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.
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.
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
Self-paced MOOC, Disability Awareness, Universal Design for Learning in Tertiary Education, “Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a learning design approach that recognises there is no ‘average’ learner.”
24-25/2/2022 QAA, Quality Insights Conference 2022, “the conference will address three core themes: Inclusive learning communities, Assessment design and delivery, Innovative approaches to managing quality”
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
Galloway, R., Hardy, J., & Brown, T. (10/2/2022), Interactive engagement and online teaching: Using the text-chat feature in digital lectures, Teaching Matters Blog, University of Edinburgh
Call for papers 25/2/2022: University of Hull Annual international teaching and learning conference, Personalised Pedagogies: Inclusive, empowering and progressive Higher Education for all
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 Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce our next External Speaker.
On 16th February, 2pm-4pm, Kevin L. Merry will be running a masterclass on Universal Design for Learning and its implementation at De Montfort University.
You can read more about Universal Design for Learning on the CAST Site.
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
In 2015, De Montfort University adopted Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as its institution-wide approach to learning, teaching, and assessment in response to its exceptional level of learner diversity. UDL is an approach that incorporates a variety of options to allow it to be accessible and inclusive for diverse groups of learners possessing a wide variety of learning needs and preferences.
In this masterclass, Dr Kevin Merry, will introduce the “Cheese Sandwich” approach to supporting learner mastery. The Cheese Sandwich has become the vehicle by which colleagues at DMU have begun to embed UDL into the design of their teaching sessions, modules, and programmes. Specifically, Kevin will provide a series of practical activities that will help colleagues to uncover the pedagogic foundations of the Cheese Sandwich. Furthermore, Kevin will invite colleagues to begin thinking about some of the key considerations that teachers must make when planning and designing learning experiences from a UDL perspective, and how this can be done using the systems approach of the CUTLAS method.
Finally, Kevin will finish off the session by addressing the elephant in the room – the issue of universally designed assessment. By providing guidance and practical examples from De Montfort University’s own Postgraduate Certificate in Learning & Teaching in Higher Education (PGCLTHE), Kevin will hopefully dispel some of the myths that exist around UDL and assessment, supporting colleagues to adopt more UDL centric ways of assessing learning.
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
Self-paced MOOC, Disability Awareness, Universal Design for Learning in Tertiary Education, “Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a learning design approach that recognises there is no ‘average’ learner.”
8/2/2022 POD Scholarly Reads, Reimagining the place of students in academic development, “With the founding of a Co-Creation Through Partnership Special Interest Group (SIG) within the POD Network, the time feels ripe for a discussion series on the possibilities of partnerships, with Students as Partners (SaP) representing a growing body of scholarship. What does it mean for us to be engaged in partnership, and how does this affect our roles and identities as educational developers? Join us for our Spring 2022 POD Scholarly Reads discussion series. Register here.”
24-25/2/2022 QAA, Quality Insights Conference 2022, “the conference will address three core themes: Inclusive learning communities, Assessment design and delivery, Innovative approaches to managing quality”
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.”
8-9/3/3022 Jisc, Digifest – update: now free of charge for Jisc members
Eden Centre, London School of Economics (2022), Inclusive Education at LSE, “Inclusive Education is teaching in ways that dismantle the dominant structures within higher education embedded in whiteness, able-bodied, elite and heteronormative culture”
Retrieval Practice (n.d.), Download Free Resources, “In our free resources, written by cognitive scientists, we condense research on teaching strategies, why they enhance learning, and how to implement them in the classroom.”
Call for papers 25/2/2022: University of Hull Annual international teaching and learning conference, Personalised Pedagogies: Inclusive, empowering and progressive Higher Education for all
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.
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-goingLTHE Chat, a weekly Twitter chat about learning and teaching in higher education
Self-paced MOOC, Disability Awareness, Universal Design for Learning in Tertiary Education, “Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a learning design approach that recognises there is no ‘average’ learner.”
Bovill, C. & McLaughlin, C. (17/1/2022), Learning together in a global pandemic: Practices and principles for teaching and assessing online in uncertain times (17-minute podcast), Teaching Matters
College STAR (Supporting Transition Access and Retention) (2022), Three Two One videos, “College STAR (Supporting Transition Access and Retention) is a grant-funded project that enables participants to partner in the development of initiatives focused on helping postsecondary campuses become more welcoming of students with learning and attention differences. Much of this work is made possible by generous funding from the Oak Foundation.”
Compton, M. (20/1/2022), Mobile phones 1: Education apps, Talk Teaching, Talk Tech (Note: this is the first of five linked posts about using mobile phones in teaching)
Call for papers 25/2/2022: University of Hull Annual international teaching and learning conference, Personalised Pedagogies: Inclusive, empowering and progressive Higher Education for all
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.
