Advancing your teaching practice
We offer a broad range of support and resources to help you advance and inform your teaching, depending on the aspect of learning and teaching you want to progress. We do this within the context of delivery of the University's Learning & Teaching Strategy, which is underpinned by our approach to quality management which is set out in our Quality Code of Practice.
Contact us for information, support and advice on advancing your teaching
You can find information, support and resources drawn from:
- current and past projects - departmental and institution-wide
- good practice discussions - see also QA54 Good Practice Discussions for further guidance
- external organisations
- workshops and events
- quality code of practice statement QA9
Learning in the disciplines
Many of our our activities to support learning in the disciplines arise from individual staff leading projects funded by the Teaching Development Fund. Other developments come from externally funded projects such as the Disciplinary Thinking project which has produced open educational resources categorised under eight themes including feedback, learning spaces, e-learning and values. These resources have been designed to encourage and support dialogue and reflection on disciplinary ways of thinking and practising.
You can also consider peer review of your teaching to inform your future developments and can find out more about the peer review scheme from a set of resources produced for us by Dr Kate Exley, University of Southampton.
Alternatively, you may be interested in finding out more about one of our current institution-wide development projects, Professionalism in the Digital Environment (PriDE), which is exploring digital literacy within different disciplines and the Flipping project, which aims to support you in rethinking the design of your units to make student learning more effective.
You can find other open access teaching resources including unit content from other institutions at JORUM.
Assessment, feedback and academic integrity
You can find guidance on assessment criteria and feedback mechanisms from our good practice discussions. You may also find it helpful to review our work on academic integrity.
In our quality codes of practice statements QA16 and QA53, you can find our formal university policies on assessment, marking and feedback (QA16) and assessment offences (QA53).
Technology enhanced learning and teaching
We have a range of tools and technologies available together with one-to-one support from members of our e-Learning team to help you explore how learning technologies can support your learning and teaching activities. You may, for example, wish to integrate clickers to support more interactive teaching or lecture capture to enable your students to revisit your lecture again at a later stage. There is also some work taking place within the University to explore the use and role of e-portfolios using a tool called Mahara.
Beyond the classroom, we offer and support Moodle, our virtual learning environment, together with online assessment tools and also Turnitin, a plagiarism detection tool that is supported by the Library.
You can find additional useful information and funding opportunities for technology related approaches to teaching from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
Increasing student engagement
Effective student engagement lies at the core of our quality management strategy and we seek to support continuous enhancement of our processes through a range of projects and resources. These include:
- institution-wide projects such as the Flipping project designed to rethink teaching to increase student engagement
- practical examples of giving feedback to students to improve their learning
- guidance on academic support for international students and good practice examples on the integration of international students
- information student engagement beyond the classroom including student surveys and Staff Student Liaison Committees
Contact us to find out more about our institution-wide project 'Flipping' and get involved
External resources
You can find many other resources and information from a number of external organisations with whom we regularly liaise. The following organisations provide a wide range of resources on many of the topics above:
- Higher Education Academy (HEA) - guidance on practical teaching approaches and examples of effective teaching nationally
- Staff Educational Development Association (SEDA) - practical guidance on a wide range of topics with a theoretical underpinning
