part of the MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh
David Sims and Cinzia Gangarosa, students on the game-based learning course, have developed a terrific game which is running over this week. Called ‘Edinburgh is Everywhere!’ it is designed to emphasise the presence of Edinburgh students across the globe, and to get some insights into the places and spaces in which they work.
It’s great fun to play, and easy to upload pictures of your own study location to help build the game.
We are looking for a Masters student who can work with us on our ‘teacherbot’ project as a developer.
We are looking for a Masters student who can work with us on our ‘teacherbot’ project as a developer. The teacherbot is a simple twitterbot which we developed to work as a light-touch ‘teaching assistant’ on our MOOC last year. We wanted to work against the idea of the ‘robot’ replacing human teachers, to see whether it was possible to develop an agent which could partner with the teaching team on this programme to add the instantaneous responses and often randomly humorous touches only a bot can pull off. We also wanted to explore, in a critical, experimental way, the role of automation in higher education teaching.
The teacherbot was quite a success with the MOOC students, and became quite a useful and engaging member of the course (read about it in the Times Higher). We’d like now to extend this pilot by further developing the teacherbot with a view to rolling it out as a university service for other teaching teams and individuals to use.
To help with this we are looking for a developer who can work with our Information Services, and us, on the next iteration of teacherbot. We have funding for a Masters student to do this on a paid internship: pragmatically this is likely to be someone who is based locally, as the project is managed by our Information Services colleagues. However if you are keen and want to propose a model for distance working, please do.
To find out more and to apply, link to the Careers Service Hub here, where you will find the job description. If you have any queries, please drop me a line (sian.bayne@ed.ac.uk).
The Edinburgh University Student Association teaching awards scheme is now taking nominations for this year – you can nominate for:
So if you’re enjoying the programme and think we’re doing a good job, please consider nominating us – it means a lot! There’s more info on the EUSA site here.
The Digital Education group who bring you this MSc also welcome enquiries from those who are considering continuing on to doctoral-level study. We’ve had many students coming off the MSc progress successfully onto PhDs either here at Edinburgh or elsewhere. If this is something you’re interested in, please just let us know: working with a member of academic staff – whether that’s your dissertation supervisor or someone else – is the best way to approach thinking about further studies.
If you have general queries about doctoral study, please drop me a line (sian.bayne@ed.ac.uk) and I will advise you. You will also find quite useful guidance on the School web pages dedicated to research degrees. Funding is always an issue, so if you want to find out more about scholarships and studentships, take a look at the relevant pages on the School web site, and also at the information on the University pages, which includes a useful scholarship search function.
It’s exciting seeing the new semester begin to kick off and students starting to get into their new courses. I thought some might be interested to take a look at the ‘Digital Student Experience’ course, which is running for the first time this semester and is one of two courses we run in which content is all open (apart from copyright protected readings). So even if you are not enrolled on this course, you’re more than welcome to take a look, make a post, or give feedback on it. You can access the ‘Digital Student Experience’ here:
http://dse14.education.ed.ac.uk/wp/
And the other open course we run is ‘Digital Education and Digital Cultures’ – you can see the 2010 course and the 2013 course here. It runs again in January so if you like the look of it you’ll be able to sign up then.
