Learning and Teaching

The Resurrected Blog

Vivian Neal — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 07:08:02 +0000

This is a new posting after a very long time, more than two years! I want to share some of my interests and experiences as an educational developer and share any modest insights I have about teaching and learning in higher education. I hope you enjoy reading my meanderings and whatever text I end up writing here.

Creativity in Teaching and Learning

Vivian Neal — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 19:21:40 +0000

At Sussex, I attended a conference on Creativity in Teaching and Learning, sponsored by LINKS+II, a Franco-Anglo consortium of universities that share knowledge for mutual economic benefit. You can take a look at the slides from the presentations at the creative links site.

The keynote speaker (sorry, her name is not with me at this Internet cafe – I’m in Glasgow at the moment) described what she considered to be the nature of creativity, as falling into three types: combinatory, exploratory and transformational, and she expressed concern that teachers have caused great damage by teaching our students to believe that they are not creative. She emphasised that we need a scientific explanation of these three creative processes to effectively support and encourage creativity.

She mentioned that creative ideas can be generated by first generating lots and lots of ideas, and then throwing out the bad ones. Well, I’ve already citing this idea several times over the past 10 days, so I guess this means that I like it.

StudyDirect and User Groups

Vivian Neal — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:59:49 +0000

The VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) at Sussex is built in Moodle and called StudyDirect. Sussex has only had a university-wide VLE since last September. Several times this year, IT Services has asked users to come together to talk about what they like and don’t like about the system, and in particular, what they’d like changed. The invitees have been instructional staff who have a course in StudyDirect, including faculty and tutors. There were about 60 people at the most recent users group gathering and about 20 at the previous ones – this seems like a large number of keen people, and of course, these are the early adopters. There’s no formal assistance offered to instructors about how to design courses for the system, but IT Services does offer workshops on how to use it. Carol Shergold, a Senior systems Developer at IT Services, said that only about 50 people took the StudyDirect training over the past year. I did hear, however, that many instructors are using it as an online space to distribute PowerPoint slides and course documents, and only a few are using a wider selection of functions.

Daisy MacDonald, Project Officer at TLDU, has put together a portfolio ‘solution’ in StudyDirect for students who are in their first year of their D.Phil. (Ph.D.). These students will be using the system to gather artifacts and record accomplishments and reflections on their various activities and learnings as they go through the lengthy process of becoming academics. Daisy is organizing a users group for the portfolio and they will be meeting two or three times over the next several months. Feedback from the users will help made the portfolio more effective for their particular needs.

Well, I’m impressed with the commitment to consultation and evaluation.

The Sussex TLDU and Moodle

Vivian Neal — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 17:17:12 +0000

The Teaching and Learning Development Unit at Sussex has 7 staff members who accomplish amazing things for the University. They offer a Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education which is compulsory for new faculty who have less than 3 years of teaching experience. The second year of the program is a research project that is relevant to the participants’ teaching endeavors. TLDU also offers a series of workshops for Associate Tutors (these are like our Teaching Assistants), and when the whole series is taken, students gain accreditation from the both the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA). The Centre also offers a selection of workshops as need arises on such topics as finding pedagogic resources, and plagiarism.

Sussex uses a Moodle based VLE, called StudyDirect, and interestingly it is the Information Technology Services department who delivers the workshops on how to use the system. Sussex used WebCT in a limited way until last year, but when they wanted to expand its use campus-wide, they found that the price was too great. They started to use the Moodle-based system last September, and now about 20% of courses use it. The feedback about Moodle has been positive, and the students have asked that more courses use the system.

Like many universities, Sussex has a Teaching and Learning Development Fund to support instructors and departments to innovate in a wide variety of teaching and learning contexts. An example of a funded project is the development of online labs for a neuroscience course with the aim of reducing the demand on tutors and allowing students to spend more time with the learning materials. The fund also supported a project to run student focus groups to gather course evaluation data – this method of data collection was seen as more accurate than using student surveys.

Finally, today I met with Pro-Vice-Chancellor Joanne Wright and we discussed how a research-intensive university can leverage its strength in research to improve the quality of the student learning experience. Any thoughts about that?

First reflections on the UK

Vivian Neal — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:55:05 +0000

This blog is to record and share my reflections and daily learnings from my visits to teaching and learning centres in the UK. My first few days here have been very busy and I keep running across exciting people who are doing extraordinary things.

I’ve been at the University of Sussex since Friday – it’s a “red brick” university built in the 60′s, and looks a lot like the University of Waterloo where I did my undergrad. It even has “Engineering 1″ and “Engineering 2″, just like Waterloo.

The UK has 74 CETL’s, Centres of Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and Sussex has a joint CETL with the University of Brighton which is InQbate the CETL in Creativity. The brochure say, “The centre pieces of the InQbate are two technology-rich Creativity Zones enabling groups of individuals to come together within a high-technology environment to communicate their ideas and generate designs.” The space is designed to be as flexible as possible so that instructors and students can come up with new ideas about how to learn and how to teach. Though the final touches are still being worked out, the space has been used since last September. I took some pictures of it, but they don’t do it justice. Tom Hamilton, Associate Director of the CETL in Creativity, said he’ll send me some pictures of the space while it’s in use, so I’ll let you know when I get them.

Well, I wanted to get this first post up and see what it looks likes before I go wild with lengthy narratives. So I’ll talk more about my learnings tomorrow.