Alex Stuart-Kelly is an Education and Scholarship (E&S) lecturer in the department of Neuroscience at Sussex (since 2022). Prior to this, his PhD and short post-doctoral research focussed on understanding the role of the major Alzheimer’s risk gene variant APOE4 on hippocampal function and rapid ‘everyday’ place memory. Additionally Alex has worked on understanding how APOE4 influences the network state and properties of neuronal ensembles following naturalistic behaviours.
Alex’s teaching focus is on core neuroscience on the undergraduate and postgraduate programme, alongside human physiology, and neuroscience research techniques. His scholarship interests include supporting widening participation and outreach for HE science programmes and student engagement in large group teaching settings.
Oliver Steele completed his BSc (Hons.) in Medical Sciences with PTY at the University of Exeter Medical School, before simultaneously undertaking an MPhil in Biomedicine and Research Associate position at Cardiff School of Biosciences during which his research interests in neurodegeneration and applied electrophysiological techniques were developed. Oliver then moved to Sussex to undertake his PhD in Neuroscience under the supervision of Dr Andrew Penn and Dr Ruth Murrell Lagnado, functionally assessing the electrophysiological impact of APOE isoforms in the murine hippocampus. Oliver has since joined BSMS as a lecturer in Physiology teaching across Phase 1 of the BM BS Course. Oliver is a Member of the British Neuroscience Association and a Member of the Physiological Society.
Oliver is a Member of the British Neuroscience Association, Society Representative for the Physiological Society and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
The project team also includes Dr Elaney Youseff, Dr Nicola Schmidt Renfree and Shalini Ram.
What we did
Through this project we have sought to understand what makes large group teaching more engaging and effective for students studying Life Sciences and Medicine. We collaborated on a student-led initiative, leveraging both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The goal was to identify teaching methods that genuinely resonate with students and enhance their learning experiences. For this we are using a variety of tools, including surveys, focus groups, and teaching evaluations, to gather insights from students about what works best in large group settings.
The project will include participation from a fourth-year medical student as part of their Individual Research Project (IRP). This project is a significant component of their penultimate year of study, where they undertake a research project that is roughly equivalent to a dissertation in other undergraduate courses. This student will be taking the lead on the research, collecting and analysing both quantitative and qualitative data, and contributing to the overall goals of the project.
Why we did it
The motivation behind this project stemmed from both existing pedagogical literature and student feedback indicating that students were more engaged and performed better when specific active teaching methods were employed. However, these methods were not universally applied across all teaching sessions. We wanted to explore this further, to not only confirm the effectiveness of these methods but also to provide evidence that could encourage furthering best practice among science educators. This project was born out of a desire to make large group teaching more effective and enjoyable, responding directly to student needs and improving overall educational outcomes. Moreover, active co-creation with students is a central to both gaining informative feedback on teaching and providing opportunities for students to build valuable project leadership skills.
How it works
We began by collecting preliminary data from Life Sciences students through surveys that measured different aspects of student engagement. This included their study habits, participation in class, and their responses to various active teaching techniques. Surprisingly, we found that while students reported that active techniques such as break out discussions, problem solving, and example primary data improved their engagement, they rated their own participation behaviours lower compared to other engagement metrics. This suggested a need for more consistent integration of interactive and structured approaches in large group settings, but also more opportunities to promote student confidence in active learning.
We also analysed student feedback on what they valued most in lectures. Predictably, students favoured lectures with a clear structure, embedded interactive elements, and those with elements that mimicked exam formats, supporting their preparation.
Future developments
Looking ahead, the project will continue with a more in-depth analysis of student engagement and learning outcomes. This will include a detailed examination of course analytics and more focused qualitative research through student-led focus groups, further dissecting the themes emerging from initial survey data. The ultimate goal is to use these findings to inform curriculum development and teaching practices across the Life Sciences and Medicine disciplines. We also plan to disseminate our findings through various channels, including conferences, internal review processes, and eventually, a co-authored publication with the student who will be leading the next phase of this research.
Top tips
Ask the students Don’t shy away from directly asking students what works for them. Their feedback is invaluable in shaping effective teaching methods.
Encourage student leadership Providing students with leadership opportunities in research and curriculum development can lead to more engaged learning and valuable insights.
Make it multi-disciplinary Make good use of opportunities for collaboration. Initiatives don’t just have to be departmental, they can be institutional and cross-institutional.
Dr Louise Newnham, a teaching focussed Senior Lecturer in Genome Stability in the School of Life Sciences, shares insights from her experience of using, since 2018/19, an oral exam (viva) as part of the assessment for a 30 credit masters module.
What I did
In 2018 I changed the assessment of one of my 30 credit masters modules from a heavily weighted exam, which asked students to write two essays from a choice of topics, to a greater emphasis on coursework (65% weighting) plus a 15-minute oral assessment (35%).
Why I did it
The module in question, Advanced Methods in Molecular Research, has a very practical focus and typically attracts a diverse student cohort, which includes a lot of international students.
My fellow tutors and I were prompted to move away from using written exams because it was clear they weren’t enabling our students to demonstrate knowledge we had clearly seen them demonstrate in the lab.
How it works
The oral assessment, which takes place in the assessment period, comprises four questions. The first is a short and simple ‘starter’ question with a straightforward right/wrong answer, followed by two ‘intermediate’ questions in which students may have to explain how something works. The final question is more advanced and asks students to discuss a particular method, its advantages/limitations and the broader context (e.g. examples of applications). The questions, drawn randomly from a question bank, are quite broad, to allow for discussion and elaboration. In fact, we try to keep it relatively conversational and will prompt students to elaborate if need be (the marking criteria allow us to factor in whether or not prompts were necessary). We’re also very happy for students to draw diagrams to support their explanation and to make notes before verbalising their answers. In fact, we encourage it.
Of course, some students may find this daunting. Therefore, from the start of the semester we emphasise that it provides excellent training for job interviews and for those considering a PhD which is assessed with a 3 hour+ viva. We also provide, in Canvas, an overview of the format and marking criteria and feedback from students on the value of participating in an oral assessment. We also run two workshops during term to help build students’ confidence and support them to do well in the exam in which students practice in pairs with example questions and students who feel they need more practice can request mock interviews. This supportive approach is possibly why all of our students have participated and the only reasonable adjustment requested, other than additional time, was for a student who wanted to write their answers down rather than verbalise them. This worked well as we were still able to give them prompts as we would have done if a verbal conversation. We’ve also run online orals for students who are overseas.
We allow 20 minutes for each viva: 15 minutes for the assessment and 5 minutes for the two markers to agree on their mark and write the feedback, guided by the model answers and mark scheme which contains specific criteria for each question type.
With breaks, this means we can get through 16 in a day so, for a cohort of 50 to 70 students, this requires three days of vivas, scheduled around exams. Overall, though, we find the workload generally equivalent to marking essays, with the distinct advantage that they are moderated in the moment.
Student feedback
Feedback from students is generally very positive. They are clearly appreciated by students who don’t thrive in written exams as it gives them an opportunity to showcase their knowledge in a different way. Students also liked fact the assessment was more ‘real world’ in that it felt more like a conversation one might have with colleagues in the workplace, and that assessment helped them develop skills they thought would be useful in interviews.
The negative feedback we receive on the oral assessment generally relates to specific questions or topics covered, e.g. when a topic a student had hoped for didn’t come up, or they were asked about a topic they were less keen on.
Top tips
In the first year, be prepared to invest lots of time up front developing your question banks (but once developed you need only tweak them from time to time, e.g. to refine them based on student performance and feedback).
Streamline the viva meeting, and save your voice, by giving students printed instructions in advance.
Empathy and understanding are crucial, as students may be nervous, as is flexibility and the recognition that students may have different ways of expressing their knowledge.
Schedule regular breaks, both to avoid fatigue and ensure quality feedback.
Please note
Since sharing her approach with Learning Matters, in August 2024, Louise has left The University of Sussex to pursue some new adventures. So, if you have any questions, please contact the new module convenor, Professor Neil Crickmore.
The Learning Matters Podcast captures insights into, experiences of, and conversations around education at the University of Sussex. The podcast is hotsed by Prof Wendy Garnham and Dr Heather Taylor. It runs monthly, and each month is centred around a particular theme. The theme of our second episode is ‘writing for scholarship, and we will hear from Dr Verona Ní Drisceoil, Reader in Legal Education (Law) in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology, and Dr James Williams, Senior Lecturer in Science Education and Communication in the School of Education and Social Work.
Recording our second podcast in the University of Sussex library
Recording
Listen to the recording of Episode 2.
Transcript
Wendy Garnham
Welcome to the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, where we capture insights, experiences, and conversations around education at our institution and beyond. Our theme for this episode is writing for scholarship, and our guests are Dr Verona Ní Drisceoil, Reader in Legal Education Law in the School of Law, Politics, and Sociology, and Dr James Williams, Senior Lecturer in Science Education and Communication in the School of Education and Social Work. My name is Wendy Garnham, Professor of Psychology.
Heather Taylor
And my name is Heather Taylor, Lecturer in Psychology, and we will be your presenters today. So, welcome everyone.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve published in terms of your scholarship?
(1:03) Verona Ní Drisceoil
Yes. Sure. I suppose to start with, one of the kind of bigger projects that I’ve been working on recently was a piece around transitions and well-being in in law schools, particularly. And in that piece, it was very much about kind of questioning the complexity of some of those concepts of confidence, of belonging, and, yeah, really trying to get into the teeth of that, I suppose, and how it’s different maybe for law students. So that’s one area of work that I’ve been working on.
In terms of other publications and scholarship, I guess, I’ve published lots of little bits on various teaching initiatives or various projects that I’ve been involved in in the law school. So by way of some examples, I wrote an article, for The Law Teacher on a land law teaching initiative that I know Wendy might remember some of that. So it was about embedding videos into the land law module, and the idea was bringing students on a virtual kind of land law field trip. So that was a really nice piece of scholarship as well, and I suppose maybe something that we might talk about later as well, is that kind of idea of where you can grow as a teacher or a scholar as well. So that was a really nice piece to write about.
Some other areas, I guess, that I’ve been working on broadly and some of the current pieces that I can maybe share with you as well is, assessment. So thinking about formative assessment. So wrote a piece asking us to think about how we approach formative assessment in higher education. And I guess I would say, generally, that we don’t maybe approach formative assessment in a very positive way that would maybe we can learn a lot from primary schools in that respect, secondary schools, and that that idea of kind of deliberate practice, so embedding deliberate practice into our teaching.
At the moment, if I may, I’ll just share what I’m kind of working on currently. So currently writing a book about authentic assessment in law, with some colleagues from the Law School, and also another piece on community and belonging. So there’s a wide range there, and I guess maybe that’s something that we can maybe talk about if you like. But, thinking about that kind of identity of my scholarship, I’m not sure that I’ve kind of quite found my identity in terms of scholarship. But I think broadly, I would say my scholarship, looks a lot or in kind of in engages with questions around skills and assessment for law students, but then secondly, tries to look at kind of inequality in legal education more widely.
(3:43) Heather Taylor
I think people, you know, also on the, Education and Scholarship track will probably be interested in where you’re publishing these things. So there’s quite a diverse range of different topics that you’ve written about. So where do you tend to publish?
Verona Ní Drisceoil
Yeah. Interesting. And I guess this is something that I’ve kind of been reflecting on myself as I’ve progressed through. Am I publishing in the right places?
I published a lot of short pieces in blog posts, and obviously, the Learning Matters blog has been excellent in that respect. I’ve also published in legal education related journals and publications and book editions as well. The book that I’m working on right now on authentic assessment is for Edward Elgar Publishing.
So I guess there’s a range there, and I suppose it is something, for us on Education and Scholarship tracks to think about and how we, you know, target publications or where we publish and so on and so forth. So, yep, there’s a range there.
(4:48) Heather Taylor
Same question to you then, James. Can you tell us a bit about what you’ve published in terms of your scholarship work?
James Williams
Yes. Of course. I mean my writing actually goes back a very long way. I started life as a secondary school teacher in terms of education. And after doing that for 12 years, I then moved into training science teachers.
Now, at that point, I was actually writing textbooks for children. So along with, two teaching colleagues, we wrote a series of textbooks that were, well, they were actually very successful. They were used in about 40% of all secondary schools. This is in the early 2000 and sold well over a million copies of the textbook. So that’s, you know, 1 element of, of scholarship if you like. And that’s I wrote the biology and my two colleagues, one wrote the physics, one wrote the chemistry. But when it comes to university and publishing, I’ve done a variety of things. So I’ve written, books for, teachers. For example, in, I wrote a book on leadership skills for teachers in schools. I then wrote a book on what’s called how science works. In other words, about the nature of science, which is actually an area of research that I’ve been undertaking for a number of years. And it was the subject also of my PhD. I also then published another book, which interestingly came out of the PhD, which was how to read and understand education research. And I’m currently working on a on a second edition of that. But in terms of other forms of writing, oh, all over the place, newspaper articles. I write a regular article every Thursday for the local Argus, called “Making Sense of It”. And that’s really an opportunity for me to engage with the local community, and to investigate things that I find interesting that I hope that they would find interesting. I’ve written, chapters of books, for publishers.
And a particular area of interest of mine is the history of evolution, the work of Charles Darwin and the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution. So I’ve written papers on Wallace, which have appeared in international peer review journals. I’ve written articles for professional magazines about Wallace, and also about Darwin. I did a chapter for a book which was about how Darwin saw science and how he built up his theories from the observations that he made on his travels. And I regularly write articles for professional associations. There’s one for science teachers called the Association For Science Education.And I regularly write articles for them. And that’s aimed obviously at an audience of secondary science teachers mainly. But I also dip into the primary area as well. So I think, you know, the question is what do we deem to be scholarship? You know, that’s the big question I think that everybody wants to be answered. And I think it is so many different things. And writing is not just writing an article for a journal. It can be lots of things. It can be blogs. It can be, articles for newspapers, professional magazines. It can be your own blog on your own site. So I think what I’d encourage people to do in terms of writing for scholarship is, you know, write about what you’re really passionate about, what you really know, and what you really understand. And that will shine through in your writing. And you’ll have far more chance, I think, of being published.
(8:32) Wendy Garnham
James, coming back to you. How did you get started with all of this writing?
James Williams
There’s a very simple answer to that question, which is when I was training to be a teacher. So I’d done a degree in geology, and I had specialized in evolutionary paleontology. And I didn’t want to become a geologist in the North Sea or do all of that sort of thing. I thought, what can I do? And I thought, oh, I know. I’ll go into teaching. And I had a tutor. His name was, Doctor. Bob Farebrother, retired now, but a wonderful man. And when I wrote an assessment for him, the feedback on my assessment in pencil sort of said, I think you’ve got a little bit of a gift for writing here. Have you ever thought about writing for a magazine? And, of course, I hadn’t. So I talked to him about that and he put me on to the Association For Science Education. They had journals. They had a journal for teachers called Education in Science and they had another journal, which is called School Science Review. So I started off by writing just one of these sort of magazine type articles, and it grew from there. And his advice was always write about what you know, you know, because then the passion comes through. Said if you artificially say, oh, I want to write about this because it’s popular at the moment, but I don’t really know anything about it. You’re not going to succeed. So write about what you know. That’s where it began. And as a result of that, I started publishing in educational newspapers. I’ve got a regular column in the newspaper. I was an agony uncle. So I was, helping students out with, issues, through questions and answers in the newspapers. I then had a science column which was called “Science Now and Then” where I looked at the history and present-day science, which was fantastic. And I did that for a good, oh, 10 years or more for the Times Educational Supplement. That then led to an offer to write textbooks for children.
Somebody had seen my articles and said, you know, would you like to write textbooks for children? And we teamed up, three of us. And as I said, we were incredibly successful. I’ve written two textbook series actually in in my career. And that then leads to lots of other types of writing. So I feel as if I’ve covered many different types of genre when it comes to writing. And that’s also then led to a lot of other opportunities for scholarship which are outside of writing. Things like, I did a television series for Channel 4, where I was a 1950s teacher of biology. And we had to teach the children 1950’s style, and everything was 1950s. It was it’s the hardest I think I’ve ever worked in my life because we did it genuinely, you know, 7 days a week. And it was a, 14-hour day when you were being filmed, you know, with these with these children. I’ve also then, done a lot of, radio stuff, certainly with the BBC, ITV, BBC Sussex. I’m regularly contacted to be the science, sorry, the education expert on that. And I go on and talk about, you know, what happens to be in the news this week about education that everybody’s up in arms about.
So you never know where your scholarship will take you. And the thing is, you know, not to try and narrow things down, but to be as broad as possible, and try and think of different audiences, different opportunities, and different places where you can publish because you never know who might spot what you’ve read.
(12:12) Wendy Garnham
So would you say then that really sort of illustrates the power of networking? It’s who you know that really sort of can help you.
James Williams
Yes, absolutely, Wendy. To a large extent, you know, opportunity leads to opportunity, and people put you in touch with other people. I mean, the book proposal that I’m preparing at the moment, I’ve got some study leave coming up. And I understand that that’s quite a rare thing on the scholarship track, but I’ve got it. So I’ve got a book proposal. Now the person who is interested in my book proposal was actually one of the editors of the textbooks I did 20 years ago. So, you know, you never know things come back around.
(12:53) Wendy Garnham
So over to Verona, same question. Just how did you get started with your scholarship writing?
Verona Ní Drisceoil
I guess just by way of some context, I think James picked up on this as well, kind of trajectory into higher education as well, and maybe that’s relevant to my story of scholarship. So I started off on a research and teaching track or education and research or whatever they’re called right now. So my, I guess, research area initially was on language rights. So that was my PhD area. Came to Sussex, and but I always, I guess, felt that maybe wasn’t my calling, and I was kind of very involved in education-related initiatives and so on and so forth in the department, and I suppose linked to what you said earlier, James, about something that you’re passionate about. Right? So I think there was just that natural sense that I was being drawn to this work, and then I requested to go on an Education and Scholarship track and found my tribe in that. And then it became much easier to write as well. And whilst I’m obviously very passionate and interested in language rights debates and so on, it maybe just wasn’t exactly what I wanted to pursue in my career trajectory. So I suppose that’s relevant to how I got started writing about scholarship.
And so for me, there’s an important maybe point as well, linking to what you were saying, James, about kind of if you’re on an Education and Scholarship track and you’re carving out your career trajectory and so on. I think there’s also potentially an important link between what roles you might be doing in the department or what you’re responsible for in the department or, you know, because that can inevitably open up other opportunities for you, and you, you know, you’re kind of passionate about something, so, for many years I was involved in the widening participation work in the Law School, and I think that brought me into literature around challenging structures and inequalities, and that’s always that’s coming through in my writing now as well. So I suppose, yeah, that’s how I got started. I’m not going to say that I found it really easy to make kind of the shift over, and I suppose something that James picked up on earlier, you know, what is scholarship or what you’re expected to do. So that was quite there was a different expectation when I moved over. And definitely, I would say that I had, some imposter syndrome around that as well. I was kind of starting over with my new research and so I did feel that was definitely a challenge, and we can definitely talk more about that if it’s of interest. So yeah, that’s how I guess I got started.
I would say there’s an important link to be made between kind of admin roles and other work that you’re doing in the department because, again, you might not be allocated lots of time for your scholarship in writing. So if you’re writing policies on feedback or you’re writing policies on x for your department, you know, you should really think about how you can think about creating that into something that might, you know, qualify as scholarship as well and in the many forms that that James has outlined.
(16:12) Wendy Garnham
It sounds as though for both of you, it’s about following your interests that really sort of sparked this sort of interest in writing the scholarship. Is that would you say that’s right?
James Williams
Yes. Because let me put it like this. If you’re not interested in it, why should anybody else be interested? You know, you’ve got to think quite carefully about the audience that you are writing for. And I came from obviously the science background and there is this terrible thing in science where they say, oh, you mustn’t bring yourself into your work. You know, you must stand outside and look in. You have to be on the outside. You mustn’t interfere or you can’t use pronouns like I and me or we. I mean, that’s oh, that’s terrible in science. But actually, you know, people don’t want to read that sort of prose. They want to feel invested and engaged in what it is that you’re writing about. So you have to make that connection and you can’t do it. I don’t think unless you have sparked a bit of interest in yourself in what you’re writing about.
And you know that that’s that for me is the key thing. I’d also say that Verona is absolutely spot on when it comes to the roles that you take on within a department. I’ve been at Sussex now for 21 plus years. And I’ve probably done nearly all of the roles apart from the two roles that I really didn’t want, which were Head of Department and Head of School. But those are for particular thoughts. I would it was the same reason why I came out of schools and went into university. Yeah. I was asked, you know, do you want be a deputy head or a head teacher? No. I don’t want to be that. I want to stay with my subject and my passions. I don’t want to be led off into admin. But I, you know, I’ve been a Director of Student Experience. I’ve led the team in terms of, initial teacher training. I’ve led the team in terms of, science education.
I’ve been an academic misconduct investigator. And I think people should also think about taking opportunities in the wider university as well. So for example, I work on the student discipline team. So I investigate cases from other areas. I sit on academic misconduct panels. And that gets you known across the University, but you’re also giving something very positive to the University. You’re helping the university to maintain its standards, to maintain its integrity. And those are really important things.
(18:55) Wendy Garnham
I guess that sort of speaks to the sort of broad nature of what scholarship is. Which brings us to, our next question, which I’m going to direct to you, Verona, which is about the impact that your writing has had for you, personally. Just what sort of impact has your scholarship writing had for you?
Verona Ní Drisceoil
Yeah. Absolutely. I think it links maybe to some of what I was saying earlier about that shift in my identity and also my value system, I guess, and my passions and feeling very aligned in that. So for me, you know, being involved in Education and Scholarship, writing about teaching, pedagogy, legal education, all of that, and all of the wonderful people that I’ve met because of that, is has been wonderful for me. And I feel, I guess, much happier. So not to sound all self-help like, but, I think that is important. You know? And I think we’ve that point about passion, your values, what you’re involved in, and what you’re contributing to is really important for us as academics. So it’s been a really positive impact for me, meeting people like all of you. I feel that it’s a really warm and wholesome space. Wendy, I remember hearing you speak before about making those external connections and networking and so on, and I did throw myself into that in terms of Twitter and social media and there’s been so many beautiful things that have come from that in terms of networking with legal education academics across the UK and Ireland. So has had a really positive impact? Not saying it’s always easy, right, but, generally, I would say, a really positive impact.
Wendy Garnham
I think sometimes it’s about just being prepared to move out of your comfort zone, isn’t it? And then these things can sort of really take off.
(20:58) Heather Taylor
So, Verona, you talked about this a little bit before, where you were saying about transitioning from being on an Education and Research track onto an Education and Scholarship track, and saying you had some challenges around sort of making that transition, a little bit of imposter syndrome. So I was just wondering, have there been any other sort of challenges you faced around doing your writing for your scholarship?
Verona Ní Drisceoil
Well, yes. I mean, I think you won’t be surprised by this answer. And listening to James, I’m like, how do you find all the time to do all this wonderful writing? You know? But I like everyone, I guess, we can often struggle with those differing demands in our roles, and if you have a heavy admin role, and there are things that you need to firefight and so on and so forth. So, I mean, I’ve had that challenge. The writing challenge. Finding space to write challenge.
I guess one other challenge that I found when thinking about the writing for scholarship, if we like, or writing in terms of legal education. For me, I didn’t have any specific training in in research methods, for example. So I came from a discipline where I wasn’t using kind of empirical work and research and so on.
So I suppose there was a part of that imposter syndrome because I think the kind of approach that you take is quite different to how I was approaching my work on language rights, which you might say was more desk based and so on. Whereas now, I’m thinking I want to do a lot more surveys with students. I want to do field work. I’m doing a project at the moment, experimenting with walking interviews, for example, but I didn’t have any of that type of training, let’s say, so I think that’s something that can be interesting for people that maybe are on an Education and Scholarship track, and maybe there’s that expectation that you’re going to do particular type of work, you’re going to use particular types of research methods and so on, and maybe you haven’t had any training in that.
And I think that can be a challenge for people on an Education and Scholarship track. It’s something I’ve had a conversation with Sarah about, and I think it’s something that might be rolled out at Sussex. So that was definitely a challenge for me.
Heather Taylor
What could be rolled out at Sussex with the training?
Verona Ní Drisceoil
I think more training for people that are on these tracks that maybe have come from various disciplines that may have not received training in that area. So I’d be interested in your thoughts on that.
Heather Taylor
I think as well, you know because obviously you’ve got really good knowledge about the topic. Finding somebody else who might have good knowledge about the methods, who wants to collaborate with you would be a really, really good idea as well.
Verona Ní Drisceoil
Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that’s kind of where the networking comes in. But, again, I suppose it’s the support structures around this, which I know I know we’ve all probably talked about those things, but, I mean, there’s been really great strides have made in that area, so supporting people with the development of their scholarship. But I think still it needs to be kept on the agenda, let’s say.
(24:25) Wendy Garnham
James, for you, what impact does your scholarship writing have, and what would you say the challenges have been for you?
James Williams
Impact is a difficult one. Again, what do you mean by impact? From a personal perspective, it’s a sense of satisfaction that I can write about the things that I really love writing about and that actually they are then appreciated by other people. And, you know, occasionally I’ll get, from a newspaper column, I’ll get an email that says, oh, I really liked your column in the newspaper. Oh, yes. I thought, you know, I agreed with you. I also get the ones that say, I think you’re totally wrong, which is which is fine. I don’t mind if people disagree, just as long as I don’t start calling me names. You know, you attack problems, not people. So there’s been the immense sort of, it’s almost like leaving a legacy. You know, I’ve got now, some grandchildren and it’s good to know that actually my textbooks, my written books, my newspaper articles, there’s a little archive of things. And, you know, they’re not going to read my PhD thesis. I mean, come on. Whoever does read this? But there is that sense, which is, you know, about the impact. And you never know where you will affect people because I’ve had people from overseas contact me about things or inquire about, oh, I found this, you know, can you tell me anything about it? Because it’s to do with Darwin or it’s to do with Wallace and all of those sorts of, aspects.
I made a great friend at Charles University in in the US who is another expert on Alfred Russel Wallace. And he and I communicate regularly now and we write, you know, we write about Wallace and we publish on a blog that he runs. And that’s been great to have that sort of impact. In terms of challenges, well, the challenges are always when you put your heart and soul into something and it doesn’t work. You know, the publisher says no, I don’t think this would be interesting for our readers, etcetera, etcetera. And you’ve got to get over the oh, that’s it. It’s because I’m a bad writer. It literally just could be this is the wrong time for that piece of work. Don’t throw it away. Keep it because I’ve had things that have been rejected, that I’ve gone back and updated and it’s been published because I hit the right publisher at the right time, You know, it’s a bit like JK Rowling, how many times was she turned down for Harry Potter? And then, you know, look what happened there.
(27:37) Wendy Garnham
I guess that sort of leads into our top tips. So really if you could share a top tip with listeners about writing a scholarship, what would your top tip be James?
James Williams
My top tip is that your writing has to involve people. If you don’t involve people, people tend not to be interested. So even if you’re writing about something which is, I don’t know, interesting historically. I wrote a piece recently about private education and people are not interested in the structure of private schools and the fact that it was set up in this, you know, at this time and it was supposed to be for the poor, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Those are just facts and people go, yeah, so what? So what you need to do is you need to find interesting characters and talk about the characters. So my top tip is always involve people in whatever you’re writing because people like to read about people.
Wendy Garnham
Top that one, Verona.
Verona Ní Drisceoil
I don’t think I can. That was really powerful, James. I love that. I guess linked to that in the sense of involve people, but not in the same way that you spoke about, but in order to do well in anything, I think, in life, you have to surround yourself with good people and people that lift you up and so on, and so I think that’s very relevant to writing about scholarship. So whatever you’re writing about, you know, surround yourself with good people, and I think that links to some of the points that were made earlier about networking, connection. So I think we’re aligned there, James, in that point, or that power of connection, let’s say, more widely. I hope that’s useful.
Heather Taylor
I agree with you that sometimes, you know, if you think about all the scholarship activities you might have done, so much of it comes out of little conversations, not even deliberate ones. You know, you might just be having a coffee with a colleague or something. And so I think, yeah, keeping a really sort of, other people, like you were saying earlier on about how much you admire James being so enthusiastic. You need a lot of enthusiastic people around you, I think, to keep enthused and to generate ideas and sort of roll with them. So, yeah, I completely agree.
Verona Ní Drisceoil
Just that idea of support, you know, we all really need that kind of support and structure. I might come in with a less interesting kind of tip, but I think we picked up on it earlier. I do think there is that point about if you are on an Education and Scholarship track and the admin point that we made earlier. Think about where you’re writing all this work, let’s say, your Director of Teaching and Learning or you are Director of Student Experience, or you are whatever, and you’ve been asked tasked with writing loads of these policy type documents with your own internal department, but how can you then maybe push that into another piece? So whatever you’re working on as well, think about how can this be more than just 1 piece.
James Williams
And if I could just come in with a second little top tip, which is to keep a notebook and write down ideas because you never know when an idea will happen. So for example, you know, as I say, I’ve got to come up with an idea every single week for my column in the in the Argus. And nobody tells me what to write. And I’ve been given carte blanche by the editor to write about whatever I want provided it’s not illegal or defamatory or all the rest. And literally, you know, this I’d normally do it on a Sunday, and I file it on a Monday or a Tuesday. And my wife said to me this week, she said what are you writing about this week? And I said, I haven’t got a clue. I don’t know yet, but I’ll find something. And then I read Twitter and Andrew Neil put out a tweet that said, of course, you know, this whole thing about, wind farms is rubbish. He said, think of how many days there are when there’s absolutely no wind whatsoever in Great Britain.
And I thought, well, that’s scientifically illiterate. That’s what I’m going write about. So this week, tomorrow’s Argus is going to be about solar farms, wind farms, and bioenergy and it’s all about alternative energy and it just came from one tweet. One thing that was said wrote it down and from there, that’s where it came from.
So keep a little notebook and when you’re having conversations with people and you think, well, that’s a good idea. Write it down because I can guarantee you that if you say, oh, I must remember that you will forget it?
Wendy Garnham
I have difficulty remembering where I put the notebook. That’s a different story. So I’ve only really got one thing to add, which is just I’ll take this opportunity to remind you, Heather, that we have a plan to write our next foundation year textbook. So, this is a good point where I can just, remind you that.
Heather Taylor
I would like to thank our guests Dr Verona Ní Drisceoil and Dr James Williams. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.
Wendy Garnham
This has been the Learning Matters Podcast from the University of Sussex created by Sarah Watson, Wendy Garnham, and Heather Taylor, and produced by Simon Overton.
The University of Sussex’s Annual Course Review (ACR) process provides an opportunity for review, reflection and evaluation of the delivery of our teaching and is a key part of the University’s quality assurance and enhancement framework. However, the ACR isn’t just about compliance, it’s also about continuous enhancement. Here we have pulled out just a few of the enhancement initiatives that Schools reported having put in place in 2022/23 to ensure that our courses remain student-centred, engaging and inclusive.
Inclusivity
In the School of Education and Social Work (ESW), the MA/PGDip in Social Work has created an excellent mentoring scheme through which international and global majority home students can access independent mentoring from an experienced Black Social-work educator. The School has also been diversifying reading lists and strengthening inputs on anti-oppressive, anti-discriminatory and anti-racist issues in teaching and learning. ESW has created virtual learning and practice-development workshops on these themes and updated module learning outcomes to make this focus more explicit in assessment.
In the Science cluster, the School of Engineering and Informatics have sought to increase female representation at applicant visit days and other external engagement activities as part of the School’s strategy to recruit more female students. Also, staff recruitment panels are now gender-balanced with an aim to enhance equal opportunities. These adaptations are intended to increase the female/male ratio in both the student and staff population, something which remains low across the sector. Additionally, the School of Life Sciences have created a BAMESci society which aims to provide support to all BAME students with as a focus on social, education, development, leadership, and communication themes.
Feedback
All of our schools reported a strong focus on improving feedback processes. The School of Psychology began running bespoke in-person training sessions on marking and feedback for doctoral tutors, while LPS have produced a document titled ‘Sussex Law School Marking Criteria Guidance’to help students better understand what is expected with respect to knowledge and understanding, engagement with sources, analysis and application, structure and presentation, and referencing.
The School of Global Studies are ensuring that all departments are embedding marking criteria within Canvas, as well as explained the criteria in class. Similarly, the School of Life Sciences are ensuring that students are accessing their feedback and are properly aware of all the feedback opportunities that are provided to them and how to best make use of this information to further their development. ESW saw a great improvement in the consistency and clarity of feedback, by ensuring that the feedback provided to students focuses both on strengths and areas for improvement.
As well as enhancing assessment feedback, we also saw improvements in collecting and acting on feedback from students. The University of Sussex Business School (USBS) created a School-wide feedback series which provided opportunities for staff and students to engage in conversations in an informal setting, supporting a sense of belonging and ensuring that student voices are heard in teaching related matters. Meanwhile the School of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (MPS) have made the decision to switch to early-term questionnaires, rather than mid-term, to allow for feedback to be addressed quickly and in a way that is visible to students.
Embedding skills
The School of Engineering and Informatics have been working closely with the Careers and Employability team to continue embedding employability in the curriculum. Within the School, Product Design have created a fantastic independent Canvas site where they engage students and staff with employability matters. MPS run a mandatory careers component which consists of weekly seminars and coursework as part of a Year 2 module. This helps improve the employability of students and the School is considering extending this initiative into Year 1 to enhance the exposure of the students to these skills.
In addition, Global Studies trialled offering PGT students a dedicated series of academic core skills workshops, led by Director for Postgraduate Taught Programmes, Dr Lyndsay McLean, which were well attended. This has been formalised into a zero-credit module and will be included in students’ timetables in the upcoming academic year.
In the School of Media, Arts and Humanities (MAH) students have been offered a number of experiential learning events. Each event was designed for a particular subject area in order to foster a wider sense of community and included intensive writing groups and workshops, research celebration days, employability sessions, social events, field trips to the theatre, art galleries, performances, and archives, visits to campus by artists, choreographers, writers, performers, and people from industry, and collaborative projects such as filmmaking. Many of the events that were run had a widening participation and/or employability related aspect, and in certain cases involved students working with community, third sector and voluntary organisations.
Curriculum changes and diversification of assessment
Regular reviews of and enhancements to courses has been a central theme. Psychology have implemented several changes to the curriculum this past academic year, including module changes to make courses more coherent and attractive and several new optional Year 3 modules to reflect the growth in faculty numbers. USBS have strengthened the rigour of the internal course review process and are continuing to work towards a completely integrated Assurance of Learning process.
Central Foundation Year have made a range of changes to modules which have had a positive impact on experience and performance. An example of this is the introduction of a problem-solving activity into weekly workshops that allows students to address challenges that have arisen during that week’s practical work.
And last, but certainly not least, a number of Schools have sought to diversify the types of assessments that students experience during their studies. In the School of Global Studies, International Development have introduced blogs and podcasts as forms of assessment, while Geography have been using learning portfolios, policy briefings, lab reports, field reports, concept notes and presentations to support learners to develop transferable skills. USBS have been increasing the use of innovative assessment modes that enable students to evidence learning in various ways, this includes the use of podcasts and business reports. Finally, in LPS, Sociology and Criminology ran a series of alternative assessment workshops for staff in the department which inspired a number of changes to module assessments.
The Learning Matters Podcast captures insights into, experiences of, and conversations around education at the University of Sussex. The podcast is hotsed by Prof Wendy Garnham and Dr Heather Taylor. It runs monthly, and each month is centred around a particular theme. The theme of our first episode is ‘scholarship leave’, and we will hear from Sue Robbins (Senior Lecturer in English Language) and Dr René Moolenaar (Senior Lecturer in Strategy) as they discuss the experiences and outputs of their recent scholarship leave.
Sue Robbins
Sue Robbins is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Director of Continuing Professional Development in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities.
René Moolenaar
René Moolenaar is Senior Lecturer in Strategy at the University of Sussex Business School and Associate Professor at the University of Queensland.
Recording
Listen to the recording of Episode 1.
Transcript
Wendy Garnham
Welcome to the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, where we capture insights, experiences and conversations around education at our institution and beyond. Our theme for this episode is scholarship leave, and our guests are René Moolenaar
Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Sue Robbins, Senior Lecturer in English Language. My name is Wendy Garnham. I’m professor of psychology and director of student experience for the Central Foundation Year Programmes, and I’m your presenter today. Welcome, everyone.
Okay, so my first question, which I’m going to direct to you, Sue, is what is scholarship leave and what prompted you to apply?
Sue Robbins
Thanks, Wendy, and thanks for inviting me. So at Sussex, colleagues on the Education and Scholarship track who are undertaking scholarship can request a semester of scholarship leave every three years. And I was awarded a period of leave from August last year to January this year, and I used it to complete the manuscript of an e-textbook, and to simultaneously prepare it for publication. So over the last couple of years, I’ve been using some of the time allocated to me for scholarship. We have a 20% allowance built into our contracts to write a textbook for learners of English as an international language, and I used the period to complete the manuscript and it was published in January this year, and it’s called Develop Your English with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, or Develop Your English for short.
So it’s an e text book for upper intermediate to advanced level English language learners pitched at approximately IELTS 6 to 7.5, if that’s something you’re familiar with, so it’s appropriate for undergraduate and postgraduate students. And I published it, with Open Press at University of Sussex, so it’s published under a Creative Commons licence and is free to access and use. The book integrates scholarship and professional practice in that it combines the application of second language acquisition theory to practice with the affordances offered by digital technology. I could say loads more about it but I probably won’t.
René Moolenaar
Thank you and thank you for inviting me. So for me, what prompted me to apply was, I’ve been with the School [University of Sussex Buisness School], for about 11 years at the time. So I did my scholarship leave in the autumn of 2022. So I’ve been 11 years there. I’ve also just finished the role of director of student experience, which is a rather challenging role. And I’d also just finished my doctorate in business administration and I thought this is the time to actually apply for scholarship leave and to continue my scholarship, based on the thesis that I wrote for my for my doctorate.
I thought it would be nice to do the scholarship leave at another institution, to get experience of another University. Of course I could have stayed in England with the University, but decided to go to the other side of the world and managed to get a place at the University Australian Centre For Water and Environmental Biotechnology, which is a bit of a mouthful. And a strange home for somebody who has worked in the Business School, since 2011. So yeah, this was kind of interesting.
Wendy Garnham
Really sort of quite diverse experiences, I think, during the notion of scholarship leap period. Could you give us an idea of what you sort of feel you achieved during that period of scholarship leave?
René Moolenaar
Yeah, so I took the topic of my thesis, which is all about how placements can support the development of a broader university-industry relationship, which is also how I pitched it to the center at UQ. For them that particular topic was really important, they do a lot of work together with industry. The framework I had developed to the local situation, and then to present my original findings and the findings from the study that I did there, to the Centre. Which they very much appreciated. They liked it a lot, given their interest in this particular field and they are actually in the process of applying the framework that I have developed.
Wendy Garnham
It sounds as though it was a very beneficial period of leave but to both of you, I just want to pose the question. Were there any unexpected outcomes from your period of scholarship leave? It was extremely beneficial,
Sue Robbins
Unlike Renee, I wasn’t in the other side of the world, I was sitting at home in my second bedroom working away at my computer. There were many, many different aspects to the management of this project, but what was really great was to have a single focus because a lot of our working lives, we manage so many different things on a daily basis that being allowed to just think about one thing for six months was a huge benefit, and I think it would have been difficult to complete the project without the scholarship leave. An unexpected outcome, is that I made an early decision to turn all of the written tasks that I’d made into interactive ones because I was working on a digital platform that allowed for interactivity, And not exactly inadvertently because it had been at the back of my mind, but I did give myself a substantial amount of extra work making that decision.
Wendy Garnham
It’s definitely a gold star for my active learning interest.
Sue Robbins
Yeah. The book is fully interactive. I used the content creation tool H5P, so all of the tasks are interactive and all of them have instant feedback so that students can self-assess at every stage how well they’ve done with every task. So it was definitely worth doing, but it hadn’t formed part of the original plan.
Wendy Garnham
How easy was it to use H5P?
Sue Robbins
It’s fairly straightforward. I’ve used it before, so I was very familiar with it. I’d created a short course for the Department of Language Studies a couple of years ago, a short online course in which I’d used it. I think of all the content creation tools, HP5 is the easiest to get to grips with. There is a learning curve, but it doesn’t stress you too much to understand how the tool works.
The only thing really is that the back end of the tool looks absolutely different to the front end. So you have to get used to that. Yeah. But I’ve tried a range of content authoring tools and for me this one is the easiest to get to grips with.
Wendy Garnham
René. How about you? Any unexpected outcomes?
René Moolenaar
Yeah. The very pleasant and unexpected outcome was that I was offered an adjunct associate professorship of University of Queensland (UQ), which was very nice. I had not anticipated that clearly, but on the penultimate day of my stay there, I had a meeting with the director of the Centre and they suggested that I should become an adjunct. Which after some discussion and sort of trying to understand a bit more what that would actually mean, how much work do I need to do and such things, we agreed that I should do that, went through the formal process and was offered that, I think about a couple of months later.
Wendy Garnham
Thinking ahead in terms of the impact of your scholarship leave, what impact has your scholarship leave had on the academic community or what impact do you hope it will have?
Sue Robbins
Yes, so publishing with Open Press here at University of Sussex, rather than with one of
the big English language teaching publishers, which I’ve done in the past, it gave me much more freedom in the design of the material. And Develop Your English is innovative in the field of English language teaching in that the content incorporates global perspectives into the into the language learning process, because it focuses on international themes which I’ve organised around each of the, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
It gave me an opportunity to think about how language education can play an essential role in sustainability literacy because potentially the market for the book is enormous, potentially, and sustainability literacy can be developed through the use of the textbook. So that’s something that could potentially shape the field in a way that it hasn’t been shaped before. And in terms of international impact, it’s also the case that English language textbooks, the cost of them is prohibitive in many low-income parts of the world, which leaves very many learners without access to good quality material.
So using this digital platform offered via, Open Press, there’s the potential of reaching those learners that isn’t there currently, and in order to make that more possible the book can now be offered in a range of formats, so it is essentially an e-textbook, but it can also be accessed in e-Pub format which means it can be used offline, and this is important because many learners in many parts of the world, if we think about, digital poverty, don’t have access either to a good internet connection or to, hardware. So it can be used as an e-textbook, it can be used offline as an e-Pub, and it can also be downloaded as a PDF which means places where, where people really don’t have good access to the things they need. Assuming one time access to a printer, it can be downloaded and printed out and used as a hard copy. Obviously, that loses the interactivity, but there’s a full answer key in that version. So thinking about sustainability literacy, which is important, and thinking about, access and equity, it has the potential to address both of those things. Yeah, I mean it ticks so many boxes I think that are real sort of hot topics within scholarship at the moment, so I’m sure it’s going to have a really big impact on the community.
The difficulty will be, promoting it. Open Press is a small press and it’s very new, So it’s how we get people to know that it’s there will be the next challenge to try and overcome.
Wendy Garnham
Looking at impact, René, how about you? What impact?
René Moolenaar
Yeah. It’s a good question. So the original framework I developed was based on the study I did at Sussex. And whereas I thought it was already fairly complete, going over to a different university on a different continent, different parts of the world, it was interesting through the data collection process and reflecting and challenging my own framework to find out that it wasn’t Although good parts sort of survived of it, clearly there were elements of it that needed updating. Partly specific to the local environment but also clearly with a much broader application, as well.
So I ended up with an improved version of the of the framework, that is now being applied, which is kind of interesting. It’s interesting to pick something up that you developed in one situation to then take it to another situation. In this case we went from a Business School situation to, in fact, a center that was in the Information Technology and Chemistry department. It’s an entirely different situation.
And data and then to see how well your your framework can be applied to a very different situation. So that was an interesting process and it led to an improved version of the of the framework.
Wendy Garnham
I mean it sounds from both of your perspectives as diverse as your experience was that you’ve really gained a lot from it academically and professionally. How about personally? Would you like to sort of say something like what was the experience of being on scholarship leave?
Sue Robbins
It’s difficult to separate the professional from the personal to be honest. Yeah. Because they interact so strongly, don’t they. In terms of scholarship. But it was really rewarding to have that time to just I think I said early on to just focus on one thing. Yeah. Which isn’t something it’s not something we normally have space to do. So I was able to complete something that I’d been working on for several years already and I think without the leave it would have taken me several more to be honest. So it was it was rewarding, I mean, and it was really interesting. And also having access to Open Press and to the Open Press team was a joy because they share a lot of my, I’m going to say passion, it’s an awful word isn’t it, but they share a lot of my passion for open practices generally, and so it was really nice to spend time talking through what we were doing with people who had a similar outlook.
Wendy Garnham
Did you find it difficult managing your time?
Sue Robbins
No. Well, I say no in the sense that I I tended to overwork during that period because I knew it was a finite amount of time and I knew I wanted to get the project done, I did go at it. Yeah. And, and so managing it in the sense of, you know, don’t wear yourself out, was perhaps the challenge. Yeah.
Wendy Garnham
How did you find that, René?
René Moolenaar
I agree with Sue that the two interact very much, the personal and the professional if you like. But from a time perspective, given that I was at UQ for eleven weeks, I had to (and early on they had already said, René you’re going to present in the penultimate week), that gave a real deadline by which I need to have completed all the additional research, reflection and evaluate the impact on my framework and then of course to present. So, there was not really an option to do it a week later or something, this had to be done. It was actually quite, I’m sort of part time, it’s important to say that I’m part time here at the University, so I’m still in industry.
And given that I sort of went from industry into academia fairly late compared to younger colleagues, my experience of other Universities was limited. So to actually spend time for eleven weeks long at another University’s properly embedded in is just, it’s just very interesting to learn how they work, the challenges they have compared to the challenges that we have, the successes etc. Of course you’re extending your network of contacts which is amazing. But I think almost above all, being awarded, applying for scholarship leave is not easy because there are limitations of course, the number of people in a department that can go on scholarship leave. So to be awarded it is kind of special.
And it gave me a feeling of an element of reward. I’m being appreciated by being awarded the scholarship leave. Because at the end of the day, you know, we’re able to focus on a particular topic, scholarship topic, with continuing sort of pay and that’s clearly very nice. So yeah, this it was it was kind of amazing, it lifted my spirits, I came back almost rejuvenated and there’s renewed energy to take on, you know, the role that we have, which is a challenging role to combine often a significant teaching workload with a scholarship workload.
Often the scholarship piece gets compromised because of the teaching element that we need to do and to be given time to focus on the scholarship element I think is fantastic. I think it’s needed. I think it’s absolutely needed and fundamental to our own development and the development of our colleagues because we’re clearly spreading, if like, the word, what we are doing. But I think it’s also very nice to for this idea of there’s an element of rewards here.
Wendy Garnham
I guess that sort of links into our next question, which is about advice that you would give to anybody contemplating taking a period of scholarship leave.
Sue Robbins
I think at any given moment most of us could come up with a range of scholarship projects that we’re either already tackling or are really interested in or would like to pursue, and I suppose given that as René said, this scholarship leave is a gift, and it’s one that, you know, is precious and it might not come round very often, it’s worth thinking about is there something that actually you really need that time to complete, or you’d really like to be able to complete or carry something out in that time that you might not be able to do without it. Because we do have, and it isn’t enough, but we do have that twenty percent built into our contracts where we can keep chugging along with lots of stuff. So is there something that you really want and that you really need that time for, and can you really do it in that amount of time? How much can you achieve in 6 months is a big question to ask yourself. But do it because undertaking and undertaking and sharing scholarship is really important work.
René Moolenaar
Adding definitely to what Sue was saying, for me the piece of advice would be to prepare for it. It took me something like a year from thinking I’m going to apply to actually go on scholarship leave. And of course perhaps in my case it was maybe slightly different because I wanted to go to another university. I was absolutely set on that, and that that’s not easy. And I thought it would be easy. I thought I’ll just talk to some colleagues from around the world and I’m sure they can find me a desk somewhere. And absolutely not. Colleagues that really have very good relationships with other universities. I’ve tried but no, I think it would have been different if I was a professor with a long list of publications under my belt and a name in a certain field. It probably would have been different. But that was not me. And so to find an open door somebody, somewhere was hard, was difficult. Took me quite a few months to find it. So yeah, definitely about prepare prepare prepare. So you may not even get it with your first application, because of maybe a limited number of colleagues that can go in that particular term or that particular year on scholarship leave. So it may you may need to apply twice to get it.
Wendy Garnham
As we all know, the importance of feed-forward is forever at the front of our minds as good good, scholarship individuals. So I guess 1 thing it would be good to leave our listeners with is some suggestion for further reading or a resource that might be of use. So if you could name one resource or article or any sort of further study, what would you suggest?
Sue Robbins
So in terms of educational for sustainable development or, sustainable literacy if you like, Christiane Lütge has written a lot in this area in terms of relating that to language teaching, and she’s really worth following up and having a look at. But I can’t not say, please do have a look at my book. Yeah. So do Develop your English with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. You might want to share it with your international students. You might want to see how the goals can be integrated into the learning process, not necessarily just in language but in any discipline. You might be interested to see how H5P works in practice, or you might just be interested in having a look at our own Open Press site which includes lots of, other books including some edited by Wendy. So I’ll just leave it there.
René Moolenaar
I think on the topic of scholarship leave or study leave or sabbatical, there are a number of journal articles published, I even found one that went into the history of it. And it going back to explaining the name sabbatical and when Harvard in, I think it was 1880 or something started this, that after six years of work you could then have one year of sabbatical. Anyway, so a number of articles on the topic. The book that at least one found two books on the topic, I haven’t read either of them, but one struck me with an interesting title. It says The Academic Sabbatical A Voyage of Discovery.
It was published in 2022 and I thought it is very much a voyage of discovery. It gives you an opportunity to go on a journey and to discover and to continue with scholarship or to discover another university or to discover certain interests that you may have that you want to develop going forwards in the field of scholarship. So I think that that’s an interesting book that I actually might well buy and or suggest a library to acquire, that might be an interesting read.
Wendy Garnham
All of these including a link I believe to Sue’s book will be in the episode description for anybody who would like to follow-up on those. That brings us to the end of our podcast on scholarship leave. So I would like to thank our guests, René Moolenaar, Senior Lecturer in Strategy. Thank you. And Sue Robbins, Senior Lecturer in English Language. Thank you.
And thank you for listening. This has been the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, created by Sarah Watson and Wendy Garnham and produced by Simon Overton. For more episodes as well as articles, blogs, case studies and infographics, please visit Learning Matters
Gardner, S.K. (2021) ‘Faculty learning and professional growth in the sabbatical leave’, Innovative Higher Education, 47(3), pp. 435–451. doi:10.1007/s10755-021-09584-4.
Macfarlane, B. (2022) ‘The academic sabbatical as a symbol of change in higher education: From rest and recuperation to hyper-performativity’, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 45(3), pp. 335–348. doi:10.1080/1360080x.2022.2140888 .
Clare Harris, Senior Teaching Fellow in Creativity and Design, and Alexandre Rodrigues, Lecturer in Product Design, explain how they implemented the use of screen recordings to enhance their feedback.
Clare has a background in design and extensive experience working in the creative industries. Her teaching primarily focuses on creative thinking, processes, and practices. Since 2016, she has been a part of the Product Design Team at the University of Sussex, where she teaches Drawing for Design, Experience Prototyping, Interaction Methods, and Toy and Game Design. Clare is also the module convenor for the Final Year Projects. Additionally, she has taught Design at the University of Southampton (Winchester School of Art), Brighton University, and the Open University. Clare lives in Hastings with her partner, her cat, Pywacket, and her dog, Moss. Her hobbies include pottery and border Morris dancing, and is proud to be a member of the Hastings Punk Choir.
Alexandre is a Lecturer in Product Design in the School of Engineering and Informatics, Department of Engineering and Design. He received his PhD from Nottingham Trent University in 2019. He is a Sussex Education Award winner. His research thesis in sustainable production and consumption contributes to understanding how the social facet of socio-technical transitions can help replace the car culture status quo and provide opportunities for nudge policy action using Cultural Theory and the Theory of Interpersonal Behaviour. His current educational interests are in using Virtual and Augmented Reality as tools for teaching and learning in Product Design. Alexandre is a SCITECH C-REC committee member.
What we did
We started to use video feedback for Final Year Project supervision with our Product Design students. When marking we create a screen recording as we go through the student’s Canvas submission, giving comments verbally and directing students to different areas of their work on the screen. Within Canvas you can click on the attached marking rubric which appears next to the assignment. You can then use this to structure your feedback, taking it section by section as your marking so the students are basically seeing what you see when you’re marking.
We really talk them through the process as we mark, in terms of what they did well, where they didn’t do quite so well. As you are screen recording you can also go back through the module’s Canvas site remind them of, for example, one of the Padlet exercises they’ve uploaded to week four. It just means that the feedback your giving becomes a lot clearer a lot quicker.
When compared to written feedback, video feedback is more nuanced to the individual submission and that student’s needs. It also allows for a greater degree of personalisation.
Why we did it
Initially, about three years ago, we shared a final year student who was neurodiverse and we had to try to be really explicit about what we expected of them and very clear, but obviously keeping a friendly tone. So we decided to experiment with video feedback for that and realised the benefits quite quickly.
It felt like you could say an awful lot more and were able to say it in a very nice, encouraging way. We could actually pinpoint bits of the submission that needed improvement, conveying a lot more information succinctly.
Moreover, if English is not your first language it can sometimes be a struggle to write the right feedback with the correct tone. It can be worrying thinking that your writing might be misinterpreted and perceived as being more negative than was intended. There is great benefit to being able to hear an encouraging or more positive tone.
Challenges
Time is needed to have a look around and experiment with different tools. You want something that is going to be easy to use and to edit if needed. We use ScreenFlow and PowerPoint, but there are so many different tools available. Your School’s Learning Technologist will be able to help.
One key element to have in place is a detailed rubric/marking scheme beforehand. This will allow you to stay focused while you record and helps to maintains consistency across your cohort. Your School’s Academic Developer will be able to support you in creating or updating your marking schemes.
Impact and student feedback
We’ve had some really positive feedback from students. One thing that has happened is that students have responded to our feedback, they’ve actually said thank you for the feedback. Whereas normally your feedback goes out there and then that’s kind of it, it’s very much one way. Now there’s a dialogue between us and the students, they’re giving us feedback on feedback!
We’ve also noticed there’s less confusion around why students got a particular grade, or what they haven’t quite got right. As we are presenting their feedback alongside the criteria students seems to have a little better understanding of it. Now students are reading and engaging with the marking criteria ahead of their assessments.
Future plans
We intend to continue using video feedback across the different modules that we teach and to extend this to additional modules and assessment modes.
Top tips
Make sure that you have a rubric/marking scheme in place because that’s the thing that’s going to keep everything consistent, focused and fair.
Personalize your feedback, address the student by name and reference specific aspects of their work to show that you’ve engaged with their submission.
Use whatever software works best for you.
Keep it manageable, around 5-7 minutes, to maintain the student’s attention.
Speak calmly and keep it positive, the tone is really important.
Please join us for the second Sussex Education Festival, an event for anyone involved in delivering education at Sussex. The event will be held over two days. You can attend the Festival in-person (9.30-4pm on 10 July) in the Woodland Rooms at the Student Centre and/or online (10-3pm on 11 July). Please see the programme for further information.
The Festival will consist of a number of different session types, including panel discussions and interactive workshops, which are focused around themes such as alternative assessments, student engagement and wellbeing, generative AI and environmental sustainability. We look forward to seeing you there to celebrate all the amazing work that goes into teaching, learning and assessment here at Sussex! Please sign up via our registration form.
Dr Matteo Madotto, Lecturer in Economics, University of Sussex Business School.[1]
Introduction
When designing multiple-choice quizzes (MCQs), an important decision to make is whether or not to apply negative marking to incorrect answers. The main rationale for penalizing wrong answers is to discourage “guessing”, i.e. situations where students are very uncertain about the correct alternative and decide to answer more or less at random in the hope of getting it right by chance. Indeed, without negative marking rational students would have an incentive to attempt all questions, even those where they have absolutely no clue about the correct answer, since they would always get a positive score in expectation (e.g. Budescu and Bar-Hillel, 1993; Prieto and Delgado, 1999; Bereby-Meyer et al., 2002; Betts et al., 2009; Lesage et al., 2013; Akyol et al., 2016). On the other hand, one of the main concerns with negative marking is that it might end up being discriminatory against female students. Indeed, evidence suggests that females tend to be more risk averse than males, which, for an equivalent level of knowledge, may lead them to answer less questions and be unfairly disadvantaged when negative marking is applied (e.g. Burton, 2005; Espinosa and Gardeazabal, 2010; Lesage et al., 2013; Akyol et al., 2016).
In this short article, I present the results of five MCQs with negative marking taken by 900 undergraduate students at the University of Sussex Business School between 2021 and 2023, and analyze how these tests performed along the two main dimensions highlighted above, i.e. guessing and gender bias.
All quizzes contained 20 open-book questions, each of which had 4 possible alternatives with only one correct answer. The order of both questions and answers was randomized to reduce collusion among students. Each correct answer was worth 5 marks, each unanswered question was worth 0 marks, while each incorrect answer was worth -2 marks. The overall score was computed as the sum of the marks, with a minimum floor of 0. Students were made aware beforehand of this marking scheme. They, however, were given no strategic advice on when they should attempt a question, so as not to bias their choices in either direction. The negative marking of -2 ensured that a student with absolutely no clue about the correct answer to a question, i.e. a student who assigned an equal probability to each of the alternatives, would get an expected mark of approximately 0 (specifically -0.25) by answering the question, as is typically considered appropriate in the case of MCQs with negative marking (e.g. Budescu and Bar-Hillel, 1993; Prieto and Delgado, 1999; Bereby-Meyer et al., 2002; Lesage et al., 2013).
Guessing and gender bias
To determine whether or not random guessing remains an issue even when negative marking is in place, we look at the average ratio between the percentages of students who selected the most popular and the second most popular incorrect alternative per question, and that between the most and the least popular incorrect alternative per question. If students assigned an equal probability to all alternatives and answered completely at random, then both these ratios would be approximately equal to 1. As can be seen in Table 1, however, this does not seem to be the case at all for both males and females, regardless of the level of difficulty of the test.[2] On the contrary, in most questions there are both a popular incorrect alternative, which appears plausible to a relatively large number of students, and a very unpopular one, which is chosen by few of them. Specifically, from Table 1 we see that in four of the five tests the most popular incorrect alternative per question is chosen by a percentage of students which on average is about 4 to 10 times larger than that of the second most popular one, and 6 to 16 times larger than that of the least popular incorrect alternative.[3] Only in one quiz the two ratios are substantially lower (see more on this below). Of course, here it is not possible to determine how much of this is due to the presence of the negative marking itself; however, it appears that one of the main apprehensions surrounding MCQs, i.e. guessing by students, is rather limited when such marking scheme is implemented. Those students who decide to answer and choose the wrong alternative seem to do it out of incorrect knowledge rather than no knowledge at all.
Test number
Number of males
Number of females
Average score
Score standard deviation
Average ratio between % of most popular and second most popular incorrect answers – Males
Average ratio between % of most popular and second most popular incorrect answers – Females
Average ratio between % of most and least popular incorrect answers – Males
Average ratio between % of most and least popular incorrect answers – Females
1
189
93
63
22.5
6.3
7.3
16.4
14.5
2
179
77
39
23.8
4.4
4.4
7.5
10.2
3
75
27
56
18.2
10.4
4.8
10.4
8.6
4
98
35
53
23.2
5.5
3.7
8.2
5.7
5
93
34
56
21.3
2.4
1.9
6.0
3.2
Table 1
Turning to the second main question of the article, we analyze whether MCQs with negative marking are discriminatory against females. Data on the gender of individual students were not available, therefore we used students’ names as a proxy for their gender. Summary statistics and two-tailed t-tests for total scores are shown in Table 2, while those for the number of unanswered questions are in Table 3. In four of the five quizzes, both scores and unanswered questions of females were not significantly different from those of males at any conventional significance level. In one quiz, however, females performed worse than males at a 1% significance level and left a larger number of questions unanswered at a 10% significance level.
Test number
Male average score
Female average score
Male scorestandard deviation
Female score standard deviation
t
p-value
1
62.7
62.7
21.0
25.5
0.004
0.997
2
38.4
41.0
24.4
21.8
-0.825
0.411
3
54.9
58.5
17.2
21.2
-0.782
0.439
4
53.6
52.7
22.2
26.4
0.180
0.858
5
59.5
47.5
20.0
22.5
2.734
0.009
Table 2
Test number
Male average of non-responses
Female average of non-responses
Male standard deviation of non-responses
Female standard deviation of non-responses
t
p-value
1
0.8
1.1
1.6
2.3
-1.023
0.308
2
1.9
2.2
2.9
2.3
-0.702
0.483
3
0.4
0.6
1.0
1.1
-0.854
0.398
4
1.1
1.5
1.7
1.8
-1.058
0.295
5
1.5
3.0
2.8
4.2
-1.895
0.065
Table 3
A possible trade-off
As Tables 2 and 3 show, one of the most common concerns about MCQs with negative marking, i.e. that they may discriminate against female students, does not appear substantiated in most of our cases. However, comparing the results in these two tables with those in Table 1, we see that the only quiz in which females performed significantly worse than males and left a larger number of unanswered questions (namely test 5) is exactly the one in which students seemed more uncertain about the correct answers, as measured by the relatively low values of the two ratios in Table 1. It may be therefore the case that gender bias occurs precisely in those situations where random guessing is more likely and hence negative marking would be more useful. This may be because differences in the risk attitude of students start playing a role exactly when the latter are sufficiently uncertain about the correct answer, i.e. when they assign similar probabilities to all alternatives.
To avoid this trade-off, it may be sensible to design questions such that at least one of the alternatives would appear highly unlikely to those students who possess a minimum level of knowledge, allowing them to assign higher probabilities to the remaining options. In this way, negative marking would discourage random guessing by those students with a very low knowledge level, without excessively reducing the incentives to answer of the more knowledgeable students, regardless of their risk attitude.
References
Akyol, S. P., Key, J. and Krishna, K. (2016) “Hit or miss? Test taking behavior in multiple choice exams” NBER Working Paper 22401.
Bereby-Meyer, Y., Meyer, J. and Flascher, O. M. (2002) “Prospect theory analysis of guessing in multiple choice tests” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 15(4), 313-327.
Betts, L. R., Elder, T. J., Hartley, J. and Trueman, M. (2009) “Does correction for guessing reduce students’ performance on multiple-choice examinations? Yes? No? Sometimes?” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 34(1), 1-15.
Budescu, D. and Bar-Hillel, M. (1993) “To guess or not to guess: a decision-theoretic view of formula scoring” Journal of Educational Measurement, 30(4), 277-291.
Burton, R. F. (2005) “Multiple-choice and true/false tests: myths and misapprehensions” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 30(1), 65-72.
Espinosa, M. P. and Gardeazabal, J. (2010) “Optimal correction for guessing in multiple-choice tests” Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 54(5), 415-425.
Lesage, E., Valcke, M. and Sabbe, E. (2013), “Scoring methods for multiple choice assessment in higher education – Is it still a matter of number right scoring or negative marking?” Studies in Educational Evaluation, 39(3), 188-193.
Prieto, G. and Delgado, A. R. (1999) “The effect of instructions on multiple-choice test scores” European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 15(2), 143-150.
[1] I would like to thank Ana Carolina Tereza Ramos de Oliveira dos Santos for her excellent work as research assistant.
[2] It is often hard to properly calibrate the level of difficulty of an MCQ, especially when this is administered for the first time, and indeed one of the test turned out very difficult for students. Of course, similar issues can occur with or without negative marking. The presence of the latter, however, tends to amplify the impact of miscalibration to a certain extent.
[3] The average ratios in Table 1 can actually be thought as lower bounds, since these are computed excluding those questions for which the denominator of the ratio would have involved an answer not chosen by any student.
Farai is Associate Dean (Education & Students) in the University of Sussex Business School and Professor in the Department of Economics. She has several years’ higher education teaching experience in statistics, development economics and other applied economics topics. She has also worked for several international development agencies in the past.
There is increased emphasis in the UK higher education sector on measuring the impact of the education provided by universities to students on acquiring the knowledge, skills, and other competencies outlined in degree programmes. In 2023 the Office for Students asked education providers to present what ‘educational gains’ they intend their students to achieve, what support they offer students to achieve them, and what evidence they have that students are succeeding in achieving these. While the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) focuses on measures of continuation, completion and progression, educational gain also encompasses areas such as knowledge, skills, personal development and work readiness. However, the definition of educational gain is quite open-ended and leaves room for providers to conceptualize and articulate their interpretation of it in practice.
Accreditation is an important process for Business Schools globally. As part of AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) accreditation Business Schools must demonstrate they have a systematic process of Assurance of Learning (AoL). Assurance of learning (AoL) is about demonstrating, through assessment processes, that students achieve learning expectations for the programs in which they participate. It involves the use of robust, systematic and sustainable assessment processes designed to improve the learning of students. It is about process improvement and can also be the key driver of curriculum change.
Curriculum alignment
One of the early steps in the Assurance of Learning (AoL) process is curriculum alignment, where school learning/competency goals and course[1] learning objectives/outcomes are mapped on the curriculum. The focus here is on the common learning experience of students enrolled on the course. Curriculum alignment is important as the mission of the school (that is, what the school does) must align with the education the school offers. Hence, it is crucial to ensure that the school’s competency goals (e.g., sustainability, responsible leadership, collaboration) are reflected in the curriculum in a manner that allows students to develop that skill, knowledge, or attitude.
Step 1: Conceptual
An important initial step of the AoL process is articulating the overall competency goals of the school. For example, the University of Sussex Business School (USBS) has five competency goals which stem from its mission statement, namely:
Demonstrate appropriate discipline-specific knowledge using relevant methods and technologies
Work effectively in a team
Be responsible students and citizens
Communicate effectively with different audiences
Demonstrate the ability to work independently and apply critical thinking skills to develop innovative solutions
We expect the education we offer our students to enable them to acquire the above competencies by the time they graduate.
Step 2: Operational statements
The USBS offers many courses (i.e., degree programmes). Each course has its own learning outcomes/objectives. As part of AoL course learning objectives are mapped to the school competencies outlined in step 1 making explicit the curriculum alignment, that is, the relationship between the Business School’s overall goals and objectives and what is offered to students at the course level. A course typically has additional bespoke learning objectives that may not necessarily map one-to-one with school competencies which serve to differentiate the differences across courses.
Step 3: 1st Measurement (opening the loop)
The next step of AoL is measuring whether we have delivered on our course learning objectives, that is, have our students acquired the course/degree level competencies we promised to deliver? Thus, an important aspect of AoL is to have a benchmark of what constitutes a course cohort having satisfactorily met the learning outcomes. For example, 80% of students achieving a pass mark on a course learning outcome at first attempt can be considered satisfactory performance. ‘Exceeding’ and ‘meeting’ the learning outcome are also differentiated. The former refers to a distinction mark while the latter refers to any pass mark below distinction. The benchmark for satisfactory performance does not have to be generic across courses. What matters is the rationale behind the benchmark.
Direct measures
Assessments are a key indicator of the extent to which students have learned what we taught them. To determine course cohort performance on a course learning outcome select core module assessments are mapped to each course learning objective. In some cases, there may be capstone assessments offered at the course level which align with specific course learning outcomes. In addition, either formative or summative assessments could be used to measure learning outcome performance, or a combination of the two. Where there is no suitable core module, optional modules that are representative of the course cohort can be used instead.
In practice a whole assessment component can be a suitable direct measure. For example, an essay assessment can be a suitable measure for the learning outcome “Demonstrate an advanced understanding of management information systems using a range of concepts, theories and technologies”. However, in other cases, only certain aspects of the essay may be relevant to ascribe to a particular learning outcome. In this case, the marker must distinguish within the marking what parts of the assessment relate to the course learning outcome. For example, a dissertation may be a suitable assessment to measure the following learning outcome: “Understand the role of ethics in the evolution of innovation, change and contemporary issues in management”. However, it may not be appropriate to ascribe the whole dissertation mark to this learning outcome. Rather, only a component of it (e.g., 10 marks out of 100) may be related to that learning outcome. This implies the marking rubric must capture that component. Moreover, a student failing the overall dissertation may have not failed the course learning outcome as they may have achieved a pass mark for the component associated with the course learning outcome, and vice versa. It is important to understand that the performance here is in relation to the course learning outcome which may be attached to a whole module, an assessment component, or an assessment sub-component. Also, a big part of using assessments is aggregating the data at course level for assessments shared across different courses. This is to ensure cohort performance is captured separately for each course.
Indirect measures
The extent to which course learning outcomes have been met can also be measured using qualitative metrics (e.g., employer surveys, NSS scores, module evaluation questionnaires, alumni surveys, advisory board focus group discussions, etc.), referred to as indirect measures. Indirect measures can be a useful complement to direct measures and if used appropriately can provide valuable explanations to the findings from the quantitative results. Caution would need to be taken to ensure any sampling procedure for collecting qualitative data yields a representative sample.
This round of data collection is referred to as “opening the loop” in AoL language.
Step 4: Using the data to improve student learning
Where the target has not been met, it can be investigated why this is the case and what the right ‘intervention’ to achieve improvement is. There are two types of improvement: (i) process improvement (e.g., improving how to teach/assess, when to teach/assess; ‘systems’, etc.), and (ii) curriculum improvement (i.e., improving the syllabus, content, skills, knowledge, and competencies taught).
AoL is about being improvements oriented rather than compliance oriented. It is not a data collection project but a data usage project. That is, how can the data we have collected be used to help improve the learning of students. How can the data be acted on?
If students have not developed the competencies faculty thought they would have from the curriculum taught, faculty can reflect and develop learning experiences that can be used to improve student performance on the learning goals. It may take some trial and error, but over time students can improve their skills in specific competencies because of thoughtful, data-driven curriculum development and management. The objective of AoL is to assure student learning.
Step 5: 2nd Measurement: closing the loop
This step involves a second data collection exercise akin to that described in step 3, e.g., one year later. From this second round of data collection, by looking at the outcomes it can be determined whether the interventions in step 4 achieved the desired effect. That way the loop will have been closed by having two data points (measurement before and after intervention). “Closing the loop” does not imply improvement in performance has been achieved. It is simply about having two data points to compare.
In the case where no intervention was required when the loop was opened, we can assess whether this is still the case at the point of closing the loop. This process repeats over time in that closing the loop is akin to opening the loop for the next period (see illustration below).
Assurance of Learning (AoL) process
Continuous improvement process
Using the approach discussed above, we can continuously monitor our courses and the extent to which course learning outcomes are being met and how effective interventions are. We can also learn what we are doing ‘well’ and find out how and why this is. The data can also help us identify whether there is a need to review learning outcomes to make them more ‘challenging’. For example, if we are continuously exceeding targets on the same learning outcome, we may need to adjust the benchmark. Or, we may decide to revise the learning outcome to offer a new competency to our students given we now have consistent satisfactory performance on the existing competency.
The AoL process is a continuous improvement process. The gap between opening a loop and closing a loop can be anything up to a six year gap. In the USBS we have adopted a one year gap for now, until we gain enough traction to widen the gap. Eventually this becomes a ‘self-driving’ process, enabling us to manage our curriculum effectively. The objective is to have a culture around what our students are learning, how we improve that learning, and how we work together to make that happen.
Effective AoL should lead to an improvement in student learning and raise the quality of graduates. AoL can also go a long way in addressing the intensifying pressure to develop data-driven responses to public demands for justification of investment in higher education.
Lastly, it is important to note that most educators already undertake the AoL exercise as part of their responsibilities in teaching and assessing students, making improvements based on past performance, and reflecting on current practice to inform future teaching and assessment. The AoL framework enables these processes to be captured in a more systematic, robust and sustainable manner. It also provides a holistic view at the course level and facilitates continuous curriculum and process management improvement.
[1] In this article, course refers to a degree programme.
Ismah Irsalina Binti Irwandy (left) and Liv Camacho Wejbrandt (right)
First year student reps, Ismah Irsalina Binti Irwandy and Liv Camacho Wejbrandt, co-developed and delivered a workshop for lecturers at the Engineering and Informatics Teaching and Learning Away Day. Here they explain the part they played in developing the session, insights from their survey of students and staff on engaging teaching, and what they learned from delivering the session.
Ismah and Liv arehappy to share the resources used in the session and to advise staff and students from other schools on developing their own activities.
What we did
In November 2023 we responded to a call from our school’s Director for Teaching and Learning (DTL), Dr Luis Ponce Cuspinero, asking for student representatives to develop and deliver a session on reviving curiosity and student engagement for the Engineering and Informatics School teaching and learning away day in January 2024.
How we did it
Luis started by sharing the aims of the 50-minute session, which were to help lecturers understand the kinds of approaches to teaching and learning Engineering and Informatics students found most engaging and to encourage them to think about how they might better encourage their students’ curiosity and provide even more engaging teaching sessions. Ismah, who was the first to sign up, primarily worked with Luis on developing the questions and activities for the session. Liv joined a little later and led more on developing the presentation and delivery of the session. Planning meetings with Luis ran for between 15 to 30 minutes each week, over around 5 weeks.
The first step was to develop a survey for Engineering and Informatics students to find out the kinds of teaching they find most engaging. Ismah brainstormed a long list of questions and, with Luis’ help, whittled them down to five, which were then put onto Poll Everywhere and sent to all students via the School Office. (The questions are provided below).
Our approach to designing the session was to make it interactive and engaging and to demonstrate how we like to be taught! The final session comprised three sections:
(1) The ice breaker ‘reflective activity’:
We developed a ‘pass the parcel’ style game, which was designed to get everyone energized and in the mood. Each table was given a bowl of folded paper slips, each printed with a prompt. Some were really simple, like ‘Describe a teacher that inspired you’, or, ‘Share an ‘aha’ moment you’ve have had while teaching’. Others were a bit more challenging, e.g.: ‘how would you re-design your module to make it more engaging?’ or, “Describe one of your modules as if to a 12-year-old”.
On the day, we played music as the bowl was passed around the table and whoever was left holding it had a minute to pick out a slip and share their answer. At the end of the section, we asked people someone from each table to volunteer to share with the room their response to one of the questions.
(2) The ‘How well do you know your students’ activity:
We used Poll Everywhere to ask each of the five student survey questions to the room. After each question we reviewed the lecturer responses then shared the results from the student survey and briefly picked out where there were similarities and differences.
(3) The ‘Embedding curiosity and engaging students’ activity
We wanted to ensure lecturers were given a chance to apply insights from the first two activities so we then asked each table (team) to work together to embed curiosity and student engagement into a module. One volunteer (the leader) from each table was to describe in brief (3 minutes) one of their modules, the teaching methods, type of assessment, and how feedback is provided. The team then had to come up with ideas/suggestions of how the module can be changed in order to make it more engaging and inspire curiosity in relation to:
Teaching delivery (teaching methods)
Assessment types
Providing feedback
We gave them 10 minutes to discuss then opened up the floor for team leaders to summarise their proposed changes.
How it went
We got close to 70 responses to the student survey by the time of the away day (and have had more since!). We think it helped that we wrote the email and insisted the poll was at the top of the message (please do this poll – it will take 2 minutes) followed by the explanation.
On the day the session went well. We played to our strengths (Liv is used to being on stage so took the lead) but it was really good to be doing it together. We were concerned about balancing being fun and respectful, while also teaching challenging our lecturers. Happily, the audience were positive and the active approach to the session made it easier for us overall. However, it also meant we had to deal with unexpected outcomes and be confident in encouraging responses from the tables. Also, while there were a few surprises in the outcomes of the student survey (including for us), it was great to see that there was also a lot of overlap and common ground.
Liv concluded by impressing on lecturers to show their own love for their subjects and, for both of us, it was a rare opportunity to be able to say something we feel deeply about to lecturers.
After the session we received lots of positive comments and had some great conversations, including with one lecturer who spoke with us for a long time asking about making his lectures more engaging. Also, we got a free lunch!
Top Tips
Our tips for other students are:
It is definitely worth doing. Although it was a commitment at a busy time (we were studying for exams while developing the session), we felt the session had an impact and it made us feel like proper student representatives, particularly as, being first years, we hadn’t had many rep meetings by that point.
You don’t have to start from scratch! We’re really happy for others to use and build on our approach and to chat with students and lecturers from other schools (see details of the activities from the session below and how to contact us).
Comments and feedback
“I was incredibly impressed by Ismah and Liv’s contribution to the content and delivery of this session and have been busy encouraging Directors for Teaching and Learning from the other Sciences Schools I support to follow suit with their own students. My only regret is that Ismah and Liv’s session didn’t kick off the Teaching and Learning away day because it was a brilliant example of an engaging and active learning session which brought real energy to the day while providing that all-important student perspective.” (Dr Sam Hemsley, Academic Developer)
