Two Brookes anthropology graduates carried out a nationwide survey of lecturers in the anthropology of art and their students, exploring what they would like from a website dedicated to the anthropology of art. The results influenced and informed the creation of a dedicated website, which is now up and running, and will continue to be developed.

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This project developed a web-teaching resource linking a group of documentary video films made by local students in the Indian steel town Bhilai to Prof. Jonathan Parry's papers relating to Bhilai. Feedback to the films from students was gathered at two seminars in London and Manchester to help develop the web-site.

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*Please note this is a condensed version of the full report which can be downloaded* The project aims were to • evaluate and disseminate findings in relation to the International E-communication Exchange (IEE); • develop the IEE learning and teaching model; • involve new partner institutions in future delivery. The IEE represents a significant innovation in learning and teaching within criminology yet it is also transferable to other associated disciplines that hold the pedagogic desire to stimulate critical awareness, analytical thought and reflective practice. Based on the theory of constructivism, the IEE assigns an active role to students which provides "room for the individual to experiment … in order to create meaningful knowledge" (Veen and Vrakking, 2006: 104).This initiative is an innovative e-communication project which involves universities in the UK and the USA teaching criminology/criminal justice. In 2004 students at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and the University of West Florida (UWF) were involved in pilots of focused discussion-based distance learning via email exchange (see Jones et al, 2005). In 2006, a partnership between MMU, Brighton University and Westminster University formed the UK strand of the IEE. The IEE also included partners from the USA: UWF, University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), University of North Carolina Pembroke (UNCP) and York College Pennsylvania (YCP). By using elearning through asynchronous discussion in a virtual environment different time zones could be managed effectively. The principal aims of the IEE are to • change modes of student communication (individual and group); • extend communication across cultural and national borders; • develop the potential to work across such borders; • develop students’ ICT mediated interactional skills. For this C-SAP funded project, a steering group comprising two academics from the lead institution (MMU) and the two other UK participating universities (Brighton and Westminster) was established to co-ordinate planning and to conduct qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the IEE. The IEE can be delivered: • on a large scale; • across geographical boundaries; • across cultural boundaries; • across different time zones. It can successfully enhance: • students’ substantive knowledge and learning; • a range of transferable skills: • ICT, elearning, • Time management, • Communicating confidently, • Group working. Pedagogic aims include: • peer-to-peer horizontal learning; • blended learning; • reflexivity; • autonomous learning; • critical thinking. The IEE experience makes a significant contribution to personal development planning and employability within the curriculum and develops skills in managing information flows through the use of communication technologies. "Classrooms which emulate the 'fuzziness' of this learning will be more effective in preparing learners for life-long learning" (Siemans, 2004).

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The original aim was to create an interactive web site (commonly known as a virtual learning environment, VLE) to support a new M.Sc. degree in Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford. All course materials, together with timetables, lecture schedules, etc. would be placed on the web site, together with numerous resources. In addition, students would be able to upload their own contributions. A part-time researcher would create the site, monitor the students’ use of it, and interview them periodically on its effectiveness. It was intended that the site would provide a model for other graduate degree courses in the department and possibly beyond. In the event it was not possible to create a VLE (see sections below for details) and a ‘static’ web site was instead created. While consulted by the students on the degree they did not use it intensively and remained wary of the intentions behind it. The project and its outcomes are nonetheless very instructive.

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* Full report available to download * This is an action research project in sociology funded by C-SAP and Bath Spa University which has involved systematically analysing what critical thinking means in relation to the teaching of first year sociology, addressing the curriculum in response to this and changing the learning and teaching methods employed. The process has involved student input at each stage and has resulted in a completely revised module in Introductory Sociology which challenges traditional notions of the role of the lecture, seminar and VLE teaching. The new module was run for the first time in semester 1, 2006/07 and is currently being evaluated by staff and students. The research findings have implications beyond sociology and will be of interest to academics in related subjects.

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* Please see the pdf version for the full report * E-learning Global Welfare is a teaching and learning project undertaken by the convenors of the International and Comparative Social Policy Group (ICSP http://www.globalwelfare.net based at the University of Sheffield and previously Queen’s University Belfast, now the Open University) partly in collaboration with GASPP (Globalism and Social Policy Programme http://www.gaspp.org) and Dr. Theo Papodopoulos (Social Policy Virtual Library, University of Bath http://www.social-policy.org). The project aims to facilitate and enhance teaching and learning in the area of global welfare studies through the development of the ICSP website into a unique pedagogic and research resource to facilitate the identification, navigation and practical use of a range of sources and types of information in global welfare studies. The project supports the development of on-line teaching resources and learning activities; collaboration between academics in the field; the provision of a quality checked international virtual library and policy and research digest which monitors and provides comment on international policy reform.

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Chatbots are computer programs that have the ability to parse natural language questions and, by referring to a knowledge base, generate natural language answers. The project developed knowledge bases for key social and/or political theorists for use with an open source chatbot via the WWW. A web-site was established and materials were evaluated both formatively and in a class setting. Whilst students were generally positive about the system they tended to use it as a form of search engine rather than engage in conversations. The project found that the time and effort needed to create good quality materials were very large.

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The aim of this project was to determine the levels of political literacy among students entering higher education to study subjects where this is of particular relevance, specifically politics at University of Southampton and political environment at Sheffield Hallam University. For this purpose an on-line instrument was developed and administered. The findings indicated that while there were significant differences in the political literacy of the two groups of students, in both cases the research engendered a ‘Hawthorn effect’. If planned with care such projects can effectively prepare the ground for the initial engagement of students with the study of politics.

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The purpose of the project has been to enable the Jean Monnet Centre for European Studies to offer a novel undergraduate module simulating negotiations in the European Union. C-SAP funding has facilitated four aspects of this project: the provision of online resources to provide participating students with the material to research their roles; the use of Blackboard software technology to facilitate the virtual aspects of the simulation; the organisation of a ‘final summit’ at a residential conference centre; and the creation of a dedicated website for presentation purposes and for the future development of the module.

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A new method of encouraging interactive teaching and learning was introduced into a class called “Evolutionary Medicine” at University College London. A series of “guests” were invited into the class and informally interviewed about their area of specialisation. The sessions were also videotaped for the class. Students reported a strong preference for this mode of teaching and learning compared to traditional lectures. In particular, they preferred sessions where two guests with contrasting views were interviewed. Students appeared to pay more attention and engage more with the topic in this type of interactive session.

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Using digital footage from two areas in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the projects will produce a set of elearning tools to enable undergraduates and postgraduates in the social sciences to make sense of some of the complex issues involved in academic activism and international development. The primary outcome will take the form of a DVD and hardcopy booklet. The elearning tools will be particulary suitable for anthropology, geography, sociology and development studies.

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This project has led to the development of a number of facilities to improve the usability of the CSAC and ERA Web Sites for learning and teaching, including new ways of navigating the material through subject headings, modularisation of the documents, and user-authoring of pages based on the resources, as well as other content-based means of accessing content. Over the next few months a "grid" service deploying our resources (in addition to the present web-based service) will provide the first Anthropology E-Science facility world-wide. This is being funded by a joint EPSRC/ESRC E-Science middleware project which would not have been possible for us to participate in this initiative without the timely support of CSAP, which effectively provided us the pilot for the newly funded project.

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* Please note this is an interim report, the full text of which can be read in the download files * The main aim of this project is to collect a series of 'stories' from undergraduate Sociology students. These detail their experiences of engaging with and negotiating online (elearning) assessment activities, both formative and summative, with the purpose of achieving a much better understanding of learners' perspectives of the role that e-assessment plays in assessing their learning. The student perspective on e-assessment is largely overlooked in research and development projects, but a greater knowledge of how learners experience online assessment activities in their learning is crucial for the development of tools, pedagogy and teaching practices. The detailed case studies that will be produced will provide an in-depth description of learners' experiences of e-assessment and be used to advocate a more student-centred development and application of online elearning assessment activities.

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* Please see the rtf and pdf version for the full report * We have taken as a starting point the increasing adoption of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) within the university context. The development of VLEs has a huge and obvious potential to broaden and deepen the learning experience of students in the Higher Education sector. VLEs have been envisaged as a tool for unleashing the growing computing power at the disposal of university departments and harnessing it in order to enhance learning opportunities for all. It is clear that VLEs have been carefully designed with student needs in mind. They have obvious benefits in terms of the efficient and exciting delivery of academic courses, in terms of developing generic transferable skills for the 21st century and also in responding effectively to the Diversity Agenda by facilitating access to academic resources for disabled students. The key, however, to making this (and similar) resources work to their full potential, realising the benefits they might bring to Higher Education, is to find a way to fully integrate these revolutionary developments in learning and teaching ICT with perceived academic needs and broadly-accepted best practice. This means integrating academics as well as students with the VLE. Our initial experiences with the particular VLE adopted by Cardiff University (BlackBoard) leave us with the impression that many academics are wary of this new technology. They are wary not because they necessarily believe that this new technology will not function so as to enhance student learning, but because it does not seem to work for the teacher as well as it might for the student. We are ourselves most familiar with responses from areas of social science and humanities disciplines that are primarily text-based. Here there is a suggestion that while many academics feel able to use part of the capacity of this resource (e.g. as a repository for OHPs, Word documents such as course kits or reading lists, PowerPoint slide handouts etc.) few are prepared to spend the extra time tied to their office desk and computer that may be necessary to utilise further aspects of the VLE. Anecdotally, the repeated claim is that the VLE will never replace, and may not even usefully supplement, pen, paper, essays and books. While replacement is not an objective, supplementation is. Therefore, this sort of academic attitude should concern both the institutions that are making the considerable investment necessary to equip their campuses with a VLE and the students and teaching professionals hoping to benefit from this ICT investment. It should be clear that good ICT has to work for all parties, and in Higher Education it is also clear that it cannot work for the student if it does not first work for the academic. If academics are wary of this technology, uncertain of its benefits and concerned about its impact, then its use will be at best haphazard and intermittent. Integrating academics with the VLE is the key element upon which the success of this experiment with VLEs depends. Much of the academic concern is focused on the potential impact of VLEs on assessment, most importantly on assessment methods. A VLE may indeed involve new opportunities for electronic rather than paper-based student assessment. It is a relatively straightforward matter, for example, to set up and operate multiple-choice tests. Academics have expressed concerns, however, that changes in the medium of assessment may have an impact on the types and quality of assessment possible. Specifically, we have encountered academic concern that the growth of a virtual environment will lead to the downgrading of the essay as a viable form of assessment and a corresponding increase in alternatives that ‘lack academic merit’ but are well suited to the electronic medium. There is a suspicion that the encouragement to adopt e-learning technology will necessarily pressure academics to hybridise the student learning experience. Essays are particularly important in the text-based areas of our disciplines (we are both political philosophers and work primarily with texts in the teaching context). Indeed, the bulk of assessment on modules in the wide range of text-based humanities subjects is essay-based. Concern has been expressed that the essay format for assessment would be sidelined in any conception of hybrid learning. Unless a VLE can accommodate essay assessment with ease in a strategy focusing on blended rather than hybrid learning it is likely, by the teachers in these subject areas, to be either regarded as of incidental importance or with suspicion as something that will erode academic quality by sidelining essay-based assessment. Concerns have also been expressed about growing time-management pressures on academics facing increasing research, teaching and administrative demands. Academic concerns that a new ICT resource which requires high maintenance and that appears to tie staff to a PC, so imposing too high a work burden, must be taken seriously if academics are to be properly integrated with the VLE. Workload concerns need to be addressed and flexibility will be a key issue. Staff need electronic tools that help them work smarter rather than tools that require them to work harder. This project is an attempt to think through one possible solution to both the academic concerns we have outlined. · That adopting a VLE, and the virtual assessment opportunities that go with it, will downgrade the ease with which essays can form a key aspect of assessment. · That adopting this technology will necessarily have a negative impact on workloads. If this solution proves viable then we may have gone some distance towards reconciling academics to this new technology and met our key concern: · To explore one way of facilitating the integration of academics with the VLE so that this important ICT may take its place as a key component of the learning resources widely available to students.

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The aim of the project was to examine the use of online learning within the History, International Relations and Politics (HIP) subject group at Coventry University. The intention was to gain a clearer understanding of the value that online learning adds to the student experience. This specifically related to the impact on student participation in class. A key question that it was hoped would be answered was whether online learning would be of particular use in assisting those students who find the transition to Higher Education a difficult process.

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This joint collaborative project offers the benefit of researchers investigating the issue of Personal Development Planning (PDP) in Sociology and Social Science in the Scottish Higher Education context from the perspective of students and staff. The project will be undertaken by researchers from the University of Abertay, Dundee and the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. Abertay researchers will examine PDP predominantly from the point of view of academic staff perceptions, whilst the RGU team will examine the issue predominantly from the student perspective.

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This research project explored the use of podcasts in the learning and teaching of Politics and International Relations (PIR) in a UK HE institution – the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. The primary research question was the following: within a strategy of blended learning on campus, what added-value can the consumption and production of podcasts bring to the learning process within PIR? During the period of the grant, we conducted a deeper review of the literature on this subject; we assisted students and teachers in the consumption of podcasts by creating a website and ‘listening list’ of relevant material; we surveyed student attitudes on the use of podcasts in higher education; we worked with staff and students to produce podcasts; we disseminated our initial findings to a national and international audience; we published these findings in the journal European Political Science.

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A symposium was held in January 2003 to discuss teaching Max Weber in higher education sociology courses, with specific reference to a range of set topics. Behind the project was the feeling that teaching Weber was a difficult enterprise and that in many instances text-books and other materials were somewhat out of touch with contemporary research. In particular the aim was to consider the feasibility and the nature of developing a web site which would utilise, in the first instance, the papers presented at the Symposium (or materials using the papers as a point of departure). The symposium raised some very interesting points of view and highlighted some key issues relevant to the project but the development of a web site from the materials presented did not in the event prove desirable or feasible. If one is to be produced if will need to be produced by a sole author.

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SDR was a collaborative multidisciplinary project to create reusable learning objects (RLOs) for use and evaluation in Sociology and Anthropology, including its constituent fields (Biological, Medical and Sociocultural Anthropology). RLOs are stand-alone "chunks" of interactive web-based multimedia, which support a single learning objective. Being flexible, they can be used and reused across disciplines. Two broad topics were identified as particularly salient across the above disciplines: sex (including sexually transmitted disease and reproduction) and drugs (including drug dependency). These two topics formed the basis for multidisciplinary development of a collection of eLearning resources that were subsequently widely used and evaluated.

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SHIELD was an interdisciplinary project, building on the success of the innovative Medical Sociology Interactive Cambridge course, to collaboratively produce a collection of eLearning resources to support teaching and learning in sociologies of health and illness. The project draws on expert knowledge, transforming it into high quality interactive multimedia resources. Each resource, or reusable learning object (RLO) explains/explores a 'stand-alone' concept or idea. The resulting databank of e-learning resources is available on-line free of charge, and is promoted and disseminated to the wider academic community. Student evaluations have also been collected and analysed and the results form part of this report.

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The new School of Social and Political Studies at the University of Edinburgh has brought together the academic units and former departments of Social Anthropology, Social Policy, Sociology, Politics and from the next academic year Social Work. This year has seen the introduction of two new interdisciplinary half courses for the second year of disciplinary degrees within the school: Social and Political Theory and Social Enquiry (details at www.sps.ed.ac.uk/uginterdiscip.html#spt). The courses have been delivered via traditional twice-weekly lectures and weekly tutorials as well as a web-based interface and learning package called WebCT. This has been used to make available standard course materials including set readings, course and lecture notes, and course guides and tutorial information. With WebCT the courses have also made use of learning tools such as self-tests, threaded discussions and direct web links to further resources. C-SAP funding supported part of the Web-CT development work, and encouraged the development officer (Pauline Watts) to keep a reflective diary of her work designing and implementing the WebCT resources. What follows is her account of this experience.

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This project has developed a searchable database of online texts, the global library, as part of the Sussex-based interdisciplinary social science portal, the global site. The database has enabled students at Sussex and other internet-users worldwide to locate online academic texts, official reports and other materials of direct relevant to social science study. The project has republished some print materials, and has incorporated a wide range of other online materials, including those published by the parent site, in a database that is readily searchable by author, title, keyword, etc.

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This project had three primary aims. First, to discover how informed second year students were about Internet resources, how they went about finding online information, and how they integrated this information into their oral and written coursework. Second, based on this information the project wanted to discover how to best teach students about the Internet’s potential to enhance the quality of their learning. The core to this was establishing ‘best practices’ in instructing students how to selectively choose and integrate various types of primary and secondary Net based resources into all aspects of their coursework. Third, the project wanted to test the portfolio method of assessment. To do this, the project aimed to guide students though an online research project, utilising primary and secondary computer generated information, which was presented in a portfolio format, along with supporting evidence as to how, which, and why particular online resources were used to complete the research project.

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A virtual seminar programme was incorporated alongside the established face-to-face seminar programme in an Honours level Politics module concerned with political philosophy and political reasoning. Students were then asked to evaluate and compare their learning experiences in these two formats. By the end of the module, most students identified a moderate but clear preference for the face-to-face learning format, with a significant minority holding the opposite view. This would appear to be related to a difference in learning styles between the two groups. There was, however, a consensus that both forms could contribute usefully in complementary ways to the learning process, and most students indicated that they thought the module should combine the two approaches, provided that the virtual element was well-structured and actively managed by the teaching staff.

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The aim of the project was to consolidate, embed and enhance the use of C&IT within the Politics undergraduate programme at Wolverhampton. We intended to share skills and perspectives within the subject team, to encourage students to use a wide variety of different forms of technology-supported learning and to systematically evaluate the experiences of students and staff. The main outcome is a clearer understanding of how students evaluate and rank their own C&IT skills. This will enable us in 2002-2003 to give targeted support to students in their use of C&IT to enhance their knowledge, understanding and skills. (99)

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The project developed means of diversifying methods for teaching, learning and assessment at undergraduate level. Students participated in the design of assessment criteria, and submitted 39 CD-ROMs (for the History of Anthropological Theory) and 8 visual ethnographies on video ( for Visual Anthropology).

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