I’ve just organised the first two of a new round of eyewitness talks for my module on Cold War Europe. This started off a few years ago when a Polish neighbour came in and told students about his experiences, including some jaw-dropping accounts of being outside Moscow in December 1941. With the help of aRead more
A recent paper (Pickford, 2013) has explored how institutional leadership can impact on the use of National Student Survey (NSS) data to improve the student experience. The author analysed the outcomes of the NSS at an institutional level in one post-1992 UK university to come to an understanding of the perceived factors behind changes inRead more
Earlier this week, the Social Market Foundation (SMF) published Robbins Revisited: Bigger and Better Higher Education, a new publication by the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts. As the SMF points out, it is half a century since “Robbins published his ground-breaking report on the key aims and principles for the future of Higher Education. TheRead more
Miracasting from Android devices In parallel with the Tablets in Teaching project, we have also been evaluating various Android devices as alternatives to Apple iPads. With the advent of Android 4.2, it has been possible to wirelessly project an Android screen onto an HDMI display. By this we mean that anything on the mobile device’sRead more
Our first ‘Tablets in Learning and Teaching’ workshop took place this week, with around 25 people dropping in at one point or another, including external presenters Dave Foord from the Tablet Academy and Ola Aiyegbayo from the University of Huddersfield. We heard from Sara Ronca and Clare Hutton how they have been using their loanRead more
Jisc Legal have just released a new guide to copyright law for e-learning authors. If you’re an academic and think this doesn’t apply to you, think again! As a module tutor, you’re responsible for a module page on Learn (Moodle), and that makes you an e-learning author. The guide is concise, to the point, andRead more
Marcus Collins from the Department of Politics History and International Relations won one of seven Teaching Innovation Awards this year. The project title was ‘Student Engagement in Curriculum Design’ and involved a group of 7 students (plus himself) carrying out research and work on the creation of a new single-honours History course set to runRead more
We know that students want to see more use of the ReVIEW lecture capture system campus-wide – this message is coming back loud and clear from the LSU Executive and surveys such as the Facilities Management teaching and learning space survey back in May. The demand is being reflected in increasing take-up by academic colleagues.Read more
Following funding from the University’s Enterprise Awards and from our own Teaching Innovation Awards, Lecturer in Publishing Studies, Melanie Ramdarshan launched Lamplight Press Publishing company in late September this year. ‘Lamplight Press is a not-for-profit general trade and academic publishing company dedicated to promoting new fiction, non-fiction and academic writing by students, academics and authorsRead more
A recent study, which reviewed surveys of the entire student experience in a large Australian metropolitan multi-campus university during 2005–2011, has highlighted the impact of two key areas on student satisfaction. The study found that: it is the total experience of the university that shapes students’ judgements, not just what happens in the classroomRead more