Category: Uncategorised

Weekly Resource Roundup – 16/6/2021

WordPress User [mhj] Resources and Webinars, Uncategorised, Weekly Resource Roundup Leave a comment

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.  

Annual Learning and Teaching Conference: Third external speaker – Dr Dyddgu Hywel

WordPress User [sil12] Annual Learning and Teaching Conference 2021, Annual Learning and Teaching Conference 2021, Conference, Uncategorised 1 Comment
Keynote announcement banner

We are delighted to announce our third external speaker to this year’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, Dr Dyddgu Hywel, senior lecturer in Education at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Dyddgu studied BSc (Hons) ‘Design and Technology Secondary Education leading to Qualified Teacher Status’ at Bangor University, where she graduated with first class honours. Her early career started as a Design and Technology A Level lecturer at Coleg Meirion Dwyfor, before being appointed as a Design and Technology teacher at Rhydywaun Comprehensive School.

She has now been working at Cardiff Metropolitan University for the past seven years, working as a senior lecturer in the School of Education, with expertise in innovative teaching, student engagement and health and well-being. Following 8 years of playing rugby for her country in the red shirt, she has adopted several effective ways of living healthily, maintaining a positive mindset, and mastering a work-life balance.

Dyddgu’s workshop will focus on prioritizing the health and well-being of staff. The workshop will benefit all academic staff at the university, to identify effective ways of protecting their personal health and well-being, as well as providing pastoral care for all students.

Workshop objectives:

  • An opportunity to reflect on your personal health and well-being
  • Consider the right balance between everyday life and work pressures
  • Identify the role of educators in student health and well-being
  • Identify personal stress management, attitude and positive thinking
  • Adopt time management and prioritization
  • Promote Welsh-language resources for effective relaxation and reflection

Dyddgu will be presenting online through the medium of Welsh and we will be providing simultaneous translation.

The ninth Annual Learning and Teaching Conference will be held online between Tuesday 29 June and Friday 2 July. You can book a place by completing this online form.

Weekly Resource Roundup – 2/6/2021

WordPress User [mhj] Resources and Webinars, Uncategorised, Weekly Resource Roundup Leave a comment

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

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.  

Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol: Online Research Conference (29 June 2021)

WordPress User [sil12] Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, Events and Networks, Uncategorised Leave a comment
CIRCULAR Funding Projects in Further Education Institutions from the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol's Strategic Development Fund

The Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol are hosting their Online Research Conference on 29 June 2021.

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.

You are welcome to register for the conference by completing this registration form.

Demystifying Assessment Criteria

WordPress User [lak22] Feedback, Marking, Uncategorised Leave a comment

Assessment Criteria serve a number of functions: to render the marking process transparent; to provide clarity about what is being assessed how; to ensure fairness across all submissions; and to provide quality assurance in terms of the subject benchmark statements. While all these reasons are valid and honourable, there are a number of issues at play:

  1. Staff have greater or lesser control of the assessment criteria they are asked to use in marking student work and interpretations of criteria may vary between different staff marking the same assessment.
  2. Assessment criteria are different from standards and the difference between the two must be clearly communicated to students (ie. what is being assessed versus how well a criterion has been met).
  3. Students are often assessment motivated (cf. Worth, 2014) and overemphasis of criteria or overly detailed assessment criteria can lead to a box ticking-type approach.
  4. Conversely, criteria that are too vague or too reliant on tacit subject knowledge can be mystifying and inaccessible to students, especially at the beginning of their degree.

This blog post will not pretend to solve all the issues surrounding assessment criteria but will offer a number of potential strategies staff and departments more widely may employ to demystify assessment criteria, and marking processes, for students. Thus, students become involved in a community of practice, rather than being treated as consumers (cf. Worth, 2014; Molesworth, Scullion & Nixon, 2011). Such activities can roughly be grouped chronologically in terms of happening before, during, or after an assessment.

Before

  • Use assessment criteria to identify goals and outcomes at the beginning of a module, with check-in points in the run up to a deadline.
  • Identify the difficulty in understanding marking criteria. Students are often used to very narrow definitions of success with clear statements that “earn” them points. Combined with a prevalent fear of failure, this can undermine their understanding of the criteria. Additionally, they may feel that they cannot judge their own abilities well in this new context (university). Group discussions not of what criteria mean, but what students understand them to mean, can help identify jargon that requires clarification, allow staff to explain their personal understanding (if they are the marker) and allow students to seek clarification before embarking on an assessment.
  • Highlight the difference between criteria and standards to students (the what and the how well – and how this is distinguished in your discipline).
  • Allocating time to a peer marking exercise using the provided criteria with subsequent group discussion will help students better understand the process.
  • Encouraging students to self mark their work pre-submission using the provided criteria will also help them better understand the process.
  • Using exemplars to illustrate both criteria and standards with concrete examples can be very helpful. This might involve students marking an exemplar in session, with subsequent discussion; annotated exemplars where students gain insights into the marking process; or live feedback sessions where students submit extracts of their work-in-progress that are used (anonymised) to show the whole group the marking process. This then allows for questions and clarification on the judgements a marker makes when working through a submission. Staff may worry that students consider exemplars as “the only right way” to respond to an assessment brief – providing a range of exemplars, especially good ones, can counteract this tendency. Different types of exemplars can be used:
    • ‘Real’ assignments may be best for their inherent complexity (so long as students whose work is used consent to this use and their work is properly anonymised).
    • Constructed exemplars may make assessment qualities more visible.
    • Constructed excerpts (rather than full-length pieces) may be more appropriate when students first learn to look for criteria and how they translate into work as well as allay staff concerns about plagiarism.

During

  • Use the same language: making the links between assessment criteria, subject standards, and university standards clear through using the same terminology in feedback as appears in assessment criteria and subject benchmark statements.
  • Where multiple markers engage with different groups of students on the same assessment, having exemplars to refer to can help ensure clear standards across larger cohorts.

After

  • Refer students back to the assessment criteria and preceding discussions thereof when they engage with feedback and marks.
  • Reiterate the difference between criteria and standards.

Simply providing students with access to assessment criteria is not enough. It is essential that staff identify and clarify the distinction between criteria and standards and demystify the language of assessment criteria by examining tacit subject knowledge staff possess by virtue of experience. Using exemplars and group discussion of these in concretising how criteria and standards translate into a submission will provide students with insights into the marking process that enables them to better understand what they are being asked to do. Lastly, staff should repeatedly encourage students to make use of the availability of assessment criteria while they work on their assessments, which should enable students to feel better prepared and more focussed in their responses.

References:

Molesworth, M., Scullion, R., and Nixon, E. (eds.) (2011) The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer, London: Routledge

Worth, N. (2014) ‘Student-focused Assessment Criteria: Thinking Through Best Practice’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 38:3, pp. 361-372; DOI: 10.1080/03098265.2014.919441

Final Academy Forum session of the year

WordPress User [aeu] Uncategorised Leave a comment

We would like to invite you to the final Academy Forum session of the year taking place on 24th of May.  

This session will be an opportunity for us to look back on this year’s Academy Forum programme, designed specifically to support staff in teaching in different ways in a response to the pandemic and reflect on what we can take forward.  

Topics we covered this year were: 

  • Creating a Learning and Teaching Community 
  • Creating Podcasts in Panopto 
  • Why and how to help students reflect on their learning 
  • Motivation Strategies for Online Learning Engagement 
  • How can I plan online and in-person activities? 
  • How can I make my teaching more inclusive? 
  • How can I embed wellbeing into the curriculum? 
  • Preparing students for assessments 

We hope that you will be able to join us.  

Book on the session 

Weekly Resource Roundup – 9/5/2021

WordPress User [mhj] Uncategorised Leave a comment

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.   

NOTE: Oxford Centre for Staff Learning and Development (OCSLD) at Oxford Brookes University, “Publishing opportunity for HE students and educators on improving student engagement”

I recommend following the University of Birmingham HEFi Twitter account. It is a good source of pedagogical literature and micro-CPD.

Online events and webinars

Resources and publications

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 – 28/4/2021

WordPress User [mhj] Resources and Webinars, Training and Support, Uncategorised, Weekly Resource Roundup Leave a comment

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

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 – 20/4/2021

WordPress User [mhj] Resources and Webinars, Training and Support, Uncategorised, Weekly Resource Roundup Leave a comment

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

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 – 8/3/2021

WordPress User [mhj] Resources and Webinars, Uncategorised, Weekly Resource Roundup Leave a comment

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. 

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.