh institutions and the work being done across Wales in the E-learning Benchmarking and Gwella projects.  There were a wide range of people attending (including academic staff, learning technologists, administrative and technical staff). A good spread of projects being demonstrated (as can be seen  on the conference Web site)

The conference started with an an overview of the work being undertaken in both Benchmarking and Gwella, and the rest of the day was a chance for inidividuals to demonstrate projects including e-portfolios, online assessment and Welsh medium e-learning.

The main points that I took away from the conference were:

• Wales seems to be doing well with the enhancement of learning and teaching through technology
• Enhancement rather than embedding seems to be the key term - embedding gives the sense of sinking something into something else (rather like sticking a pole into concrete) whereas as enhancement gives more a sense of a sensitive approach to the connection between learning and teaching and technology.
• Need to think about the future and create mechanisms and process that allow for change; once you have the right business processes and policies in place, it makes it easier to change and adapt what you are doing. So for example, you may want to think about online learning support as a process rather than how can we use Blackboard. In that way, if you change your VLE you are changing the delivery mechanism and the approach and underlying pedagogy can transfer.