The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit are excited to announce the date for the 9th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. The conference will be taking place between Wednesday 30th June and Friday 2nd July 2021.
Look out for Calls for Proposals and the announcement of the conference theme later this month. As usual, we will be updating our Learning and Teaching Conference Webpages and also our blog to keep you up-to-date with how things are progressing.
On Wednesday 16th December, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit will host their next Mini Conference.
We are delighted to announce that Dr Naomi Winstone from University of Surrey will be giving a presentation:
Even the highest-quality feedback on students’ work will not have an impact on their development unless students actively engage with and implement the advice. The literature, alongside anecdotal reports of educators, often paint a negative picture of students’ willingness to read and enact feedback. My recent programme of research has focused on students’ cognitive, motivational, and emotional landscapes and how they influence the ways in which students receive, process, and implement feedback on their work. In this talk, I will argue that maximising students’ engagement with feedback is fundamentally an issue of design, where opportunities for students to develop the skills required for effective use of feedback, and opportunities to apply feedback, can transform the role of students in assessment. In particular, I will share a toolkit of resources that we developed in partnership with students to support the development of feedback ‘recipience skills’. Through this approach, I demonstrate how the responsibility for ensuring that feedback has high impact can, and should, be shared between educators and students.
You may notice some changes to Blackboard labels whilst we update our language pack tomorrow morning (Tuesday 10.11.2020).
This will affect menu items and My Modules. Blackboard functionality and access will remain during this time and you will still be able to create content, access materials, and submit assignments. This work is scheduled to take place as part of Information Services’ Tuesday morning maintenance: https://faqs.aber.ac.uk/94.
In this blogpost, we’ll be looking at some tips for monitoring a Teams chat when you’ve also got attendees joining in person and online.
The planning of the synchronous activity and what you want your students to be able to do after they have engaged with the activity shapes the purpose of the chat. Ask yourself: what role do you want the chat to have in your teaching session?
For example, do you want the chat to be used for students joining online to communicate their ideas with you? Do you want it to be used for them to chat with each other? Do you want the chat contributions to be communicated with those joining in person?
In addition to that, you want to think about how you are asking your online students to engage in the session. Do you want them, for example, to use the raise the hand function to attract your attention? Or, do you want them to only use the chat.
This blogpost is intended to take you through various scenarios that you may wish to use in Teaching Rooms. If you have any questions, please email is@aber.ac.uk.
The following changes have been made to teaching rooms:
If you are in a teaching room and require technical assistance, pick up the phone and wait. It will automatically dial through to Technical Support.
Before the session we advise you to:
Setting up sessions through MS Teams:For any technical assistance with using MS Teams or any of the E-learning tools, please email elearning@aber.ac.uk. If you wish to discuss any aspect of learning and teaching, please email lteu@aber.ac.uk.
We would like to provide you with an overview of recent developments and support materials that we have worked on for the past few months.
This information is also available at: https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/is/it-services/elearning/continuity/
All teaching sessions held in MS Teams should be scheduled in Blackboard. This includes timetabled online activities.
Setting up a meeting: https://faqs.aber.ac.uk/3067
Information for students: https://faqs.aber.ac.uk/3061
There are privacy concerns which need to be considered when recording a meeting in MS Teams.
Further information: Guidance on recording seminars and Teams activities
Information about using teaching rooms this academic year, including how to use MS Teams in an in-person teaching session is available at Teaching Room Guide 2020-21
Supporting your Learning resources for students are now available at https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/important-info/living-and-learning-in-aberystwyth-2020-21/students/supporting-your-learning/. We will add to this page during the semester as things change or we approach key points for students.
We’re looking forward to this year’s Learning and Teaching Conference which is just under a month away, 7-9th September 2020.
As you may have read, this year’s Conference will be taking place online via Teams so you can join us for as much or as little of the conference as you wish.
You can download the full programme and book your place online.
We’re grateful to have a number of external speakers this year. Our keynote, Professor Ale Armellini, will be talking about embedding active blended learning into all courses at the University of Northampton. You can read more about this project on the University of Northampton’s webpage.
In addition to Professor Armellini, we also have Dr Kate Lister from the Open University who will be talking about embedding wellbeing into the curriculum. In addition to her presentation, Kate will also be offering a drop-in session where colleagues can ask specific questions about the wellbeing strategy.
Registration for the eighth annual Learning and Teaching conference is open. This year’s Learning and Teaching conference has the theme Enhancing the Curriculum: Inspire Learning and Invigorate Teaching! and will be taking place online between Monday 7th and Wednesday 9th September 2020.
You can register for the conference by filling in this online form.
This year, we’ve got an exciting and varied programme with activities, workshops and presentations demonstrating the innovative teaching practices that are taking place across the University. A draft copy of the programme is available on our webpages.
If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
We have updated the RMP to respond to the Covid-19 situation. The new RMP contains items that will help support students with their online learning. It has been developed by the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Group (LTEU) with significant input from sub-groups of the Learning and Teaching Scenario Planning Group (LTSPG).
All new or altered items are highlighted in bold in the new RMP. They represent some good practice currently in place around AU as well as responding to some of the queries received by the LTEU from staff and students during the Covid-19 crisis. Some highlights include:
The IBERS Distance Learning modules make use of an induction folder (known as Unit 0). This introduces all students to a range of activities which must be completed to ensure that students are able to successfully study online. We recommend this approach for modules in the coming year. The types of activities you may want to include will vary between modules and will depend on what tools and approaches you are using in the module. Some examples may be:
If you need any help or support with the new RMP, please email elearning@aber.ac.uk