Scale Up Nightmare

I woke up this morning realising that I had been dreaming about the Scale Up project. It was really detailed dream in which I gave my students an activity to complete that involved estimating the number of toffees (the flat ones in the gold wrappers) in a tin of Quality Street.

There was a bit of confusion at first as the students struggled to understand the relevance of this activity to a social sciences course, but I expalined that it was about research skills and sampling. The fact that they got to share the sweets at the end was a further "convincer".

The good thing about the dream was that it didn't involve any scary scenarios about booting up Mac Books - in fact no technology was involved at all. I had been discussing earlier in the day (in real life) with my teaching team the need to have low tech alternative lesson plans for When the Technology Goes Wrong, so this was pertinent.

I have put together a "baseline" questionnaire for the new students which will ascertain how many currently have mobile devices and which OS they are familiar with. (you can access this here)

I am hopeful this will tell me whether (as I hope) a good proportion will be able to Bring Their Own Device to class.

Risk Management

As part of my participation in the ocTEL on line course, I have started on a risk log, spurred on by news that the hardware chosen for the project will be Mac Books. Very shiny! but in a module where I want to teach digital skills - including how to use the University's normal computing environment (based wholly on PCs, Windows and Microsoft) this seems an odd decision to say the least...........

Why "Not to Scale"?

This blog will focus on the SCALE UP project I am going to be involved in for the next year - or longer.

SCALE UP apparently stands for Student Centred Active Learning Environment with Upsidedown Pedagogies. It is also about large scale problem based learning. Professor Beichner in the US has developed the model in a way that fits particularly well with teaching physics in the US Higher Education system.
How this will work in the UK with Social Sciences students we have yet to see.

I have many reasons, at this point, for wanting to be involved in this project, but I have no idea how it is going to turn out.

Not to Scale is a phrase used to label  maps and diagrams to warn viewers not to take what they see too literally.......By reflecting on our learning from this project, hopefully we can discover as much about what works well as  "how not to" do Scale Up.