Voyage Around TV

Would that this voyage around my site were as beautiful as this photo of a very special corner of Tuscany…  and thanks to barrister, author and screen-writer John Mortimer for the ‘Voyage Around‘ idea (from his first book: ‘A voyage around my Father‘)…

This is just to be a quick ‘voyage around’ the highways and byways of Tonyversity to demonstrate how it works with student classroom attendance, learning from home and progression.

1. ESS

In this English course, I determined to deliver a programme of English learning and development wholly aligned with the subject matter (sustainability), but to centre it upon students’ personal and future professional perspectives upon the issue.  Here are some of the key links on Tonyversity:

• Block Three: ‘Sustainability Inhibitors’  – outline and instructions. The set up of a three or four week block with clear expectations and outcomes.
• Inhibitors Brainstorm.  I captured the brainstorming session myself on -screen, so that students could free themselves up from the fear of not having recorded the key issues and actually think about the subject & question and how to express it.  I helped them by ‘clustering’ their thoughts under certain headings which would be appropriate for the next stage of the task (which was to develop an Action Programme by which such inhibitor might be overcome).

2. Students on Work Experience.

Although I teach ‘Intro to Research’ on various M1 and M2 courses, I felt it would help were I to house on Tonyversity my ‘Best of’ advice to students on placement (whether they be my tutees/responsibility or not):

• Stagiaires’ base page. Offering advice and links to:
  • my lecture notes on Intro to Research
  • a Project Proposal Form (to complete and send to the placement tutor)
  • links to the Harvard Referencing System instructions
  • warnings about Plagiarism (and how to avoid it at all costs .. and the consequences of not so doing)
• My ‘best of’ advice on one scrolling page
• Céline’s Top Tips … one of my ex-students (MICAI M2) who won the Best Business Rapport de Stage in Alsace competition and kindly permitted me to host her (entirely sensible) advice to her successors.
• Charlotte’s Intro.  Students often find ‘getting started’ with the writing to be difficult.  It needn’t be so.  Charlotte Chauffaille (MICAI M2 again) wrote a short but particularly helpful and clear introduction to her rapport and was happy for me to host it and to refer people to it as an exemplar of clarity of set-up.

3. LPHT & L3 Intro to Business: Business Simulation / Role Play

A 16 – 20 hour long role play event.  As PDG I post materials, reviews, memos and other documents during class and between classes and the classroom time becomes a meeting between myself in role and the students as Directors of Divisions and Brand Managers. The key foci are: performance review, site potential analysis, development of a more efficient, effective and economical system of staff recruitment, selection and retention and strategic vision and planning.

• Unit specification
• ‘ColmarCo scenario context‘.
• First Role Play Task instructions and associated theoretical models
• Feedback from tutor (protected until work complete)

I am not claiming this is perfect at all – but it does provide a lot of virtues:

1. always there, accessible and not hidden behind login and password
2. absent students cannot claim they ‘didn’t know’
3. I can capture classroom work and free up the students to think and perform
4. I can use Tonyversity as a way of accelerating learning
5. I can offer support to students at distance – especially in relation to their time undertaking work experience away for the UHA.

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