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Reflect blogging service to support Connected Curriculum at UCL
13 May 2019
Staff and students can use new blogging service to develop skills, connect with each other and produce outputs for public audiences
Reflect is a new blogging service that is available to all staff and students for use in taught classes. It can also be used for personal blogging.
Reflect is designed to support learning and assessment activities through written text with added links, images and video. There are also a range of themes and plug-ins to allow more creative expression, integration with social networks, visualisation of datasets and more.
Blogging is well suited to activities unpinned by UCL's Connected Curriculum, particularly allowing students to:
- develop assessments directed at an audience (Dimension 5),
- develop skills for the workplace (Dimension 4) and
- connect with each other and with alumni (Dimension 6).
Blog posts can also receive comments allowing students to engage in across subjects and out into the world (Dimension 3).
The Digital Education team is seeing particular interest in the use of blogging to act as an 'integrating' medium, bringing together different topics and aspects from a students' experience into a final showcase or capstone project.
An early adopter of the service has been Dr Nephtali Marina-Gonzales from Applied Medical Sciences. Read the case study: Medical Science students use UCL Reflect to create scientific blogs for assessment.
Nephtali Marina-Gonzales talks about how he has used Reflect (video - 5 mins)
Reflect is based on the industry-standard WordPress platform — which powers about one in three websites on the internet.
The Digital Education team has led the development of this service, working with colleagues across ISD and in the Arena Centre, including the student interns who have been leading our thinking on showcase portfolios for students.
Anson Mackay talks about how blogging has benefited his students (video - 6 mins)
Showcase Portfolio event on 28 May
On 28 May, the Showcase Portfolio project will presents examples and case studies of UCL academics who are using Reflect in their teaching.
Curated by a team of students, the exhibition takes place in UCL North Cloisters, 12-5pm.
Find out more about the Showcase Portfolio event.