Scotland and specifically Glasgow has one of the worst health records in the entire Western world. Glasgow is a perfect candidate for the title ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, it is a vortex of extreme poverty and wealth that has rendered the city with an undeserved scarred and spartan reputation.

It is true that Glasgow’s health record has significantly changed for the better over recent years but much still remains to be done. Government and councils have worked towards healing Glasgow’s ailments through various different projects. One of the projects currently at the forefront of such activity is named the ‘Glasgow Centre for Population Health‘. The GCPH aims to provide a ‘focus on those issues which drive the patterns of ill-health that characterise Glasgow and the West of Scotland’. The organisation ‘provides a setting where academics, policy-makers, practitioners and local people can come together’ in order to ‘help remove the ’sick city of Europe’ label from Glasgow’.

The Spoken Word has played a key collaborative role with the GCPH by providing a platform for the recording of their seminar series. The seminar series involves a number of public lectures designed to bring a range of input from professionals and lay people on numerous health related topics. The seminars have had various distinguished key speakers opening the discussion including the philosopher A.C. Grayling and the economist Lord Richard Layard.

All of the GCPH seminar series can be found through i-Tunes or directly through our repository by clicking on the image below:

Picture Courtesy Of: bicameral

On Monday the 3rd of September, fellow Spoken Word colleague Caroline Nokaes and myself attended the Caledonian Academy Learning Communities Forum event here at Caledonian University. The guest speaker was Dr Rob Philips from Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia.

The event was based around Student and Staff Perceptions of Web-based Lecture Recording Technologies, in particular looking at staff and student data figures and examining the difficulties both groups encountered when using such technology.

Studies to date on the use and uptake of web-based lecture technologies have explored the technical and operational issues surrounding access and use. It is well documented that these technologies provide flexible access to lectures for students for a variety of reasons relating to students’ personal circumstances and timetabling arrangements. However, there are changes in usage and attendance patterns which have not been investigated that are thought to impact on the learning environment. Some lecturers report poor attendance, loss of contact with students, disruptions to the continuity of the learning experience and poor results. Others have reported no apparent changes. This raises questions of: Why is this happening? What other changes are taking place in the environment, from both a teaching perspective and a student learning perspective? Are these changes having a negative or positive impact on learning?

The presentation gave Dr Philips a chance to present the findings of the first stage of such research, a survey of students and a survey of staff:

The student survey investigated:
i. changes in lecture attendance;
ii. how lecture recordings are used;
iii. strategies for supporting learning;
iv. perceptions of effectiveness in relation to learning and the achievement of better results.

Significant differences were recorded across several variables for different cohorts: between net generation students and those born prior to 1980; between on-campus and distance students; and between surface and deep learners.

The staff survey investigated:
i. individual approaches to teaching,
ii. the role of lectures,
iii. the ways in which web-based lecture technologies have been used,
iv. their impact on teaching practice.

You can read more about Dr Rob Philips and look at his published papers here.