Internationalising Student Support Community of Practice (COP) by Matthew Daley

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The University Strategy for Teaching and Learning identified “communities of practice” as key vehicles for informal dialogue with the ‘academic voice’ and for mutual support, for the exchange of ideas and the sharing of good practice between different role groups involved in the whole University teaching and learning agenda.

The Internationalising Student Support COP has been established with the remit to offer opportunities for staff involved with and interested in the development and enhancement of student support and experience in relation to internationalisation; to share best practice and discuss current challenges and opportunities for providing a high quality international student experience for all students. This COP is led by the University’s International Student Adviser in partnership with RUSU’s elected International Students’ Officer and supported by the Associate Dean (Science).

Each meeting focuses on a particular theme and good practice and ideas for improvement on that theme are presented and shared, with the intention of exploring how to disseminate good practice effectively.

The first meeting took place on Wednesday 5 December with the theme ‘Employability’ and attracted 20 members of staff from across the University.

Some of the highlights were:

  • Em Sowden, Placement and Development Manager, talked about the demand for international placements from all students particularly in China, Malaysia and India. Em also talked about the new online resource ‘My Jobs Online’.
  • Jane Batchelor, Career Development Advisor for the School of Real Estate & Planning and Lilly Mae Liddicott, Head of Industrial Training/Industry Liaison for the Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences both highlighted the value of Alumni involvement. Alumni could be used in a number of ways including mentoring current students and offering evening lectures.
  • Organising student-led events, where previous placement students can talk to current students about their own placement experience and how it has benefited them.

Future meetings and their themes are below and bookings can be made via CSTD:

  • Tailoring Support for International Students (staff supporting international/EU students)

–        Thursday 07/02/2013 – 13.00-14.00

  • Integration and Languages (staff supporting all students)

–         Wednesday 24/04/2013 – 13.00-14.00

Technology in fieldwork

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The University of Reading is part of a three-year HEA-funded project considering the use of technology in fieldwork. The project is now in its final year and has led to the production of a wide range of resources and publications which can be viewed on the project website at http://www.enhancingfieldwork.org.uk.

Alice Mauchline and Julian Park from the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development here at Reading have recently contributed an article to the Guardian Higher Education Network on ‘Academic fieldwork: six ways to make it work on a budget’. Their briefing report on ‘The future of fieldwork in GEES’ outlines current undergraduate GEES fieldwork provision across a selection of HE institutions in the UK and explores how location, duration and cost of fieldwork to the student may change as a result of the introduction of increased tuition fees.

Dr Alice Mauchline and Professor Julian Park

Opening our eyes to technology….how students can teach the educators! By Dr Samantha Weston

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An eye-opening T&L seminar, presented by Dr Neil Morris (University of Leeds) outlined how terribly, terribly easy the majority of our undergraduates find using technology…of all kinds!

Having seen his short video clip about how one of his students used his tablet to video record a lecture, whilst simultaneously annotate lecture slides provided on the University’s VLE, and instantly share his thoughts and indeed the whole videocast of the lecture with his Facebook friends, made me consider how much technology my own students use. As if by magic this week, it has been as if the students knew I was looking for such evidence, as the majority of the Therapeutics Problem Based Learning sessions I have been working in, demonstrated use of tablets, laptops, netbooks and mobile phones in numbers I had barely registered present in the room previously! One group even asked me to check through their Power Point presentation and promptly handed over an extremely professionally finished product….. on a mobile phone!

Anecdotal chatting with other students, introduced the concept of social media working groups. Many of them have set up Facebook Groups to share their PBL materials instantly with each other, and the issue of copyright and confidentiality was raised by Dr Morris in his talk. Having had such a clear demonstration from both Neil and the incredibly technologically-savvy University of Reading student population, I think it is essential now for staff to raise their game to meet student expectations, and begin to engage them in their electronic universe as well as face-to-face.

Reflections on a Training Event for Early Career Teachers of English Literature by Nicola Abram

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Avid readers of this blog might recall that I completed the University’s Teaching and Learning Support Programme in 2011. I recently took the opportunity to complement this valuable training by attending a subject-specific event run by the Council for College and University English, at Keele University.

The event began with a fruitful workshop on close reading, where the teachers became the taught! Dusting off memories of our distant undergraduate days, we were grouped with unfamiliar faces and given unknown poems to dissect and discuss. After the brief thrill of together turning words into meanings, we reflected on the role of close reading in our classrooms: What is it for? What kinds of students does it accommodate? How can we model it better?

Always an important aspect of any such gathering, dinner gave the opportunity to meet other delegates: inspiring and energetic people, all of whom are committed to teaching well. On the second day we continued to learn from one another’s experiences and observations, specifically exploring techniques for lecturing and small group teaching. There were eruptions of laughter, as the occasional improbably awkward teaching experience was recounted, and the appreciative scurry of pen on paper as we recorded others’ ideas for how to engage students.

Professor Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway) then provoked our understanding of ‘The Identity of the English Lecturer’, digging for the unconscious philosophies marking every moment of our teaching. For example, what are we silently saying through the shapes of our classrooms?

The event proved to be a precious opportunity to reflect on my teaching practice among a cheerful community of early career peers. I left newly invigorated to exploit connections between my teaching practice and research activities, and counting many new colleagues as fellow travellers on that adventure.

 

‘What did I do wrong?’ Researching student referencing practices by Helen Hathaway, Clare Nukui, Dr Kim Shahabudin and Dr Liz Wilding

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‘What did I do wrong?’ may be a sadly familiar phrase to tutors when notifying students of poor academic practice in their written work. It was chosen for the title of our collaborative TLDF-funded project because it captures the confusion and lack of understanding which is characteristic in student responses to plagiarism and poor academic practice accusations. Such accusations can destroy the confidence and downgrade the final result for otherwise intelligent, committed and hardworking students. Our project aims to uncover some of the reasons why student difficulties with referencing arise, and collate good practice teaching materials for use in subject teaching and for self-development throughout the University.

Difficulties with referencing and plagiarism are an area of concern for all HE institutions in the UK. Problems go beyond knowing how and when to write a citation. Both tutors and students regularly report a failure to understand the purpose of referencing to support a critical discussion. This inability to apply principles of rigorous independent learning goes to the heart of poor academic writing.

There have been increasing efforts on the part of academic departments and central services to provide solutions to this problem through guides, taught sessions, exercises and digital tools like Turnitin. We are all far too busy to keep re-inventing the wheel! So the primary aim of the project is to collate best practice examples of teaching materials and make them available in a format which can be easily adapted for other departments.

We also hope to discover why it is that, even where there is plentiful, comprehensive and highlighted guidance, student difficulties persist. Why are students not using – or not understanding – the guidance available? How can we best persuade them to take referencing at university seriously? We plan to include suggestions with the ‘toolkit’ of teaching materials.

While we are limited by the scope of the current project to focusing close attention on a limited number of departments, we are also planning to briefly survey academics across the university on this topic. In the meantime, we would be very happy to receive any comments, experiences or examples of good practice. Please feel free to contact any member of the project team named above.

Technology in teaching: Reflections on Dr Neil Morris’ Seminar, 19th November 2012 by Dr Natasha Barrett

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Last week’s T&L seminar, by Dr Neil Morris, on the use of technology in enhancing the student experience was a superb overview of the array of technology that our students seem to be familiar with and that many institutions are incorporating into teaching.  A key highlight for me was the data that Neil was able to share with us to dispel some of the myths and highlight some benefits of a relatively simple addition to our teaching (that many of us may already be using) – the use of audio recording lectures.

Based on a sample of 120 students (data yet to be published):

  • 76% have listened to more than half of the lecture audio recordings available to them
  • On average students listened to audio recordings of lectures twice
  • 73% indicated that the availability of audio recordings did not influence their attendance
  • 93% thought they were important.
  • 60% were happy with the unedited version
  • 84% used the recordings to write detailed lecture notes (ideally the students want the recordings available within an hour of the end of the lecture as this is when they are writing their notes up).

Add to this the published data that use of audio recordings improves exam results (Morris, 2010) and it really did hit home that this is an “easy win” in the use of technology in enhancing the student experience.

Morris, N.P. (2010) Podcasts and mobile assessment enhance student learning experience and academic performance. Bioscience Education. Vol. 16. http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/journal/vol16/

You can view the slides from Dr Morris’ seminar here

When our efforts of internationalisation in T&L and Global Employability go Faculty-wide by Dr Kimberly Watson and Dr Teeroumanee Nadan

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Significant effort at the University of Reading has been focused on all aspects of Internationalisation. In the School of Biological Sciences, we are working toward enhancing Global Employability of our students (both home and overseas) to produce high quality, highly competitive Global Graduates. Our vision of a Global Graduate will be someone who is highly competitive in the international market and who will be able to successfully practice their chosen science globally.

In the Spring of this year, we initiated a pilot project funded by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) to develop and promote best practice in teaching and learning, that would directly contribute to students’ skill development and work experience. Our pilot project was recently highlighted in the ‘University of Reading Internationalisation Newsletter’, which is distributed widely across campus and alumni.

Over the Summer, we led focus group workshops with students to better understand their concerns with regards to 6 defined areas: Teaching Methods, Learning Styles, Assessment Methods, Academic Support (including tutorial teaching), Technical Support and Career Management. These workshops were well attended with both international and home students, and included students from other Schools within the Faculty of Life Sciences. Continue reading →

Digital Portal Creates New Dimensions for Art’s Studio Community by Christine Ellison

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I am excited to announce the launch of OSCAR the Online Studio Community at Reading. This new digital platform has been developed to support the vast range of teaching and learning activities that happen across studio modules in Art, within the department itself but also off-campus and internationally.

While the studio remains an important environment for students of Art it is no longer the sole site of production. The OSCAR initiative has emerged in response to the changing requirements of studio teaching and learning in a culture of nomadic, digital, and transcontinental art practices.

On receiving a TLDF grant last year to develop this project my main concern was to create a useful, dynamic site, and not merely another hoop to cajole staff and students through. Keen not to compete with or replicate the functionality of Blackboard, Flickr, Facebook, etc., the new site has been designed to connect and exploit these existing web platforms where we already had strong presence. As such, OSCAR has become a portal to the Art community at Reading: a collation to one site, of blogs, groups, feeds, and links, that map the extensive reach of the department’s studio activities.

One of the core objectives has been to make visible the multitude of student events, projects, and exhibitions that happen across our programmes at home and internationally. OSCAR’s large image galleries feed from our regularly updated image archive on Flickr. There are also blogs for our visiting artist lecture series, student-led gallery programme and off-site projects.

Crucially, it’s not all controlled by staff. Students can join groups and get involved by posting to discussions and blogs. As the site evolves we hope to further student involvement in the administration and management of the site. OSCAR’s 24-hour accessibility supports the varying timetables of our students, who may be studying on a joint honours degree, on a work placement, or on exchange abroad. It is also a platform for our research students who are based across the globe.

OSCAR collates the diverse and far-reaching aspects of our ambitious teaching and learning community in Art, supporting flexibility in a progressively mobile culture where the studio is continually re-imagined.

The sincerest form of flattery by Nadja Guggi

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6OjCAq5u-TQ

Our Teaching & Learning Showcase Series continued yesterday with a session on ‘Sharing good practice in the use of Turnitin’. Turnitin is an online service which allows educators to check students’ work for similarity with other sources as a tool for plagiarism prevention and development of academic writing skills.

Turnitin automatically generates an ‘Originality Report’ with a ‘similarity index’ expressed as a percentage, and links to matched sources, including other students’ work, the internet, and other publications. It’s available at Reading through the University’s VLE Blackboard as well as a web portal.

As Associate Dean Orla Kennedy, who has been chairing these informal lunchtime gatherings this term, pointed out, the event coincidentally took place at the same time as a meeting of SCAM (the University’s aptly named Sub-Committee on Academic Misconduct) but still saw a good turnout of some 20 colleagues from academic and service departments across the University.

Speakers Virginie Ruiz (Systems Engineering), Sara Broad (Institute of Education) and Mary Morrissey (English Literature) are among those leading the use of Turnitin in teaching and learning at the University. Each shared their approaches and experiences, highlighting different aspects and issues surrounding the use of Turnitin, before addressing questions and concerns from colleagues.

Continue reading →

The Value of Cake by Dr Emma Mayhew

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In September British baking was celebrated during National Cupcake Week. The BBC’s Great British Bake Off has been tremendously popular. Niche cup-cake shops have been springing up on the high street…and quite right. Most of us love cake.

Part 3 politics students enjoying cake

With this in mind, last year I introduced a 10 minute break in the middle of my two-hour Part 3 seminars. During that ten minute break my students and I sat together and chatted over a Tupperware container of home-made cake. We had decided on a cake rota at the start of the autumn term. Each week a different student volunteered to made cupcakes, fairy cakes, millionaire’s short bread, lemon drizzle cake, chocolate brownies and carrot cake.

This year I rolled out my pilot project across all of my Part 3 seminars. This may seem a rather self-indulgent concept. Six seminars a week does, I admit, equal six slices of delicious homemade cake. But this isn’t just about the cake and the simple enjoyment of baking. Cake has pedagogical value.

Part 3 politics students enjoying cake

In these breaks we chat. We don’t just chat about the actual topic of debate in the seminar. We talk about dissertations, essays, careers and controversial authors. We complain about the price of food, the weather, what’s on TV, the economy and politicians. We bond a little more as a group and everyone, including me, becomes less intimidating to the quieter students. We carefully tidy our cake cases away, scoop up the crumbs and start debating the topic of the week again. We’re relaxed, refuelled and reenergised.

Optimal learning occurs when students are happy, calm, engaged and often when they feel part of a wider group learning experience. Cake can help to deliver this environment.