In June, the School of Arts and Social Sciences held its first Learning and Teaching Awards. Our own Connie Tse and Dina Fainberg, lecturer in Modern History, presented the Digital Vault project, a student-produced database of historical documents, for which they won the runner-up prize. What is the Digital History Vault? The Digital Vault is…Continue Reading Students as Producers: the Digital History Vault
The School of Arts and Social Sciences’ (SASS) inaugural Learning and Teaching Awards took place on 13th June. School staff were encouraged to submit examples of their good practice in relation to teaching and learning, methods of assessment and feedback, employability skills development and student support. From a very strong field, finalists were selected to…Continue Reading Learning and Teaching Awards – SASS (School of Arts and Social Sciences)
Following on from Health’s Got Talent in June (see our previous blog posts), we are sharing some of the excellent learning and teaching and practice presented at the event. In this post we will explore the use of technology to support assessment diversification, with an example from Caroline McGraw in the School of Health Sciences. Caroline…Continue Reading Innovation in Assessment: Pitching a Service Improvement Initiative
This is a guest post from Aurelie Zhu, a 1st year Business Studies student at Cass Business School, that looks back on her participation in the ‘Reflective Practitioner’ module. What is the module about? The module is designed to enhance and develop Intuitive qualities which are essential to any successful managers of our time. And…Continue Reading ‘The Reflective Practitioner’: a one-of-a-kind elective
There are several ways to mark and provide feedback on Moodle. In this blog post I will focus on rubrics as a method in which this is possible. A rubric for assessment, usually in the form of a matrix or grid, is a feedback tool used to interpret and grade students’ work against criteria and…Continue Reading Moodle3.2: Rubrics as a method of providing feedback using Moodle Assignment
At the beginning of October 2016, LEaD loaned a touchscreen tablet and stylus to Professor Keith Pullen to enable him to provide hand-written notations and feedback on online assignment submissions. Keith is a Professor of Energy Systems, who teaches Part 4 Design for Mechanical Engineering students. The students on the course are required to produce…Continue Reading Marking electronic submissions with a touchscreen
Earlier this year, I attended the HEA STEM 2016 conference. This post details some of the highlights from the event. With a conference theme centred around inspiring, supporting and sharing excellent practice in STEM teaching and learning, I was particularly interested in sessions that focused on innovations in STEM teaching. I found inspiration at ones run…Continue Reading Innovations in STEM teaching
Plagiarism, and in particular the recent burgeoning of so-called essay mills, was the theme of the ALDinHE (London & south-east region) event hosted by the University of Reading on July 22nd 2016. I had the pleasure of attending this lively and stimulating day of presentations and discussion at the University’s verdant London Road campus, a…Continue Reading Plagiarism and essay mills
Sometimes screening students for specific learning differences can be a bit like staggering through a teaching and learning jungle; a place where languages are plenty and, for a dyslexia support tutor, the tools are not quite what you need. Last year, for instance, a student (I’m going to call her ‘Tiger’), whose first language (L1)…Continue Reading Lions, CAMLS and neuro-diverse linguists
As an academic skills tutor, I’m often faced with a student clutching a set of assessment criteria containing the phrase “critically analyse”, or a synonym of that instruction. In my experience, many students understand the broad concept of critical analysis (e.g. being sceptical, not taking information on face value, evaluating evidence, etc), but have difficulty…Continue Reading Two meanings of “critically analyse”