Embedding Employability in the Department of History: Historic Themes in Practice by Professor Lindy Grant

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The Department of History has been running a module for Part 2 students called Historic Themes in Practice (HTP) for the last three years. It is an innovative module in conception, organisation and structure. It is designed to make second year students enlarge their views of career possibilities, particularly within the heritage sector, and learn to work together in teams to bring a group project to fruition: in short it is designed to embed employability into the teaching of history. And it takes employability one stage further. Every year, the options from which students choose their group project includes at least one group placement, working to a brief provided by an institution within the heritage sector.

This all sounds like a bit like heavy corporate-speak, so how does this module run? What do the students actually do? Continue reading →

Using technology to find low-tech solutions by Mary Morrissey

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Like a lot of people, I do not consider myself particularly savvy about technology: when I find that something is useful to me, I learn how to use it. That said, I think we can use learning technologies to come up with ‘low tech’ solutions to our teaching needs. Among the advantage is efficiency in terms of time and money: we already have the kit, and we know how to use it. I offer the following as an example.

It is often difficult to make sure that students are aware of detailed regulations that affect their work but which cannot be summarised or displayed easily. Conventions for writing and referencing are a good example in our department.  Last summer, Pat Ferguson (our Royal Literary Fund fellow whose role in the department is to help student improve their writing skills) observed that we had excellent advice on essay writing, but it was in our large Student Handbook, distributed at the start of the first year. Pat suggested that we make this information available separately.

I thought this was a great idea. I noticed there was other information in the handbook that students need through their degree too: there was information about our marking criteria; there were some very helpful examples that showed the difference between plagiarism and poor academic practice. I took these sections, and I created three separate documents with titles that I hoped would be self-explanatory: ‘Style Guide for English Literature students’; ‘Understanding Feedback – Marking Criteria’; and ‘Plagiarism’.

I uploaded all three documents to Blackboard’s ‘Fileshare’ area for the department, and I created links from the Blackboard courses for all our Part 1 and Part 2 modules. (I am working on the Part 3 modules, but there are over 50 of those!) I also posted the documents in our central ‘Information for English Literature Students’ Blackboard organisation, on which all staff, undergraduates and postgraduate students are enrolled. By keeping the documents in ‘Fileshare’ I can update them every year, to include new ‘standard paragraphs’ for example. I overwrite the old file with the newer version, and all the daughter versions linked to it update automatically.

This isn’t rocket science, but I think it has helped us make useful information more readily available. Having in posted in most of our Blackboard courses makes it more visible; having three small documents (in pdf format) makes them easier to download and print.

Where would I go from here? Students have told me that they like a website with exercises that help with grammar and writing skills that we recommended. It’s based in the University of Bristol:  http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/index.htm

I would like to create an interactive resource like this, and I know it can be done. The University of Aberdeen took the paper-based ‘Guide to Written Work’ (on which we all relied when I worked there!) and turned it into an internet-based resource with exercises: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/writing/

If anyone knows any low-tech ways that I could do something similar, please let me know!

What it means to me to be a National Teaching Fellow by Helen Bilton & Professor Julian Park

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By Helen Bilton, Institute of Education (NTFS 2012)

I had never heard of the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme, nor the University Teaching Fellowships, until a colleague who had achieved the status of University Teaching Fellow came and talked to our research group about the achievement. I actually was having a very bad day and missed the talk and arrived in a foul mood not knowing what anyone was talking about! When the meeting had finished Carol turned to me and said ‘you should apply for that Helen you have done so much with students’. I didn’t think much more about it until she sent through the information. I wouldn’t normally have bothered but the encouragement from this colleague, who also said ‘what have you got to lose’ was enough for me to say ‘go for it’. To say I was gobsmacked when I was told I had achieved the status of Early Career Teaching Fellow was to say an understatement.  When the opportunity came around to apply for the more heady status of National Teaching Fellow having been encouraged initially by Carol gave me the impetus to say to myself ‘why not?’.

Moral of the story: there are always people about who think a lot of themselves! But there are so many people who are brilliant but never think to shout about it. We all need to keep a look out and shout about our colleagues’ achievements. Without my colleague being aware of and happy to help me, I would not have become a National Teaching Fellow. I now look out for others and say ‘go for it’. If all of us could encourage one person, that would be a lot of people being acknowledged.

Being an Early Career Teaching Fellow meant I was exposed to some really nice people-always a bonus! It also meant I became more involved and felt more a part of the University. I came into contact with some amazing people across the University, many of whom I’d not met before. Being a Fellow has meant I feel even more confident about what I do with students; some of the things I have done are ‘creative’ and ‘a bit out of the box’ and the achievement has encouraged me to realise my beliefs are correct. It has also meant my passion for the last 33 years-children playing and learning outside has been recognised.

By Professor Julian Park, FDTL Life Sciences (NTFS 2008)

As a committed educator I applied for a University Teaching Fellowship because I believe it is a key route to ensure high quality teaching and learning is promoted within the University. The award provided funding to develop the engage in feedback website, which is now used internationally.  My UTFS award quickly led to the opportunity to apply for a National Teaching Fellowship, which I was delighted to receive in 2008. As well as providing a great opportunity to network with like-minded individuals, it was a useful additional piece of evidence to support my promotion to Professor in 2010. Collaborations with other National Teaching Fellows has led to the award of £200k for the Enhancing Fieldwork Learning project, which is still on-going.

Developing students’ digital skills through placements – Maximising student engagement by Rachel Glover

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I have previously blogged about my trip to ALT-C in Manchester. In the same week I went to the RAISE Conference in Southampton. The Researching, Advancing & Inspiring Student Engagement day was my first opportunity to speak about some of the findings of our research so far.

At the last-minute, my supervisor Nadja Guggi had to take sick leave, but I felt confident enough to talk about our research and step up to the challenge of delivering our presentation on ‘Developing students’ digital skills through placements’  on my own.

RAISE presentation

I focused on five key areas that had stood out for me so far, addressing each theme in turn: confidence, time, participation, social media and value.

After my presentation I opened the floor to questions. This was a particularly valuable experience. One member of the audience queried a point I had made about students’ social media skills. With hindsight, I could have made a clearer distinction between skills and practices – the difference knowing how to use social media, and using social media in a professional context, as part of a communication strategy. This is something to take forward for future presentations.

RAISE Students

Another delegate wanted to know if I had asked students about how they initially heard about their placement opportunity. I had indeed done this, with the majority of students hearing about the placement from a friend. The delegate had also done some research with similar findings. It was really valuable to hear about other research projects and to discover similarities between them.

See the clip below for a summary of the common themes addressing my RAISE presentation. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90-WurbS5-4&feature=youtu.be

Teaching and Learning Away Day Reflections by Dr Cindy Becker

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As usual, it was great to see so many colleagues at a Teaching and Learning away day – it always reminds me how much we all care about this important aspect of our lives as academics. I enjoyed this session especially because I met several colleagues with whom I have never worked before. Two of us even discussed the possibility of a joint module.

I was a little disappointed that the day did not relate as much to Part One engagement as I had expected. I was expecting to hear lots of ideas about how departments other than my own keep their Part One students engaged and enthusiastic. Having said that, I enjoyed the chance to consider how students might engage with all aspects of university life and I will raise some of the ideas generated by the day with colleagues in my department.

Staff Development and Internationalisation: learning from each other by Clare McCullagh

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The term internationalisation is thrown about very easily in HE nowadays, so I enjoyed a recent opportunity to sit around a table and discuss pedagogy and policy in detail with two visiting academics from the Sudan University for Science and Technology (SUST). As Academic Staff Development Managers in CSTD my colleague Nina Brooke and I were invited by Dr Tabarak Ballal, Director of undergraduate programmes and Lecturer in Building Technology, to develop and deliver a tailored and condensed introduction to T&L in HE. We were tasked with providing a focus on teaching large groups, curriculum design, quality enhancement and application of learning technologies.

Our visitors, Dr Yassir Mohammednour Elfadul Abbas and Dr Elsadig Elhadi Elhassan, are in the process of establishing at SUST a new MSc in Construction Management. The School of Construction Management here at Reading is supporting them in this process, led by Dr Tabarak Ballal and funded as part of the British Council funded Sudan Higher Education Quality Improvement project (SHEQuIP). SHEQuIP supports links between Sudanese and UK universities focusing on the theme of quality improvement under the Internationalising Higher Education Programme (IHE). IHE establishes new generation partnership models to develop global knowledge economies.

Nina and I enjoyed learning about the teaching context in Sudan, drawing comparisons and contrasts with our own situation here, and discovering that we share many similar challenges. Other staff from SCME, including Tabarak, joined the programme and also contributed to the content; these real examples are what bring a workshop to life. For example, Dr Emmanuel Essah charted his journey in setting up a new Career Development module involving industrial placements for undergraduates and Steve Mika demonstrated how his Building Pathology students develop the skills required to assess causes of building decay through ‘virtual’ site visits. Tabarak demonstrated a variety of teaching and learning strategies that she adopts in her delivery of Construction Technology, including the use of Blackboard, to inspire her students to be active learners. We also had the pleasure of meeting a Part Three student, President of the Construction Society and co-founder of ConstructionChat website, Connor O’Connor, who is a shining example of student engagement with so many exciting ideas about student support, employability and module design that he hardly paused for breath.

Our visitors said that they had learned a lot and were taking away plenty of ideas and food for thought. I also felt that I learned a lot from everyone who contributed. When you work in a central department it is a great privilege to spend some time within a School getting to know some of the staff and their work in a little bit more detail.  Many thanks to Tabarak for all her work in organising the visit, and to everyone who contributed.

Learning Technologies in the UK HE sector: Some highlights from the ALT-C2012 Conference by Maria Papaefthimiou

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The 19th international conference of the Association for Learning Technology ( University of Manchester, UK, 11-13 September 2012) was buzzing with 700 participants, where I had the opportunity to attend some excellent sessions and to keep a watching brief on what is happening in the HE sector in terms of learning technologies and pedagogy. Below are some highlights of the themes, the technologies and the pedagogies that are prevalent in the UK HE sector.

Student engagement, interactivity in the classroom, assessment and feedback, Open Educational Resources, and Digital Literacies were some of the main points of the presentations I attended. VLEs are still dominant in institutions, with increased use of Mobile Devices, and classroom interactivity systems;  Augmented Reality in Teaching and Learning has attracted attention as a powerful tool for learning.

Eric Mazur, in his keynote” The scientific approach to teaching: Research as a basis for course design”, provided evidence for the “flipped classroom”, where students’ interaction and engagement during the lecture had a significant impact on their learning. Appropriate design of course delivery and the use of voting systems has been instrumental for the learners.

An interesting aspect for me was the recognition of new roles within support staff in institutions (such as Teaching administrators) that have a major role to play in the student experience and are in a position to enable institutional change especially within a rich technological environment. UCL have presented on their project The Digital Department [Identifying new “blended” support roles: Identifying new ‘blended’ support roles to enable institutional change http://altc2012.alt.ac.uk/talks/28131] which is running in parallel to our own Digitally Ready project.

Two sector surveys were presented. The UCISA TEL Survey 2012, highlighted that knowledge of academic staff is considered far less of a barrier influencing technology enhanced learning (TEL) development than in other years but lack of time and insufficient financial resources are the top barriers to TEL. Although institutions had conducted studies on the impact of TEL on the student experience, the evaluation of pedagogic practices is less common (with Scottish universities appearing strongest in this arena). Finally, the survey highlights the notable progress of services for mobile devices by institutions, especially for supporting access to library services, email and course announcements for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The second survey of 44 HEIs has revealed that 50% of HEIs are working on developing policies on e-submission, a topical subject among learning technologists.

Finally, in his talk “Research about Technology Enhanced Learning: who needs it?”, Prof Richard Noss, from the London Knowledge Lab, convinced us that “thinking about TEL is good at encouraging us to address deep educational issues that may themselves have little to do with computers – including reappraising what it is our learners need to learn, why, and how.”

More about ALT-C can be found on our Digitally Ready blog.

Turning study skills learning on its head by Dr Michelle Reid, Sonia Hood and Dr Kim Shahabudin

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The Study Advice team found David Nutt’s post (Preparing to turn the classroom upside down, 14th Sept 2012) very timely as we too are embarking on a project to ‘flip’ the classroom.

Flipped learning has been a significant driver in the increase in open online courses for higher education. It has been used in higher education in the US with great success, particularly in science and maths subjects and has become widely used in teaching in US secondary schools. Discussing the approach with learning development colleagues at other universities alerted us to the potential benefits for teaching study skills.

Students are often reluctant to commit time from a busy schedule to developing their study skills, despite the prospect of greater success in learning. The flipped learning model allows students to explore key concepts or theories via videos, podcasts or screencasts, whilst freeing up contact hours for interactive application of these key concepts. This means that:

  • students practise independent learning from the start;
  • they can learn at their own pace and at a time to suit them;
  • problems with understanding can be spotted and addressed quickly.

The Study Advice project, funded by a grant from the Annual Fund, will apply the model to generic study skills teaching on topics including essay writing and referencing practice. We will be developing suites of ‘bite-size’ animated teaching resources using Camtasia to produce screencasts, accessed via our Blackboard Organisation. These will be followed by ‘Workshop Plus’ sessions to practise the skills taught in the screencasts. The screencasts will also be made available to University of Reading students and staff to use for their own purposes.

Challenges include persuading students to watch the screencasts before attending the hands-on sessions. Previous examples of flipped learning are course-based, with a specific cohort of students in one subject area. This means students are more motivated to access resources, while tutors can target the ‘just in time teaching’ mentioned by David to the needs of the group. In contrast, our teaching will be generic, on key study concepts which have a significant, but less visible impact on grades.

We would be very interested to hear the experiences of any other staff taking this approach in their teaching, and will be happy to share our own experiences. If you would like to know more about this project, contact any member of the Study Advice team (Sonia Hood, Kim Shahabudin, Michelle Reid and Judy Turner).

Preparing to turn the classroom upside down by Dr David Nutt

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I think it was at the HEA-STEM conference (London, April 2012) in a talk given by Prof Simon Bates from the University of Edinburgh (now at the University of British Columbia) that I first heard of the “flipped” or “inverted” classroom. The basic premise really appealed to me: contact time with lecturers is limited and precious, so why do we so often use them simply to present material? Given clear directions, the students can read things for themselves! Instead, the timetabled lecture slots can be used to create a dialogue: addressing areas of difficulty or common misconceptions, applying the material to real-life examples and so on.

There are all sorts of ways to flip the classroom, but the most common approach seems to be use video podcasts, like those from the Khan Academy, combined with “just in time teaching”. Students watch the videos in their own time in advance of the timetabled lecture and are assumed to have covered the material. This is often checked by getting them to complete an on-line quiz, with a number of questions based on the material, plus a final open-ended question asking whether there are things they have found unclear or particularly difficult. The day before the lecture (this is the “just in time” bit), the lecturer collates the data, finds out what areas are causing difficulty and prepares material for the class which addresses these issues.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and flip two of my lecture courses this year, a second year course on spectroscopy (5 lectures) and a fourth year course on biomolecular modelling (5 lectures). The second year course contains many fundamental concepts and equations which just need to be learnt. In this case, the lecture slots can be transformed into workshops, in which the concepts can be put into practice. I anticipate that the lecture slots for the fourth year course will become much more research-focussed, for example discussing a paper from the literature which uses the theories and approaches described in the video podcast to address a real scientific problem.

I’m currently starting to prepare these courses. Using a web-cam, Camtasia Studio software and a Yeti microphone (purchased as part of a previous HE-STEM project on developing video resources), it’s straightforward to produce good quality video podcasts. That’s the easy bit! The next bit is seeing how it all works in practice… I’ll let you know how I got on after Christmas!

Links:

My introductory video podcast for the students:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzb4a03hv6c

Introductions to the flipped classroom approach:
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7081.pdf
http://www.iste.org/images/excerpts/FLIPPR-excerpt.pdf

Other interesting web resources:
http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2012/06/25/pros-and-cons-of-the-flipped-classroom/
http://www.mast.unco.edu/programs/flipped/
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
http://andrewdouch.wordpress.com/2012/08/21/my-response-to-flipping-the-classroom-vitta2012-reflection/