Friday 10 May 2013

Teaching Exchange 2013

This years Teaching Exchange had drop in slots with talks and a demonstration. Featuring some of the winners of the VC's excellence in learning and teaching awards....

Opening introduction Ruth Pilkington talked about the PRF and the UCLan Pedagogic Research Rainbow taken from  the Impact: Pedagogic Research publication and how we support everyone interested in learning and teaching.


Debbie Williams talked about Innovation in teaching and assessment- Realistic Working Environment. they have been all over the world with students from various disciplines all working on creating and publishing a book. Letters to Africa was their first and highly successful publication, they have since worked on 2 more books and have another 8 in production. This cooperative working environment with tangible outputs have been enjoyable for all involved and have led to students getting jobs in industry, some have moved to Africa to work as there experiences there were life changing.

Rob Smith talked about  research -informed teaching and learning and his young researchers project in Chemistry, where undergraduates spend time in the lab outside of class to work on solutions real world problems. Some of the students manage to get summer research internships from the Centre for Research-informed Teaching to enable the staff and students to work full time over the summer to conduct research and publish papers.

Due to a last minute cancellation the computing team Nicky Danino, Lesley May and Nick Mitchell stepped in to talk about their highly successful four week challenge project. This project runs a whole module in 4 weeks full time straight from when the 1st years start the course. It is a fully immersive experience with workshops and help sessions and the students are sorted into groups of 6 and given an app to develop and market in this time. Competition is fierce as there is a leader board updated regularly, but students get points for being helpful and developing resources the other teams can use. The reports from the students are overwhelmingly positive, although it is hard work,  they get to make friends, share their knowledge and ask for help in this time so the rest of the course is not quite so daunting.
 
The last session was a Demonstration by Juliet Ibbotson on Sage Research Methods The University has a subscription to this useful service, which can give you definitions of research terms, provide research materials, and gives you access to relevant books, book chapters, dictionary and encyclopedia entries, videos, or journal articles from over 175,000 pages of renowned SAGE content in research methods. The research methods map is a very useful tool and it will give you a definition of a method or procedure but you can also find related methods and the key theorists in that area.


We closed with a thank you to all the staff who came and we even had lecturers from our new associate school at Myerscough college, who were really interested in the amazing work done at the university and wanted to know how to get more involved.

Hopefully next years event will be even more successful.

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