We’re the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit. Based in Information Services, we work with staff across the university to support and develop learning and teaching. We run a wide range of activities to do this.
We’re really excited to announce our forthcoming Academy Forums for 2022-23. Building on the success of last year’s sessions, and based on feedback, we’ve increased the number of Academy Forums on offer, with 10 running across the academic year.
For those of you unfamiliar with Academy Forums, they’re informal discussions that bring colleagues together from across the University. In each session, we’ll look at a particular topic related to Learning and Teaching. We’ll facilitate the discussion and also provide resources and guidance following the Academy Forum. We then make these available on our webpages. Take a look at last year’s Academy Forum topics:
We’ll be starting our Academy Forums with a discussion around Student Induction. We’ll be thinking about how you prepare students to study. What types of activities do you run in week 1 of your module to familarise your students with the content? Also, we’ll be asking colleagues to share with us how you might use technology in these interactions.
We are looking forward to welcoming you to the 10th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, which is just over a month away, 12-14 September.
This year’s conference theme, 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 and recognise a decade of conferences.
We’re pleased to confirm ourfull programme. We will have 2 online days (Monday 12 and Wednesday 14 September) and 1 in person day (Tuesday 13 September).
You can register for the conference by completing this online form.
We’re very excited to welcome three external speakers this year:
This year’s keynote speaker is presented by Kyra Araneta, Jennifer Fraser, and Moonisah Usman from the University of Westminster. They will be looking specifically at socially just staff and student partnership work.
Our second external speaker, Alex Hope, will be looking at meaningful ways in which we can embed sustainability across our curricula.
We’re delighted to welcome back our colleague, Ania Udalowska, to run a session on the Digital Learning Champions project they are running at the University of Arts London.
We have an exciting and varied programme this year with representatives from all faculties. In addition to our external speakers, we’ve got some great topics being presented by colleagues:
Round table on developing students’ digital capabilities with colleagues from Business, Psychology and Education
Academic integrity in a post-Covid landscape
Student engagement strategies
Authentic assessments
Translanguaging within a bilingual context
We look forward to seeing you at the conference, and please remember to register for the conference by completing this online form.
Now that the 2022-23 modules are available to staff, we can link them together at the module co-ordinator’s request. This process is known as parent-childing. Linking modules together is an effective way of dealing with separate modules with the same content so you don’t have to upload materials to two or more different modules.
This process makes one module the parent, whilst the other module(s) become a child. There’s no limit on how many modules you make a child but there can only be one parent.
If you’d like to parent-child your modules, and you’re the module co-coordinator, contact elearning@aber.ac.uk with the module codes for the parent and child modules.
Examples from Aberystwyth
Many members of staff are currently using parent-child modules across the institution. Some examples are:
Modules are taught the same content but there’s a module available for different years
Modules that bring together different degree schemes and have different module IDs, for example dissertation modules
Essentially, any module that shares the same content is ideal for parent-childing.
This year marks the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit’s 10th year of organising the annual learning and teaching conference. To celebrate, we’ve made all of our materials from our previous conferences available on our conference webpage.
We’ve also been looking over our stats and brought together a number of facts for you.
Since the first conference in 2013, we have had:
Over 400 different members of staff and students from Aberystwyth University present at the conference
Over 1000 attendees
Most sessions by Department:
Our top 10 academic departments presenting at the conference are:
IBERS with 41 sessions
Education with 28 sessions
Lifelong Learning with 26 sessions
Psychology with 21 sessions
Computer Science with 18 sessions
Aberystwyth Business School with 17 sessions
International Politics with 14 sessions
Physics with 13 sessions
Geography and Earth Sciences with 12 sessions
Law and Criminology with 11 sessions
Most sessions by a presenter
We’ve got a tie for first place with the greatest number of sessions run by an academic member of staff. With a total of 8 sessions, we have Education’s Steve Atherton, Psychology’s Antonia Ivaldi and Gareth Norris. Tied in fourth place, with 7 sessions, we have IBERS’ Basil Wolf and Physics and the Graduate School’s Maire Gorman. Big well done to them.
We’re really looking forward to the next 10 years of conferences. We hope you can make the conference between 12 and 14 September with a mixture of online and in-person sessions. Book your place online.
Modules for the academic year 2022-2023 are now available for staff teaching on modules. This is in order to assist staff in preparing for the new academic year.
You may have noticed that a new tab has appeared on the top menu of your Blackboard screen:
If you’re enrolled as a staff member on the module in Astra then you should be able to view your modules for next academic year. If you’re not able to see a module that you are enrolled on then contact your Departmental Administrator. Students won’t be enrolled on the module until registration is complete.
If you have any queries regarding Course Copy, or need further assistance, please email elearning@aber.ac.uk.
We are pleased to announce this year’s annual learning and teaching conference keynote (12-14 September 2022).
Kyra Araneta, Jennifer Fraser, and Moonisah Usman from the University of Westminster will be joining us virtually for their keynote speech, Navigating power lines: Developing principles and practices to support socially just student : staff partnerships.
In this keynote Kyra, Jennifer, and Moonisah will be discussing their successful staff-student partnership projects.
Session Abstract
For many of us universities and classrooms are sites of possibility (hooks, 1994) that we invest with hopes for different futures for students and ourselves. They are also sites of tension as we navigate complex relationships and power dynamics. How we live education for liberation has become even more pressing in recent years with mobilisations for Black Lives Matter and calls to decolonise universities. In Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances Aimee Carrillo Rowe asks ‘How do we build power lines that connect us to others in, through, and for justice?’ (2008, p. 2). Our keynote engages with this question to explore how we develop principles and practices to support socially just student : staff partnership relationships. We argue that, if designed for social justice, partnerships can create anti-racist and decolonial atmospheres (Bell, 2018) that become sites of possibility. Using examples from our work at the University of Westminster we engage with the intersections of power, allyship, social justice and partnership to consider strategies for building programmes that centre transformative relationships. We share examples of how we have built relationships, co-created programme values and enacted these in partnership projects. To illustrate how we can build partnerships with power lines that connect us for social justice we will use the example of the Pedagogies for Social Justice Project (https://blog.westminster.ac.uk/psj/). This project is committed to centring student voices in its values, beliefs and experiences and in using these to dismantle contemporary forms of coloniality in curricula, relationships and research. We argue that partnerships are pivotal to this work as they co-produce knowledge; develop new and critical ways of understanding disciplines; and undertake sustained collaboration, experimentation and dialogue. Understanding that these are challenging and complex processes, we offer this keynote as a step in your University’s and your own journeys toward creating socially just pedagogical spaces for students and staff.
Towards the end of July we will start to create Blackboard modules for 2022-23.
Unlike previous years, there will be no existing courses created blank. This decision was made at the recent Academic Board.
Course content and files will be copied over from the version of the module in the previous academic year. Turnitin submission points, Panopto recordings, and interactive Blackboard activities are not included in the copy; these will need to be rebuilt. We’ve got lots of FAQs to assist staff with this.
If you are running a new module then these will be created using your pre-agreed Departmental Templates. Similarly, if you are running a module that hasn’t run in the past couple of years then these will also be created blank.
If you have any questions about this process, please contact us (elearning@aber.ac.uk). Once the modules have been created, we will let you know.
