For those of you that were unable to make it to our inaugural UK User Conference, the videos below should help you play catch up. From Professor Mazur's excellent keynote on Peer Instruction to Paul Burt's practical tips for the deployment of ResponseWare, you'll end up furnished with masses of knowledge.

To relive the conference properly please prepare yourself a tasty finger food buffet and enjoy it while networking with colleagues in between sessions 1 and 2.

Happy viewing!

UK User Conference Welcome & Keynote by Prof Eric Mazur

Dr. Mazur's teaching method has a large national and international following, and has been adapted to teaching many disciplines. He is author or co-author of over 200 publications and 12 patents, and helped produce the award-winning DVD Interactive Teaching.

Almost 20 years ago, Harvard physicist Eric Mazur had an "aha" moment about his teaching practice that forced him to rethink the traditional unidirectional teaching model. He described his early approach to courses as "not how you teach it, but what you cover. [Then] I realized education was not merely a transfer of information. It was about how well students could assimilate information and transfer it to their own experience." So Dr. Mazur radically changed his approach. He developed a strategy that incorporates "just-in-time" teaching with short lectures punctuated by conceptual questions posed to the students, using classroom response technology. Dr. Mazur asks his students to think about and respond to these questions, and to attempt to convince each other of their positions. This is the basis of what he calls the Peer Instruction method, which engages students, provides continuous assessment and feedback, and allows students to learn from each other.

UK User Conference Session 1A: Tips for Transforming Your Context: A Workshop

Siara Isaac
Academic Developer, Université de Lyon 1

This interactive session will involve participants examining three case studies (2 undergraduate science courses and 1 continuing medical education course) and making concrete proposals for transforming passive, confrontational, or individualistic environments into more productive learning experiences using electronic voting systems. Participants will draw on their collective experience and pedagogical knowledge to address elements of question construction, instructor behaviour during the polls and responding to results.

UK User Conference Session 1B: Introducing ResponseWare Voting Into a University-Wide EVS Service

Paul Burt and Ceri Seviour
Learning and Technology Advisors, University of Surrey

Across many UK universities the use of dedicated EVS hardware in lectures has been developing for a number of years. For the past five years the University of Surrey has operated a novel and robust method of loaning EVS handsets to students. This presentation will report on some of the challenges to successful EVS take up that have been encountered and how the University is now offering students the option, as an alternative to dedicated EVS handsets, to respond using ResponseWare on their own mobile devices.

UK User Conference Session 2A: Using Zappers to Enhance the Student Learning Experience

Presenter
Shelley Parr
Director of the BM4 Programme (Graduate Entry Medicine), University of Southampton

Co-presenters
Charles Harrison
Fiona Walker

Having led a Zappers special interest group at the University of Southampton I will present examples of a number of different ways that turning technologies handsets that we call Zappers in our institution have been used to enhance the student learning experience, and some top tips from users of the system on how best to use them.

UK User Conference Session 2B: Using Voting for Effective Marking and Moderation in Large Classes

 Dr Abby Cathcart
Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

Audience Response Systems (ARS) have been successfully used by academics to facilitate student learning and engagement, particularly in large lecture settings. However, in large core subjects a key challenge is not only to engage students, but also to engage large and diverse teaching teams in order to ensure a consistent approach to grading assessments. This paper provides an insight into the ways in which ARS can be used to encourage participation by tutors in marking and moderation meetings. It concludes that ARS can improve the consistency of grading and the quality of feedback provided to students.

UK User Conference Session 3A: Applications of a PRS in Undergraduate HE Modules

Alan Hilliard
Principal Lecturer, University of Hertfordshire

The TurningPoint® Personal Response System (PRS) was introduced as a learning tool into Diagnostic Radiography undergraduate education in 2006 as a means of increasing student engagement and classroom interactivity. It was used initially to informally and anonymously assess students' knowledge and understanding of taught content. It has also been used to provide formative feedback for students to enable them to track their progress throughout a module. The conditional branching application has been used to facilitate students' decision making skills, and in the forthcoming year the PRS will be used for summative student assessment. This breakout session will offer participants a hands-on opportunity to experience the PRS for a range of applications.

UK User Conference Session 3B: Using Student Mobile Devices as Voting Devices

Dr Siân Lindsay
Lecturer, City University London

In this presentation I will describe how we used a TurningPoint technology called ResponseWare Web (RWW) with our students at City University, London. I will describe our rationale for using RWW over traditional electronic voting systems (EVS), highlighting the practical and pedagogic benefits of this technology. I will further provide the student perspective of using RWW as a means of mobile learning in the classroom. The presentation will include a demonstration of RWW, and will show some of the useful functions of this technology when used in parallel to TurningPoint Anywhere. Finally I will describe some of the barriers to using RWW ending with a discussion on how we could go about managing these better.