Oxford Teaching Award to Develop Mapping Tool
The Department's 2014 Oxford Teaching Award was awarded to Dr Martin Ruhs, University Lecturer in Political Economy. Dr Ruhs used the award of £5,000 to work with the Department's Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL) team to develop a new online tool that allows students to use a map interface to share information they have attached to a geographical location, thus collectively creating a shared map resource for their course.
The idea for the tool came from Dr Ruhs whilst he was writing the Department's new online course, International Labour Migration: Economics, Politics and Ethics. Dr Ruhs had a number of ideas for learning activities that build on the benefits of having an international student cohort for a course looking at global issues and wanted a way for student-generated information to be shared in a visual way. Working with TALL, the Department's specialist online development team, the InfoMap tool was created to achieve this.
An example of how the tool is used is in a course task that asks students to research public attitudes to immigration in their country and share their findings. By using the InfoMap tool, the students' results can be presented in a visual way giving a representation of the attitudes to immigration worldwide, allowing students and tutors to see trends represented in a geographical way that was not previously possible.
As well as being used in Dr Ruhs' new online course, there has been keen interest in the tool from authors of other online courses currently being developed by the Department with suggestions for using it ranging from exploring the legacy of European occupation in non-European countries to comparing architectural features in great churches. Dr Ruhs' International Labour Migration: Economics, Politics and Ethics online course will be opening for enrolment shortly and starts in September 2014. We hope it will be the first of many online courses to use of the new tool to create student-generated map resources.
Oxford Teaching Awards are given to individuals and teams at the University as a public acknowledgement of excellence in teaching and learning.
For more information about our online courses, please see: www.conted.ox.ac.uk/online
Published 13 May 2014