Assessment, Learning & Teaching Reflections |
July 2010
This will be the last ALT Update of the academic year and the last in its present form. As many of you may know, I shall be taking a research sabbatical from 1 September before taking early retirement next March. I will, however, be continuing as an Emeritus Professor to complete my National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) project on Master's level assessment. So I would like here to look back at some of our successful assessment, learning and teaching initiatives over the past year.
First I would like to congratulate Cath Sanderson on her terrific achievement in being awarded a National Teaching Fellowship: she is one of 50 staff in England and Northern Ireland honoured for excellence in teaching in 2010. Leeds Met has been awarded seven NTFs over the years. Congratulations too to the eight members of staff appointed as University Teacher Fellows this year: they join a growing network of more than 50 Teacher Fellows active in helping to shape and further Faculty and University assessment, learning and teaching strategy and its implementation; mentoring; contributing to the development of improved ALT processes; developing learning materials; and acting as advocates for innovation.
Our highly successful Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) are now reaching the ends of their funded life-spans: we can see real differences to our estate, curriculum and ALT practice as led by the Institute for Enterprise CETL as well as the consortium CETLs, Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings (ALPs) and CETL AliC, Active Learning in Computing. Thanks to everyone concerned in helping the CETLs have such a lasting impact.
Congratulations too to everyone who has been successful in achieving JISC funding for ALT-related bids, most recently Rob Moores and Wendy Luker for further funding to support flexible service delivery and Simon Thomson who also gained extra funding for dissemination of his Open Educational Resources project, Unicycle. In the last three years we have achieved at least £2.5 million in contestable bids from the NTFS, JISC and the Higher Education Academy to advance teaching and learning. We are proud that Leeds Met is the most successful university in bidding for modest-sized funds from JISC.
This year we were also awarded £20,000 from the Higher Education Academy for the STEEL project to complete a synthesis of evidence-based research on the use of technology enhanced learning for employability and employee learning in higher and further education.
We were also awarded £68,500 from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills under the Learning Revolution Transformation Fund to deliver free skills sessions to people who have been hit by the economic downturn. Learn with Leeds Met aimed not only to provide an introduction to learning to the unemployed or those disengaged with education, but also to highlight progression routes to HE for adults, in partnership with Regional University Network colleges. Below Karli Wilkinson reflects on her own learning journey in administering the project.
Leeds Met was one of nine higher education institutions selected to take part in Enhancement Academy, a year-long initiative from the Higher Education Academy to help HEIs with a good track record in assessment, learning and teaching to enhance learning and teaching through the use of technology. Our cross-institutional team is leading a project to embed technology enhanced learning (TEL) systematically throughout the whole University, with Teacher Fellows and others helping to champion this initiative at Faculty level. This group will have an important role in taking forward TEL across the Faculties in the new academic year.
We ran a full programme of ALT staff development throughout the year, including presentations and workshops by international visiting speakers such as Gordon Joughin and Beverley Oliver. University Teacher Fellows led and supported a number of cross-University initiatives including the peer observation of teaching scheme, and initiatives relating to recruitment and student attendance.
FLAP, the First Level Assessment Project, has continued to raise the profile of assessment and feedback across and beyond Leeds Met. Competitions at Leeds Met to recognise the best overall first-year learning experience, and in local schools to encourage 6th form students to reflect on assessment and their expectations of university, provided much useful material. The second national conference on first-year assessment, 'Taking the "Ass" out of Assessment', in June 2010 was well attended by delegates from across the UK, and our Leeds Met Press publication Designing First-Year Assessment and Feedback (a guide for staff) was widely disseminated in the UK and internationally.
Ongoing projects such as Unicycle, PC3 and Sounds Good are continuing to gain both internal and external recognition.
The TEL team is working in collaboration with People Development, the ALT team and Libraries and Learning Innovation to produce an integrated single staff development programme which will operate from 2011-12. The third annual TEL Us More competition for good practice in the use of TEL produced an even higher standard of entries than in previous years, and examples of good practice from last year have been made available to support others throughout the University.
The Employability team launched the updated Futures workbook series, including two new workbooks and new additions to the learning objects on employability issues. These are well regarded and used both inside and outside the University; they have been released as open source objects through the Unicycle project.
The Employability team has also successfully completed the HE5P e-portfolio project looking at students who are also employees. The project is funded by the Centre for Recording Achievement, who were very happy with our output.
The Institute for Enterprise CETL held an event celebrating the success of the three Leeds Met CETLs at the end of their funded period. Among the Institute's achievements have been the student Enterprise Pioneers project and inter-Faculty collaborative curriculum development projects, for example involving students in re-branding and re-designing the PDSA's charity shop in Headingley. The Institute has also produced an enterprise skills mapping tool for courses to embed in their programmes and a range of open educational resources on enterprise.
The Enterprise team has been shortlisted for an NCGE (National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship) enterprise educator award. Sue Smith, the Institute for Enterprise Director, and Janet Finlay, co-Director of the TEL team, have both guest edited issues of our ALT Journal this year.
A range of enterprise projects and activities will be continued by Sue Smith and Karen O'Rourke under the auspices of the ALT office from September.
This year Leeds Met Press has published ten titles, including staff and student guides to first-year assessment and guides to oral assessment, formative assessment, course design, increasing resilience and personal tutoring. These publications, and site licences allowing their local customisation, are proving increasingly popular with other higher education institutions, having been sold to more than 40 HEIs in the UK and in Australia, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, the USA and South Africa. HEIF funding is supporting an exciting new development, the translation of some of our publications into Arabic and Spanish, to market to key potential clients in the Middle East and Latin America as well as Spain, thereby further enhancing the high esteem in which ALT activities at Leeds Met are held in the UK and internationally
I am handing over the direction of our ALT, TEL and Employability teams in the interim to Professor Ruth Pickford. I wish her, and you, every success in contributing to the vibrant culture of assessment, learning and teaching at Leeds Met.
Sally Brown
Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic)
S.Brown@leedsmet.ac.uk
Reflection
As a graduate trainee working my way through the minefield of the bidding process I felt as if I were working in a world where everyone knew the language but me. It brought back memories of past physics lessons, that feeling of "everyone knows this but me", that question of "why can't I do this?" After enough drafts to sap the office red pen supply, our bid was submitted and subsequently accepted. Now I'm learning another language, that of project management, budgets, work plans and milestone reports.
Learning, they say, is a lifelong journey. For some the path is straight; for others it's more like a labyrinth complicated by the burden of negative images, low confidence and fear sitting firmly on their shoulders. Learn with Leeds Met aimed to lift some of this weight by taking informal sessions into non-traditional learning environments; instead of classrooms we used rugby clubs, instead of teachers we used unemployed graduates, and the teacher-pupil relationship was replaced with a "what do YOU think?" attitude. This highlights the constant process of learning we are engaged in, as we coach each other through the project and strive to provide a positive experience for all.
Karli Wilkinson
Project Manager, Learn with Leeds Met
Update
Booking is now open for the Assessment, Learning and Teaching Conference on 7-8 September at Headingley Carnegie Stadium. This year's conference themes are: 'Finding Creative Solutions to Difficult Dilemmas' and 'Challenging Accepted Wisdom: Seeking Alternative Solutions'. Keynote speakers include Professor D. Royce Sadler of the Griffith Institute for Higher Education, Griffith University, Brisbane; Professor Margaret Price, Director of the ASKe Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning; and Professor Ruth Pickford, giving her inaugural lecture. The conference is free of charge to Leeds Met colleagues and available at a discount to Regional University Network partners. Go to the conference website for further details and to book.