Reflection

Conversations with and feedback from colleagues since then continues to highlight time and perceived relevance as a barrier to participating in the tutorials. At the time of writing, a year after these tutorial videos were produced, use of Xerte as a pedagogical design tool in the IPC remains limited to a small group of teachers and module leaders, and to the subject area of English for Academic Purposes. From my knowledge of the teachers and modules, it is likely that where some of the subject specific modules see learning as being more to do with knowledge transmission than the development of core skills. As such, they place greater value on tools such as Panopto to 'deliver' their content than on Xerte and its range of interactive features. Many of the content delivery teachers see the comprehension checking tools within Panopto and Blackboard as being sufficient to their needs. There has also been a strong narrative that lockdown teaching has presented an already overwhelming array of challenges and new technology, and that a new platform, especially one with a notoriously steep learning curve, was too much to take on. There is, however, evidence that Xerte could help teachers enhance their provision of flipped learning, and so it would be worth finding out why uptake has been so low. As an example, student feedback via tutorial sessions has observed that although we have been teaching almost entirely online for a year now, some of their lectures do not have separate material for asynchronous study and live sessions. In some cases, teaching staff are simply using live sessions to verbally restate material that they'd uploaded in video format for self study. It seems that there is an opportunity here to make the material more engaging by using Xerte objects to set tasks and test students' knowledge of asynchronous material prior to the start of the live session. With the 'explaining' part done, the live sessions would be better placed to hold discussion and prompt deep learning of the material.

I spoke to some colleagues to get an idea of why so few people had made use of the videos or taken any interest in Xerte, and the common problem was that of time. This is perhaps unsurprising, but it also seems that presenting the tutorials as videos rather than live sessions meant that many people simply never got round to watching them because there was always a more pressing issue at hand. Attendance for departmental CPD sessions, on the other hand, was much better because they would be scheduled events that participants could put in their diaries. For the new term, I plan to integrate the content of the tutorials into regular CPD sessions and monitor to see if there is a better uptake. An example of how this approach did turn out to be more effective was when I attended a programme meeting and gave a brief, real time overview of some of the benefits Xerte offered to flipped teaching. In this case there were positive responses from the staff, and a number of them requested logins and further sessions to get started with designing their first learning objects.

I have also focused on getting more involved with communities of online materials development. For example BALEAP (British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes) has a number of special interest groups, one of which is dedicated to Technology Enhanced Learning. In October 2020, I presented at the 1st BALEAP TELSIG Conference, where I talked through some ways in which rapid authoring tool such as Xerte can enhanced flipped learning. I was also able to network with other users of Xerte within the language teaching community at events such as the 2021 Xerte conference, and subsequently piloted the Xerte for EAP swap shop, an informal online gathering designed to support fellow language teachers with their use of Xerte and to improve my own practice.