Learning & Teaching Enhancement Office

“Who should take responsibility for student learning?” asks Gwen van der Velden.  And “is more always better when it comes to contact and engagement with students?”

Writing for the QAA’s (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education) Talking about quality series, Gwen argues that contrary to suggestions by the popular press, today’s well informed students place more emphasis on effectiveness and less on quantity when it comes to contact time. “Instead, students are looking for depth in their learning: more interaction and debate with staff and fellow students that makes them really question the subject.”

Gwen also writes:  “Whose responsibility is classroom engagement? Is it the students who have chosen to become university level learners and therefore should push themselves to engage in intellectually demanding ways? Or is it the staff who must somehow ‘switch on’ engagement in their students?”

Responding to today’s Talking about quality paper, Alex Bols of the National Union of Students makes the point that not everyone in higher education wants educating. “As much as we may hate to admit this fact, with increasing numbers of people going to university the reasons why people go become more diverse - whether to get a job, become more employable or even just to get a qualification. Some students are more interested in just jumping the hurdles to get the piece of paper at the end. The challenge is how we best support those that want to get involved.”

Gwen van der Velden was invited as a higher education expert to write for QAA’s think piece Talking about Quality, published today with responses from Alex Bols and Rebecca Freeman, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham researching the ‘student voice in higher education’.

Gwen also advised QAA on its student engagement chapter for the UK Quality Code for Higher Education, due to be published this summer.

Organised by the National Higher Education (HE) STEM Programme, and hosted by the University of Bath, this interactive workshop will explore student involvement in STEM communication activities. The workshop will take place on Friday 25 May 2012.

The event will start at 10.00 am until 4.00 pm and be held in the Wolfson Lecture Theatre, 4 West Building, University of Bath.

Registration for this workshop is free, however, places are limited so please book your place. If you would like to bring along/demonstrate STEM activities, then please indicate this when you register. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

The event will offer participants the opportunity to:

• compare and share good practice in student involvement 
• consider the implications and opportunities for enhancing student involvement in delivering STEM communication activities
• join group discussions and interactions including the sharing of materials/literature that illustrate their own STEM activities

The event will open with a welcome and overview from Professor Chris Budd, Project Lead for the STEM Communicators Models Project followed by a networking session and presentation of the Guide from Professor Budd and members of his project team.

With the forthcoming upgrade to Moodle 2.2, and following a hugely positive response to initial sessions, the e-Learning Team, part of the Learning & Teaching Enhancement Office (LTEO), are running a series of familiarisation seminars during May and June 2012.

As a Moodle user, who creates, uploads and edits learning resources and activities, you are invited to attend one of these seminars prior to the rollout of Moodle 2.2. The seminar will:

• provide an overview of the upgrade
• highlight existing and new Moodle features
• build a course based around a set of scenarios, by way of an example

The seminars are a one hour session.

Please note that although these seminars are not hands-on, you are welcome to contact the e-Learning Team at any time to schedule bespoke training sessions for you and your colleagues - these can be small groups, departmental or Faculty-based.

Please read more about these seminars and book your place.

Further information from the e-Learning Team.

This year’s winners of the hugely popular ‘Images of Research’ exhibition, organised and run by the Researcher Development Unit and sponsored by the EPSRC KTA Fund, were selected by the panel of judges at a preview evening held on Wednesday 2 May 2012.

Chosen by the University’s own judges, Professor Jane Millar, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) and Tim Kaner, Director of Marketing & Communications and joined by Sophie Duncan, Deputy Director of the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE), the overall winner, Dr Melina Freitag from the Department of Mathematical Sciences, led the way with her work entitled ‘Come Rain or Shine’.

Dr Freitag’s image was a montage of pictures of different weather conditions at the University campus. Her abstract explained how collaboration between the Met Office and researchers in the Department helps to improve the weather forecast by finding better and faster techniques to solve the mathematical equations that describe the dynamics of the atmosphere.

Additional winners were:

• Dr Richard Burke, Department of Mechanical Engineering - Best Abstract
• Hannah Family, Department of Pharmacy & Pharmacology - Best Image

A further winner, to be selected by the public, will be voted for at the public exhibition to be held at The Octagon, Milsom Place in central Bath on Saturday 12 May and Sunday 13 May 2012 from 10.30 am to 16.30 pm. Everyone is welcome to attend the public exhibition to find out more about the research being undertaken here at the University and to cast their vote.

Further information: Researcher Development Unit

Launched by the Researcher Development Unit, part of the Learning & Teaching Enhancement Office, the Research Student Personal Web Page and Blog Competition 2012 is an excellent opportunity for you, as a research student, to develop your online presence and improve communications and dissemination with your peers and the wider public.

The deadline for entries is Monday 18 June with the winners being announced at the Meeting of Minds postgraduate conference on 28 June 2012. Please see further details on the web page competition. This information also includes advice on how to set up a web page if you have not already done so. You are also welcome to nominate colleagues.

Engaging in a dialogue with the public at large, your peers or potential collaborators or employers about your research activity is becoming increasingly important and a key part of your work as an active researcher. The creation of a high quality online presence either in the form of a web page or blog is an excellent way of both presenting your work and disseminating your findings to a wider audience.

For the first time here at the University we are running a competition for the best research web page or blog created by a University of Bath research student. The winner will receive an Amazon Kindle.

Further information: Researcher Development Unit

This year’s Programme Evaluation Survey has been launched for all taught students including Foundation Degrees, Honours Year, Undergraduate and Postgraduate Taught programmes.

Seventy-seven separate programme evaluation surveys have been set up, tailored accordingly in response to requests from Directors of Studies for their choices of elective questions. Departments are encouraged to promote this survey to students through:

• Moodle pages
• departmental websites
• local plasma screens

All eligible taught students have received an invitation via email to complete their specific questionnaire via the central web page on the LTEO website. Two central reminder emails will also be sent out during the fieldwork stage of the survey.

Students are encouraged to complete the survey online as early as possible, as experience with the National Student Survey indicates that departments with lower response rates in the first two weeks of a survey struggle to achieve high/reasonable response rates.

Further information: Shaun McGall, Learning & Teaching Development Officer, LTEO ext 3848

Organised jointly with the Higher Education Academy (HEA), the Department of Biology & Biochemistry is delighted to be hosting this one day event ‘Enhancing the International Student Learning Experience in Biosciences’ on Thursday 24 May 2012.

The event will start at 10.00 am until 4.00 pm and be held in 4 West Room 1.1.

You can book your place for this exciting event by contacting Dr Momna Hejmadi. Please include any special dietary or access needs in your email.

The event will offer participants the opportunity to:

• develop their subject knowledge (via keynote presentations)
• share good practice (via short delegate-led ’swapshop’ presentations)
• collaborate on pilot projects across institutions (UK and India)

The event will open with a keynote presentation from Dr Janette Ryan, Director, HEA International Students Project) talking about ‘An Institutional Approach to Teaching and Supporting International Students. This will be followed by a mix of keynote presentations, good practice sharing, networking and group discussion. Speakers will bring a wide range of ideas and experience from their own institutions including the Universities of Mumbai, Reading, Nottingham Trent, Hertfordshire and Plymouth.

This event is free of charge and will include refreshments and lunch. Please note, however, that spaces are limited therefore we reserve the right to levy a fee of £75.00 for any delegates who do not attend. This charge will be waived where illness/family/home/emergency prevents attendance. Substitutions will not incur a fee.

Further information: Dr Momna Hejmadi, Department of Biology & Biochemistry, University of Bath

The Professionalism in the Digital Environment (PriDE) Project, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has launched its first set of open educational resources (OERs) to the higher education community.

Following the first successful stage of the project involving the establishment of four Faculty Learning Communities and running 12 creative think tank sessions exploring ideas and issues surrounding the creation of a digital environment, the project team has now released a full set of resources informing other institutions and projects how to set up and run a similar process.

The resources take end users through the complete process including:

• establishing faculty learning communities
• designing think tank sessions
• a range of different exercises for the think tanks
• capturing the outputs

Video introductions have been made available to walk users through the collection of resources describing how they have been used here at Bath and the project team’s overall experiences so far.

Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou, Head of e-Learning, LTEO and also Project Manager for PriDE, said:

‘This is a challenging, organisation-wide project and it has been hugely rewarding to witness the high levels of engagement from all those staff and students involved to-date. There is quite definitely an appetite for tackling the digital literacies agenda and making things happen here at Bath. Making these resources available to the sector is the first significant set of project deliverables which I am delighted with.’

Further video resources are due for release shortly. You can keep up-to-date with the PriDE Project via the blog and twitter.

Further information: Vic Jenkins or Nitin Parmar, PriDE Project Officers

The University’s Student Shadowing Project, run jointly with the University of Exeter and funded by the Leadership Foundation, is set to continue.

After a hugely positive response to the call for participants, from students and University senior managers, the Learning & Teaching Enhancement Office (LTEO) is now exploring ways to adopt the ’shadowing concept’ as an ongoing method of informing and improving the student experience.

Gwen van der Velden, Director, Learning & Teaching Enhancement said:

‘The first hand experience of spending a day with a student, in lectures, in the Students Centre, in the coffee bar and the Library, has proved to be a very effective way of gaining insight into the student experience. The University’s senior management team has put their full support and energy into this project and everyone has indicated their wish to see it continue.’

Professor Dame Glynis Breakwell, the University’s Vice-Chancellor, has given this project her full support and elected to spend half a day with Hanna Wade, a final year Languages student, attending a French lecture on Women in History and joining Hanna and her friends in the Students Centre for coffee and a chat.

Professor Dame Breakwell said:

‘It is only too easy to become removed and distant from the daily lives of our students so I welcomed the opportunity to meet Hanna and her friends to hear directly from them about some of the issues they face on a day to day basis. We have an excellent track record here at Bath for the quality of our student experience but we must never become complacent and assume we know what is right for our students. It is critically important that we listen and learn. The Shadowing Project is an excellent way we can continue to extend the opportunities available to us to remain in touch with our student body.’

The formal end of the funded project was marked by the two participating Universities with a symposium in early February during which the two project teams reflected on lessons learned and explored ideas for continuing.

Further information: Sarah Turpin, LTEO ext 4355

A new and exciting group workspace has been launched and is available for both staff and students to book for group working, teaching and study.

The room can be booked for a full teaching session or each workzone can be booked out individually by groups of up to six students.

Equipped with leading edge workzones and audio-visual equipment, designed and built by TeamMate, an innovative supplier of contemporary business and learning media solutions, the new room, 8 West 1.28, provides the perfect environment for collaborative learning and teaching.

One of the key projects this year, as part of the General Teaching Accommodation (GTA) Working Party’s refurbishment plan, the redesign of 8 West 1.28 has been supported by both University funds and the Alumni Fund.

Professor Bernie Morley, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Learning & Teaching) said:

‘This is the future for learning environments. Group work in a supported environment fits well with the intention to develop strong independent learning and the technology offered allows students to test and develop their intellectual and technological skills. Both aspects will prepare students well for placement and employability. I also expect that staff will enjoy teaching in this space as much as students will enjoy learning in them.’

The room’s key features include:

• five group workzones equipped with LCD screens
• each workzone with power supply, docking stations, internet connections and headphone sockets
• lecturer’s workstation equipped with full audio-visual system
• five glass writing boards

Further information: Timetabling Team