Ten things you can do to your module… without filling in a form
It’s late in the Autumn semester, with the curriculum change period looming, and many of you will be digging out old module forms, and working out what you need to change over the next couple of years. But put down those pens / close down Word! You might be surprised to know that you can […]
How video can support active learning
I recently attended the Panopto EMEA Annual Conference in London. This conference provides an opportunity for sharing best practice and to learn about latest developments in using video for learning and teaching. The theme this year was ‘Your video learning ecosystem’ and the agenda covered how academics are using video to enhance their students’ […]
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 […]
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 […]
Supporting student learning: the limits of genericism
‘Learning in higher education involves adapting to new ways of knowing: new ways of understanding, interpreting and organising knowledge. Academic literacy practices… constitute central processes through which students learn new subjects and develop their knowledge about new areas of study. A practices approach to literacy takes account of the cultural and contextual component of writing […]
Implementing lecture capture event 11 Sep 2017 – Pedagogy, Practice and Policy discussions
As part of the ‘Implementing lecture capture – what are we learning‘ event on Monday 11 September 2017, we held discussions on the theme of Pedagogy, Practice and Policy. The Pedagogy, Practice and Policy discussions started by considering institutional policy and whether the use of lecture capture is on an opt-in or opt-out basis. […]
An Academic Literacies Approach to Digital Literacies
This is an account of my initial attempt to find learning theory to underpin and inform the development of our Digital Literacies framework and its implementation, as part of the LLI’s involvement in the university’s Digital Campus strategy. I drew upon literacies research and on the conclusions from my own MSc research into the […]
Recent Comments