{"id":224,"date":"2014-07-11T10:36:31","date_gmt":"2014-07-11T10:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/?p=224"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:24:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:24:00","slug":"hea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/2014\/07\/11\/hea\/","title":{"rendered":"Some reflections on HEA annual conference – with links and resources"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Thinking\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m going to divert away from learning outcomes for this particular post to offer some reflections after attending the Higher Education Academy’s (HEA) annual conference last week.<\/p>\n

Overall, I found this two-day conference a really valuable and stimulating experience.\u00a0 The keynote speakers were particularly impressive.\u00a0 The conference opened with a keynote speech from Anne Morrison, Director, BBC Academy<\/a>.\u00a0 She offered a rich and unique perspective of what the BBC, as an employer, is looking for in its entry graduates, but also what learning opportunities the BBC can offer to students and HE institutions too.\u00a0 The emphasis in this speech was on employers working with HE too and\u00a0not just HE providing what employers are looking for, which I found really refreshing.\u00a0 Too often now it can seem, especially\u00a0from the media, that HE’s only job is to ‘produce’ employable graduates that meet the needs and expectations of employers – in other words, that the onus of responsibility is all one-way.\u00a0 Anne Morrison, on the other hand, strongly conveyed a two-way\u00a0focus in which HE institutions and employers work together not only to ensure students finish their degrees with the skills employers are looking for, but also for employers to input ideas and\/or learning opportunities into the curriculum too.\u00a0 Critically, Anne Morrison reinforced that this working relationship needs to support vocational and<\/em> academic purposes – that one is not more important than the other and that employers should be just as concerned with developing their students academic, as well as job-related,\u00a0skills.<\/p>\n

The keynote speech on the second day was given by Professor Shirley Alexander, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Teaching, Learning and Equity) at the University of Technology, Sydney.\u00a0 This speech was also inspiring for different reasons.\u00a0 She spoke about the creative and innovative learning spaces being created at the University of Technology, Sydney.\u00a0 Whilst she was fortunate to have a very substantial budget, I left her keynote encouraged to look and think creatively about the teaching and learning spaces we have and the uses they could be put to (click here to view her keynote presentation slides<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"Team\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As well as the keynotes, I attended a variety of useful sessions over the two days.\u00a0 One particular session explored students as partners and was run by the authors of the HEA report ‘Engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education’.<\/em><\/a> Another was a workshop in which Simon Tweddell, Alison Hartley and Josie Fraser from the University of Bradford demonstrated Team-Based Learning.\u00a0 I had not come across this\u00a0method before but I was very impressed with the potential it has to facilitate deep and meaningful engagement from students in class (an overview of\u00a0TBL\u00a0can be found here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

As much as I did enjoy the conference, there were certain aspects that left me a bit disatisfied or unfulfilled.\u00a0 These feelings are not really a reflection of the quality of the conference or the sessions that were run.\u00a0 They are more evidence that some topics are so large and complex that they perhaps cannot be succintly summarised in 20 minutes or even an hour.\u00a0 These include the students-as-partners\u00a0concept and technology within education.\u00a0 I will perhaps just have a bit of a rant about the latter one.\u00a0 It often feels to me that discussions about mobile technology in learning are presented in ideal terms, i.e. mobile devices enhance learning and all\u00a0students should be using them in class and\u00a0you, as the teacher, are effectively crazy if you’re not letting this happen.\u00a0 But there is\u00a0usually no accompanying\u00a0discussion about what can often be a reality\u00a0with mobile devices in class, i.e.\u00a0students on facebook, or texting\u00a0or doing \u2018distracting\u2019 activities that\u00a0are not related to the session.\u00a0 I would really appreciate for this to be acknowledged that sometimes (perhaps often) students will not behave in ideal ways and will use their mobile devices in class\u00a0for non-learning or work related activities.\u00a0 And I want it to be acknowledged just so that we can\u00a0have meaningful discussions about how to address it.<\/p>\n

\"Mobile<\/a><\/p>\n

I know a most common response here would be\u00a0\u2018make your session\/activities interesting to engage all of your students\u2019 and of course I agree with this – this is always at the\u00a0core of my planning and I certainly do not try to plan a boring session or activity.\u00a0\u00a0But the reality is that you\u2019re not going to hold the attention of all your students in every class 100% of the time.\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes the content you need them to cover is not the most thrilling, no matter what activities you design.\u00a0\u00a0So I would value discussions about how to engage with students to make them see their responsibilities with the use of technology in classrooms.\u00a0 I always feel a failure when speakers\/presenters talk about mobile devices in classrooms because they always make it seem that these issues do not occur.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I am just not knowledgeable enough about how to effectively use the vast array of learning technologies out there and how to help students get the best out of them for their learning.\u00a0 I just know that I would find discussion about some of these practical issues as useful as presentations about what technologies to use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m going to divert away from learning outcomes for this particular post to offer some reflections after attending the Higher Education Academy’s (HEA) annual conference last week. Overall, I found this two-day conference a really valuable and stimulating experience.\u00a0 The keynote speakers were particularly impressive.\u00a0 The conference opened with a keynote speech from Anne Morrison, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":226,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conferences","tag-conferences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":240,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions\/240"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}