We’re delighted to announce our keynote presentation for this year’s Mini Conference taking place online via Teams on 20 December 2022.
Dr Georgina Gough will be leading a session on embedding Sustainable Development Goals into the curriculum.
Dr Gough is Associate Professor in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) lead at UWE Bristol. She coordinates a cross university, award-winning knowledge exchange for sustainability education (KESE) and mentors academics to incorporate sustainability into their teaching, learning and professional practice. Georgina leads a long-term project mapping academic activity against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and is actively involved in city-level work to achieve the SDGs. She was on the expert panel which developed the HE sector guidance on ESD (Advance HE/ QAA, 2021) and works in partnership with colleagues, students and external stakeholders to embed sustainability across higher education and to share good practice both internally and externally. Georgina is programme leader for MSc Sustainable Development in Practice and teaches in geography- and business-based UG modules as well as contributing to cross-university sustainability modules and academic development initiatives.
Booking for the mini conference is currently open – reserve your place online. Our full programme will be announced shortly.
We at the LTEU want to say a big thank you to everyone who got involved and attended our annual learning and teaching conference.
If you didn’t manage to attend not to worry, we are pleased to announce that all of the recordings are now live on the Annual Learning and Teaching Conference programme page.
If you attended this year’s conference, we would love to hear your feedback, please fill in our Annual Learning & Teaching Conference 2022 Survey. We are beginning our preparations for our 11th Annual Learning & Teaching Conference and your feedback will help us make it the best one yet!
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.
Owing to the success of the format and the attendance, we’re looking to increase the number of academy forums on offer next academic year. If you’ve got a topic related to learning and teaching that you’d like to discuss with colleagues, then drop us an email (lteu@aber.ac.uk).
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.
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.
All the information that you need is on the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit webpages. We have recently worked intensively with academic colleagues to develop solutions in response to the Covid 19 pandemic. Our Supporting your Teaching webpages will help you with various teaching solutions.
We write a blog full of the latest updates, details on events and training sessions, and resources.
If you need to get in touch with us, you can do so using one of two email addresses:
lteu@aber.ac.uk (for pedagogical and design questions, or to arrange a consultation) or
As part of this year’s CPD programme, we hosted a number of external speakers who provided us with new perspectives and unique expertise in various aspects of learning and teaching. In preparation for the upcoming year, we would like to briefly remind you of some of the topics discussed and the resources available to you. We hope that by building on these and other sessions the Unit organised this year you will feel fully prepared to adapt and innovate your teaching in the upcoming year.
In the first mini-conference of the year, we had an opportunity to listen to Dr Naomi Winstor who argued 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 this mini-conference keynote speech attendees learnt about key elements of positive psychology in the context of higher education and practical strategies for enhancing their own wellbeing.
Kate Lister from Advance HE explored how to create effective digital communities that can support students’ sense of belonging and purpose, facilitate meaningful connections, and provide support without relying on a campus environment.
Dr Kate Exley was invited to deliver a workshop on moving our lectures, previously delivered in large lecture theatres and classrooms, to online platforms.
During our Mini-Fest on assessment, Dr Sally Brown and Dr Kay Sambell led a workshop designed to build on lessons learned during the complex transitions academics made last year and explore the concept of authentic approaches to assessments.
We invited Professor Mick Healey and Dr Ruth Healey to deliver a workshop on student-staff partnerships and consult them on engaging students in projects and provisions we currently deliver.
We also had an opportunity to listen to Andy McGregor from JISC on the future of assessment. A talk based on JISC’s paper: The future of assessment: five principles, five targets for 2025, which ‘sets five targets for the next five years to progress assessment towards being more authentic, accessible, appropriately automated and secure’.
Joe Probert and Izzy Whitley from Vevox, our university polling software, delivered a session on how to make effective use of polling to engage learners.
Places are limited so please book as soon as possible.
Session Overview:
Many colleagues have been involved in providing blended or on-line learning for many years but the Covid pandemic has meant that we have all needed to quickly provide much of our teaching and learning at a distance. This has involved moving our lectures, previously delivered in large lecture theatres and classrooms, to online platforms. The speed at which this huge change has happened has in itself caused significant challenges for staff and students alike. This blended workshop aims to provide some guidance, examples and a forum for colleagues to share their experiences and ideas for enhancing this provision.
This workshop is presented in two parts:
A set of 3 short videos will be made available on or before the 30th June 2021 and should be viewed independently before joining discussion forum – approximately 45 minutes independent study.
A discussion forum hosted via Teams on the 7th July, in which participants will have the opportunity to ask questions, share experiences and discuss the topic – lasting 1 hour.
By the end of the two hour, session you should be able to:
Consider the purpose of the on-line lecture in Covid times
Discuss a range of practical design issues when taking lectures on-line
Share experiences and ideas with colleagues ‘in the same boat’
Begin to plan your next steps & what you can implement from the workshop
This workshop is mapped primarily to A2, A5, K2, K3 on the UKPSF.
This conference is for anyone who is interested in multi-disciplinary academic research through the medium of Welsh. Scientists, humanists and sociologists from all over Wales and beyond are invited to share the results of their research and to meet other like-minded Welsh researchers.
The aim of the conference is to give the next generation of academics the opportunity to present their research to an audience of peers. It will also be an opportunity to network with Welsh-speaking researchers and to foster a wider community of academics who promote Welsh-medium provision in our universities.
Here is the full programme for the conference, which includes the conference schedule along with contributor biographies and abstracts.
