Dr Richard Hodgkins, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography, has recently received a Vice-Chancellor’s Award from Loughborough University for his contribution to Learning and Teaching. In this post, Dr Hodgkins details the recent experiences in gaining accreditation for some, rather different, programmes offered by the Department of Geography at Loughborough. On the face of it, some academicRead more
In this blog-post for the Centre for Academic Practice, Nuzhat Fatima, LSU Welfare and Diversity Executive Officer, discusses the Black and Minority Ethnic student attainment gap in UK higher education institutions, and introduces a new research project at Loughborough entitled ‘Experiences in the Classroom and Beyond: The Role of Race and Ethnicity’ What is theRead more
This year’s first CAP Forum focused on the topic of embedding your research in your teaching. As a result, we invited one of this year’s Research-informed Teaching Award winners to present on how and why she embeds her research into her teaching, and what her research is about. In 2002, Dr Cheryl Travers set upRead more
I was invited to the University Learning and Teaching Committee yesterday to give a short presentation on how learning technologies can be used to deliver feedback to students. This is an area in which students themselves (and their Union representatives) can see opportunities for much more use of technology. In my presentation I covered aRead more
Ian Jones and Lara Alcock in the Mathematics Education Centre recently undertook an innovation designed to assess undergraduates’ conceptual understanding of mathematics. Undergraduates first sat a written test in which they had to explain their understanding of key concepts from the module. They then assessed their peers’ work online using an approach called Adaptive ComparativeRead more
Felipe Iza uses Learn Quiz for formative assessment with Loughborough University first year Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering students. He and his colleagues introduced a series of formative assessments throughout the course of their module designed to motivate and provide feedback to students, and to keep the module tutors informed of progress. Using Learn, theRead more
Traditional marking of students’ work struggles to assess creativity and high-order thinking skills reliably. A recent technological innovation, called Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ), potentially offers a solution to this. ACJ is based not on atomistic mark schemes but on holistic expert judgements of pairs of students’ work. The outcomes of many such pairings are usedRead more
It’s easy to dismiss OMR (or Optical Mark Recognition) as technologically outdated – surely everything can be done online now? But don’t dismiss OMR as it can still be very useful. In the case of CAA (Computer Assisted Assessment), it’s a relatively easy, low-cost approach to automating the process of marking large numbers of examRead more
TurnItIn UK User Group, 3/2/11, Aston University Bryan Dawson This is a six-monthly event for TurnItIn (TII) Administrators and power users. The system continues to grow, with over ½ million submissions per month to the system in the last quarter of 2010. The UK branch of iParadigms (the U.S. company that built TurnItIn) now hasRead more
If you’ve heard of WebPA, the online peer assessment tool developed by EngCETL, but you don’t know what it can do for you, you might like to check out the ReVIEW capture of the ‘Introduction to WebPA’ training session delivered yesterday by Lee Barnett and Nicola Wilkinson. Alternatively click on the screenshot to visitRead more