Faculty of Health Sciences Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching 2015 - 2016 Award Winners
Huge congratulations to our colleagues Karen Dinneen and Pascaline Fresneau who will receive the award for Faculty of Health Sciences Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching for their project to increase participation in the virtual learning environment for the National Dental Nursing Training Programme (NDNTP).
During the successful pilot of distance learning for the Dental Nursing programme it became apparent that student engagement with the online tools was not as active as anticipated. To increase online engagement and socialisation, this project will introduce additional online teaching and learning activities on Blackboard Learn. These include additional discussion forums, quizzes and group work. These activities will be based on gamification pedagogy where learning is made more appealing (Apostol et al., 2013) by using game-based online activities to further promote learning and online social interaction in a fun and entertaining way. We also endeavour to maximise students’ engagement and participation with the programme content by building a comprehensive and innovative online reward system on Blackboard Learn. In order to receive digital badges, students would be required to successfully complete core online learning activities and competences e.g. CPR. If developed and implemented adequately, gamification and badgification have the potential to recognise the practical and soft skills that students have acquired throughout the programme but which written examinations do not capture. Acquisition of badges will afford students the opportunity to show potential employers that they have acquired these specific skills.
Further information on the Faculty of Health Sciences Dean's Awards can be found here
Well done Karen & Pascaline!
