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.
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
On-goingLTHEchat, a weekly Twitter chat about learning and teaching in higher education
5/4/2022 CRADLE seminar series, Developing Feedback Literacy: Case Studies from Multiple Disciplines, with Professor Phillip Dawson and Dr Joanna Tai along with Development Partners Dr Kelli Nicola-Richmond and Dr Christine Contessotto
7/4/2022 HERDSA Queensland Branch, The online engagement framework: Activating students’ online learning experience, with Dr Alice Brown and Professor Petrea Redmond,
Mihai, A. (16/3/2022), “Educationalist: Around the world” podcast, Episode 7: Jenae Cohn, California State University, Sacramento, USA, (38-minute audio recording)
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.
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.
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
On-goingLTHEchat, a weekly Twitter chat about learning and teaching in higher education
Ferrell, G. & Knight, S. (2/3/2022), Principles of good assessment and feedback: How good learning, teaching and assessment can be applied to improving assessment and feedback practice, JiscGuides
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.
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.
View of Aberystwyth from the National Library. KGS Aug 2021
Su’mae! I’m Keziah, I joined the LTEU in 2022 as a Support Assistant, so I will be helping out the team in a variety of ways from dealing with enquiries to supporting CPD sessions and the annual Learning and Teaching conference. I first came to Aber in 2012 as an undergraduate with the History and Welsh History department. Having graduated I stayed on to complete an MA, before having a brief interlude in Leicester. Afterwards I was lucky enough to be able to take up a PhD here researching Ceredigion’s early modern history through the use of criminal records in the National Library of Wales. During my PhD I was given the opportunity to do some teaching within the department and to take part in the TPAU programme. I quickly became passionate about finding new ways to improve teaching in Higher Education, especially the problem-solving aspects of balancing all of the different elements that go into designing a rewarding and engaging programme. My current areas of interest outside of my research, are learning Welsh and looking at ways in which ideas about leadership training from business and industry can be used in undergraduate teaching to build confidence and initiative in students. I’m looking forward to supporting staff and students at Aberystwyth in their ongoing development, and meeting new people from around the university.
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
On-goingLTHEchat, a weekly Twitter chat about learning and teaching in higher education
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.
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).
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
On-goingLTHEchat, a weekly Twitter chat about learning and teaching in higher education
3/3/2022 University of London Centre for Distance Education, The year ahead for the practitioner “The Covid-19 pandemic has rejuvenated debates around the use of learning technologies in the classroom (online or face-to-face) and resulted into the emergence of hybrid models and approaches that are predicted to permanently influence the way both distance and campus based learning are carried out.”
8-9/3/2022 Jisc, Digifest – update: now free of charge for Jisc members
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.
