Registration for the tenth annual Learning and Teaching conference is now open. This year’s Learning and Teaching conference has the theme Designing the Teaching of Tomorrow: Innovation, Enhancement, and Excellence and will be taking place between Monday 12 September and Wednesday 14 September 2022.
As May starts to approach, we thought it would be useful to outline the support available for the Component Marks Transfer process. This process transfers marks from the Blackboard Grade Centre columns into AStRA’s Assessment marks per Module (STF080) page.
The tool is available in each Blackboard module and also in the Component Marks tool in MyAdmin. Departmental Administrative Staff are able to view and transfer modules for each module in their department whereas Module Co-ordinators are able to view and transfer marks for their modules.
To support the Component Marks Transfer process, we have:
Dr Laura Stephenson, from the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, has been awarded the Exemplary Course Award for the module TFM0120: Gender and Media Production.
In addition to the winner, the following modules achieved Highly Commended:
Dr Andrew Filmer from the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies for the module TP33420: Performance and Architecture
Dr Maire Gorman from the Graduate School and Physics for the module PGM4310: Quantitative Data Collection and Analysis
Claire Ward from Lifelong Learning for the module XA01605: Natural History Illustration: Seed Heads
The diverse range of teaching and learning styles evidenced in this year’s applications reflects the innovative work that is taking place across the institution.
The aim of the Exemplary Course Award, now in its seventh year, aims to recognise the very best learning and teaching practices. It gives staff members the opportunity to share their work with colleagues, enhance their current modules in Blackboard, and receive feedback on to improve.
Modules are assessed across 4 areas: course design, interaction and collaboration, assessment, and learner support. The self-assessed nature of the award gives staff the opportunity to reflect on their course and enhance aspects of their module before a panel assesses each application against the rubric.
The panel and the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit would like to thank all of the applicants for the time and effort that they have put into their applications and modules this year.
We’re looking forward to receiving more applications next year and many congratulations to the recipients of this year’s award.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce its next External Speaker Event.
On 20 May 2022 12:30-13:30, Dr Mary Davies, Principal Lecturer in the Business School at Oxford Brookes University, and colleagues will be running a workshop on their interactive red flag checklist resource Contract Cheating Detection for Markers.
Dr Davies will be joined by Stephen Bunbury, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Westminster, Anna Krajewska, Director of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Bloomsbury Institute, and Dr Matthew Jones, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Greenwich.
This workshop is designed to help staff participants detect potential contract cheating when marking. The presenters belong to the London and South East Academic Integrity Network Contract Cheating Working Group who put together an interactive ‘red flag’ checklist resource Contract Cheating Detection for Markers.
In the workshop, the presenters will explain the red flags that indicate possible contract cheating, through discussing sections of the checklist: text analysis, referencing and the use of sources, Turnitin similarity and text matching, document properties, the writing process, comparison with students’ previous work, and comparison to cohort. Participants will be provided with opportunities to practise using the checklist and to discuss effective ways to help them identify potential contract cheating in student work.
Resources from previous External Speaker events can be found on our blog.
The workshop will take place online using Microsoft Teams. Book your place online.
Please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit if you have any questions (lteu@aber.ac.uk).
On Friday 11 March, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit hosted Dr Rob Nash, a Reader in Psychology from Aston University. Rob is an expert in feedback and ran a workshop looking explicitly at ways in which we can enhance and develop feedback engagement.
A recording of the transmission elements of the session is available on Panopto. You can also view the slides that he used.
For those of you who are interested in further exploring the terrain of feedback, you can take a look at the references that Rob used in his session:
Our next External Speaker event is Dr Mary Davies from Oxford Brookes who’ll be joined by other colleagues to discuss how we can detect potential contract cheating during the marking process. This workshop will be on 20 May 2022, 12:30-13:30. Booking for the session is already open.
Designing the Teaching of Tomorrow: Innovation, Enhancement, and Excellence
Celebrating 10 years of Aberystwyth University’s Learning and Teaching Conferences
aims to reflect the commitment that AU staff have to enhance the student learning experience.
The main strands of this year’s conference are:
Inclusive and sustainable pedagogies
Assessment validity, authentic assessment, and feedback engagement
Scaffolding skills across the curriculum and beyond
Developing a Bilingual University community
Working with students as partners to design learning
Active learning in today’s higher education landscape
Staff, postgraduate teaching assistants, and students are welcome to propose sessions on any topic relating to learning and teaching, especially those that focus on the incorporation and use of technology. Even if your suggestion doesn’t fit a particular strand, other topics are welcome.
We seek to encourage presenters to consider using alternative formats that reflect and suit the content of their sessions. As such, we are not specifying a standardised presentation format.
Please complete this form no later than 27 May 2022.
If you have any questions, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit at lteu@aber.ac.uk.
On 21 March Vevox, the University’s polling software, will be having an update with some additional functionality.
We’re really pleased to be able to see some of the developments as they are requests that we have placed to Vevox on behalf of you.
Firstly, for distance learning practitioners and those who want students to undertake self-paced polling, there’s the introduction of self-paced quizzes to the survey tool.
You’ll just need to create a survey and then add a correct answer. Students can do this anonymously or you can choose to identify them.
The Q and A boards are still underused a little here at AU, but there will be the option to tag questions and comments. Will be useful for those of you who are co-delivering a presentation and want to allocate specific questions to a presenter.
Further information on new Vevox functionality can be found on their update blogpost.
We have regular contact with our Vevox account managers. They’ve already assisted in creating bilingual aspects and have reached out to us for further discussion on how this could be developed further. Also, some enhancement requests that we’ve asked for include:
Vevox is not limited to learning and teaching activities. All members of the University can log in and use Vevox. If you’re running a meeting and want to poll attendees, then Vevox could be for you. Check out their recent case studies on how to make meetings interactive with Vevox.
If Vevox is new to you, then we’ve got guidance on our webpages. Vevox runs 15 minute training sessions – sign up online. We’re always up to hear about anything innovative you’re doing with Vevox so drop us a line if you’re doing something exciting.
A suite of online training sessions on the 5th and 12th April has been added to the LTEU pages for staff working within supervisory roles. Staff are welcome to attend as many sessions in suite as they wish depending on availability: each session is independent.
The workshop will take place online via Teams. A link will be sent to you before the event.
Please see below for the session description and speaker biography.
Session Description
Why don’t they listen to my feedback?
Most people prefer to perform well than to perform badly, and one of the primary aims of giving feedback to students is to help them improve their performance. So why do our students so often ignore, resist, and reject the feedback we give them, and what can we do about it? To set the scene for this workshop, we will first consider the extent to which these problems are unique to students. In particular, I will share some insights from diverse domains of social psychology that shed light on the very human motives behind avoiding feedback. With these insights in mind, we will go on to explore the perceived and actual barriers that limit students’ effective engagement with their feedback. We will contemplate practical ways by which we, as educators, might play a role in breaking down these barriers. Throughout these discussions, sustainability is key: with academic workloads spiralling ever higher, our fixes cannot involve us always giving more feedback, quicker feedback, and fancier feedback. I will share my own mixed experiences of trying to implement into my own teaching practice what I’ve learned from almost a decade of working on these problems.
Speaker Biography
Dr Rob Nash is a Reader in Psychology at Aston University, where he is currently Director of Undergraduate Learning & Teaching for the School of Psychology. A experimental psychologist, Rob’s primary expertise is in human memory, particularly the ways in which memories become biased, distorted, and fabricated. However, he also conducts and publishes research on the topic of feedback in education, with an emphasis on how people respond and react when given feedback. Rob is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Associate Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Legal & Criminological Psychology, and co-author of the Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (Higher Education Academy, 2016).
If you’ve got any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us (lteu@aber.ac.uk).
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce the theme and strands for this year’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference.
Save the Date: this year’s conference will take place between 12th and 14th September 2022. It’s hoped that we will see the return of some face-to-face elements that we’ve enjoyed in the past.
This year’s conference theme is:
Designing the Teaching of Tomorrow: Innovation, Enhancement, and Excellence
Celebrating 10 years of Aberystwyth University’s Learning and Teaching Conferences
With the following strands:
Inclusive and sustainable pedagogies
Assessment validity, authentic assessment, and feedback engagement
Scaffolding skills across the curriculum and beyond
Developing a Bilingual University community
Working with students as partners to design learning
Active learning in today’s higher education landscape
We can’t believe that it’s our tenth annual conference, with the first one starting in 2013. We’ll have lots of highlights from the past ten years. Ahead of the conference, we’ll be making our archive of materials available so look out for those.
Save the date and look out for the forthcoming call for proposals, guest speakers, and booking announcements on our blog and webpages.
