Making something digital does not always make it better. Why? It not the digital itself that it actually the issue. After all, experimentation and exploration with digital practices and devices can bring on board innovative change within academic learning and teaching. Fundamentally, it is the way we view and handle the digital which needs to […]
Leicester Learning Institute: Enhancing learning and teaching
A Literal Escape Room: an experiential approach to study skills
Developed by Mark Van Der Enden, Tracy Dix, and Alex Patel The challenge and rationale… The problem with ‘study skills’ workshops are that, typically, they are boring, generic and students feel they have little relevance to them (Lea and Street, 2006; Rooney, 2016). In fact, it takes a GREAT deal of time, effort and expertise […]
“So, can we say ‘skills’?”
As those whose unhappy lot in life it is to have to listen to me moaning on about matters educational will know, I’m not a big fan of the term ‘skills’. Or, more precisely, I’m not a big fan about how this term is often used. I’m even less keen when it’s preceded by […]
The Knowledge ‘versus’ Skills Debate, Part 1: forgetting what we know about knowledge.
One of the many poorly-framed, point-missing ‘debates’ that regularly plague contemporary education goes something like this: ‘should education be focused primarily on teaching knowledge, or on developing students’ skills?’ Even attempts to reconcile the (apparent) ‘knowledge .v. skills’ opposition with reasonable-sounding appeals to its being ‘a bit of both’ miss the main point – namely, […]
The Knowledge ‘versus’ Skills Debate, Part 2: What about ‘transferable skills’?
In the first part of this post, I discussed the need to develop more broad and inclusive understandings of knowledge and to move away from unhelpfully simplistic and reductive notions like ‘study skills’ which, it is wrongly assumed, stand somehow outside the realm of what we call ‘knowledge’. Here, I want to interrogate more closely […]
Using and Learning from Top Hat – a short post about our recent workshop
We recently put on a workshop ‘Using and Learning from Top Hat’. We found out about the problems and pitfalls of using Top Hat, but also how it can promote engagement, improve the experience of students and help lecturers to assess learning. Most importantly, we found out how planning for engagement fundamentally changes the way […]
Liven your lectures – engage your students with an active learning approach
Active learning is an umbrella term for learning and teaching methods which put the student in charge of their own learning through meaningful activities. They think about and apply what they are learning, in a deliberate contrast to passive learning. Research has shown that audience attention in lectures begins to wane every 10-20 […]
Enhancing our use of Blackboard – Ideas from the Bb Teaching and Learning Conference 2018
In this post I want to share some ideas from the Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference I attended in Manchester last week about how we can enhance our use of Blackboard . It was a very diverse conference with 264 participants from 22 different countries. Topics ranged from the potential of using large amounts […]
The unintended consequences of MOOCs
I attended the Research and Innovation in Distance Education and eLearning (RIDE) conference in March, and a session I found particularly interesting was a presentation by Stylianos Hatzipanagos and Alan Tait, from the University of London, about MOOCs and their unintentional consequences for learning and teaching. Numbers of MOOCs, and learners taking them, have been steadily growing over the past five […]
Tango for beginners
While waiting to be admitted to the room for their first ‘Tango for beginners’ class, participants chatted about their reasons for being there. Some were very keen to learn the dance and were genuinely enthused by what they believed lay ahead in the next couple of hours or so. Others had been ‘dragged’ along, more […]
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