Weekly Resource Roundup – 20/12/2022

As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery. 

Online events and webinars

Resources and publications

Other

  • Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinars free open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity
  • Subscribe to SEDA’s mailing list for email discussions about educational development and emerging teaching practices. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
  • Follow University of Birmingham’s Higher Education Futures institute HEFi on Twitter for daily posts with links to pedagogical literature and more. This is one of the sources I use when identifying useful material for the Roundup.
  • Join the #LTHEchat on Twitter Wednesday nights for one hour of lively discussion about learning and teaching in HE. I often find out about good resources for the Roundup from the chat.
  • Call for papers due 23/1/2023, AHE, International Assessment in Higher Education (AHE) Conference (in-person, Manchester)
  • Call for papers due 27/1/2023, Oxford Brookes University, International Teaching and Learning Conference: Pedagogies of possibility: tales of transformation and hope
  • Call for papers due 29/1/2023, University of Lincoln Digital Education Team, DigiEd: Horizons
  • Call for participation due 31/1/2023, Association for Learning Design & Education for Sustainable Development, Learning Design and ESD Bootcamp 2023

Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.

Weekly Resource Roundup – 13/12/2022

As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery. 

Online events and webinars

Resources and publications

Other

Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.

Academy Forums 2023

Thank you to all who have attended Academy Forums in Semester 1. We’ve had some great discussions around wellbeing in the curriculum, student induction activities, how students are using technology at Aberystwyth University, and Digital Capabilities (Part 1).

All our handouts from our Academy Forums are available on our webpages.

You can now book your place on our Academy Forums for Semester 2.

  • 24 January, 14:00-15:30: Academy Forum 5: Strategies for Feedback Engagement (In-person, E3)
  • 16 February, 10:00-11:30: Academy Forum 6: Using Technology for Reflective Activities (Online)
  • 6 March, 10:00-11:30, Academy Forum 7: Designing Group Assessment using Technology (Online)
  • 19 April, 10:00-11:30, Academy Forum 8: Digital Capabilities (Part 2) (Online)
  • 17 May, 14:00-16:00, Academy Forum 9: Equality and Diversity in the Curriculum (In-person, E3)

If you have any questions, then please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (lteu@aber.ac.uk).

Mini Conference Programme Announced

Accessibility icons showing 3 images: a checklist, a computer workstation, an image

On Tuesday 20 December, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit will be hosting an Academy Mini-Conference online.

The theme is ‘Sustainability in Higher Education’.

The Mini-Conference will run from 10:15-14:15.

We’re excited to confirm our programme:

  • Dr Georgina Gough – keynote speaker Embedding Sustainability Goals across the Curriculum
  • Marian Gray: Student Mobility and Cross-Cultural Skills – Global and Sustainable?
  • Dr Louise Marshall – Discipline hopping: Interdisciplinary approaches to a sustainable curriculum

For session abstracts and timings, please see the programme on our webpages.

We hope that you will be able to join us. You can register to attend the Mini-Conference by clicking on this link. If you have any queries, please email lteu@aber.ac.uk.

Weekly Resource Roundup – 6/12/2022

As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery. 

Online events and webinars

Resources and publications

Other

Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.

Reflecting on the #WeeklyResourceRoundup

As we prepare for the next intake of PGCTHE participants in January, I am taking a moment to reflect on the Weekly Resource Roundup. It is hard to believe that the first Roundup post was 10th June 2020, two and a half years ago!

I started the Roundup because my students needed it.

I run the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education (PGCTHE), a 60-credit Masters-level study scheme. My students are new teaching staff. As the pandemic took hold, our in-person training sessions were cancelled and my students struggled to find enough training opportunities to meet our module CPD requirements. They also struggled to find effective ways of teaching under challenging pandemic conditions. It is my habit to scan the Higher Education sector and I noticed that many organisations were offering free online opportunities that would help meet my students’ learning goals.

I decided to curate a regular list of external events and online resources as they came to my attention. Giving credit where credit is due, I have to say that I wasn’t sure what to call it at first, so when our team manager Kate Wright suggested the word ’roundup’ to describe it, I went with that. Thanks Kate!

Everything in the Roundup has been vetted by me personally. If I come across a new webinar, podcast, blog, or publication, I check it out first to see if it is authoritative and has potential to help staff develop their teaching. Where do I find such material? I subscribe to various mailing lists and follow a wide range of educators and learning and teaching networks on social media. I pro-actively search for material on certain themes. I pay attention to emerging topics in the sector and explore to find out more about them. This is a core part of my professional activity as a lecturer in the teaching and scholarship category. I do this scanning and vetting all throughout the week and then post the best items to the Roundup every 7-10 days.

Based on the initial response, it became clear that the Roundup was not only useful for PGCTHE participants but also general teaching staff and others outside of the university. I take an active role in several communities of practice on Twitter and elsewhere, participating in online discussions and events. It was natural for me to promote the Roundup through those channels using the hashtag #WeeklyResourceRoundup. It gained further momentum and now has global reach as evidenced both in the response on Twitter and statistics on Roundup posts in the LTEU blog.

Curating the Roundup is, of course, a way for me to learn and develop my own practice as well as share good practice with others. I value the communities of practice and the people I have met by doing this. I’m grateful for their generosity and pleased to amplify their voices. Curation and sharing, contribution and development, are all central to who I am as a professional educator. I derive great personal and professional satisfaction, both from the Roundup itself and from communicating with others. I hope the Roundup serves as a bridge connecting people who have shared interests in helping students learn, wherever you may be.

Curating and sharing the Roundup is my contribution to these valued communities.

In short, it is a labour of love, from me to you.