Two Priorities When Selecting Software

Graeme Knowles:

This isn’t just an advert for GoReact, but we’ve found GoReact A to be very, very simple tool to use, but also the support that offer’s been very good. If we do get ourselves into a tangle, which does occasionally happen that someone could help us out, but in terms of staff, obviously I think we discussed previously that there’s been quite a challenging time for staff for the last two or three years. They’ve been through lots and lots of change, much of your unwanted and certainly most of your unprepared for, and so they are, that we can’t go to them and say, “Here’s another thing you should be doing.” Unless we’ve got some very good reasons for that.

I’m looking in at WMG, I’ve got a team of around eight people who are education designers or technologists who can support staff, but we always start with the why. Why are we doing this? Why is this worthwhile? What’s the benefit both the students and also to member of staff? And then we can also say to them, we have a team of people here who can help you to develop your thinking in this area rather than you being just given a piece of technology and asked to sort it out. That for me, I think the point that Sarah made before is really important that this is about design. If we design how we are students going to learn and design how assessment plays a role in that, then everyone can see the benefit. If you don’t do that, then it becomes an imposition for either staff or students or both.