Expertise and excellence in teaching and in SoTL can be a vehicle for developing leadership, esteem, and evidence for academic promotion. This session focuses on developing an understanding of SoTL, introduces the four scholarships of Boyer’s ‘scholarship reconsidered’, and finishes with a framework for SoTL project design. During the session, we’ll present examples of SoTL to give a feel for what constitutes SoTL in Higher Education.

NB: Prof. Fischbacher-Smith has recorded some preliminary advice on academic promotion already. We ask that you watch her short presentation before attending (3 videos, ~25 minutes total):

This session moves from formulating scholarship questions towards deciding how you’ll answer them. What counts as data? What kind of data do you require in order to actually address the issue at hand, and how can you plan your data collection, management and analysis to make sure that’s achievable – especially when the data might be of an unfamiliar form? 

Depending on the details of a given scholarship projects, specific ethical approval might need to
be applied for, reviewed and approved before the work can begin. This session will explore ethical considerations for scholarship of learning and teaching, with an emphasis on research into the experience of the learners. We’ll also examine the process of designing an ethically sound methodology. Relevant ethics application forms and associated documentation will be used to give this session a significant practical ‘workshop’ feel. This workshop will appeal to staff preparing to undertake scholarship in any of the four colleges. College-specific documentation will be circulated to allow participants to contextualise their queries in relation to their own college. 

Questionnaires can notoriously be interpreted in different ways by different respondents, making your analysis of the responses difficult. Good question design can help to eliminate ambiguity and help respondents to provide you with meaningful answers. This workshop will combine theory and practice and will be delivered in three parts: 1) the theory of designing evidence-based questionnaires, 2) practice at developing a questionnaire, 3) feedback and discussion on proposed questionnaire designs, and issues arising.

This workshop will appeal to staff in all four colleges who are interested in undertaking scholarship, particularly around learner experience research. 

After collecting responses from human participants in, for example, interviews or open-ended survey questionssurveys, you need to decide how to categorise ing their responses. This session introduces you to coding of text and illustrates a variety of coding techniques in qualitative textual data analysis. It aims to position approaches to coding in the landscape of qualitative research and inquiry, and gives you the opportunity to practice during the workshop with real data. We’ll investigate why coding can be useful, what the benefits are and what pitfalls to be aware ofware, and when you might want to choose coding for your project – and what type of coding technique.

Ethnography is a method of investigation that looks at the situation (in this case, the teaching scenario) from the point of view of the culture and behaviour of the subjects being studied. This session will explore what ethnography is, how it works as a research approach in an educational context, what methods are related to ethnography, and some of the principles of ethnographic research. The session also introduces case studies as a methodology and explores their purpose within research and scholarship in higher education. 

This session offers an overview of the principles of observation as a research method. We’ll discuss issues around observation bias, interference with the observed, ‘going native’, and the significance of data derived through observation.

In contrast to research that starts with a hypothesis, “Grounded Theory is a form of qualitative research developed [...] for the purpose of constructing theory” from the observations upwards (Corbin, 2017).

This session is a brief introduction to the principles of Grounded Theory, and its applicability to educational scholarship. 

The Media & Digital Development experts in LEADS will take you through the basics of practical videography and explore the best use of software and equipment available for creating your own content. They’ll also give you an introduction on how to prepare and work with our team on developing professional videos 

In this workshop, we’ll explore the use of PBL as a small- group teaching method which promotes self-directed independent learning. This is an interactive and practice- based workshop, providing examples, ideas and tools to support staff who are thinking about developing this type of teaching. Traditionally used in medicine, we’ll consider how this approach can be of benefit to students from a wide variety of disciplines. 

Portofolio assessment is useful in letting students show (and reflect on) their progression through a course, and it provides multiple small opportunities for them to stay engaged as the course goes by. This session introduces the e-portfolio tool Mahara. We’ll look at what the tool offers, why you might want to use it, and examples of how it is being used with students in the School of law. 

Flipped classroom teaching means asking students to engage with content (such as videos, articles, activities) before class, meaning that classroom time can be used to explore concepts more collaboratively and dialogically. This session helps you consider how this might be implemented in your own practice.

The judging on Strictly Come Dancing is probably how the largest cross-section of the public are exposed to what
we would call assessment and feedback. The way marks are awarded, decisions are made and feedback given
can give an insight into how we assess and feedback on student work. We’ll use examples from these shows to
start a conversation about how we assess, the feedback we give, and what we might expect students to do with it. The session may help colleagues understand why students don’t always do what we would like them to do with the feedback we give. 

This session will introduce the concept of Constructive Alignment and will then use a workshop format to explore well (and poorly) written Aims and ILOs. Finally, you’ll get a chane to review and enhance any Aims and ILOs from your own discipline and / or Aims and ILOs you might currently be drafting. 

Building on the concept of Constructive Alignment (indtroduced in the previous session), this session will use a workshop format to and address how ILOs can be assessed. The workshop will look at a variety of assessment types and their pros and cons. You’ll be invited to consider the design of your own courses / programmes. 

We’ll discuss ideas of authentic assessment and provide examples of what we mean by this. We’ll then address authentic assessment in the context of your own teaching, and help you to consider how you might make the assessments you use throughout a course and / or programme authentic and relevant. 

This session focuses on what plagiarism actually means in an international context, and will demonstrate that (in some instances, at least) plagiarism is the result of cultural differences and not a crime! This session is based on a recent review of plagiarism- focused literature, and gives guidance on how to make your teaching, your expectations, and your materials more accessible and more explicit. 

Diverse cultural and educational backgrounds can have an influence on the performance and experience of international research students. This session provides a space to discuss experiences and challenges, and offers examples of good supervisory practice that you could think about adopting. The session also introduces resources that will be helpful to supervisors and their students on issues ranging from mental health to writing difficulties. 

This session will look at the growing imperative in HE Institutions to challenge assumptions about racial and civilisational hierarchies and their impact on academic study. The session will consider, through discussion and practical activities, why it might be important to challenge the historical contexts of knowledge and how, through considering course content, including biographies, you might make small changes to courses that can represent a more diverse student population and engage all students in challenging assumptions about knowledge.