Blogging about higher education - student learning, academic integrity, employability

Keeping up to date in higher education

Posted on by

Some recent events have had me reflecting on how we, as academics, and future academics who are PhD students, can keep up to date in higher education. Those recent events were a full day of training on leadership with Amanda Phillips from APA Training, and interviewing candidates for a position at my university. You might think – I’m so busy – I don’t have time to attend a teaching and learning event, or read up about what is happening in the university system right now. But remember, these activities are an investment in your skills as a higher education professional

Continue reading

Providing post-results feedback to students – mark breakdowns and results commentary.

Posted on by

When results are released at the end of term or semester, it is easy to become overwhelmed in email queries from students. In this blog post I’m going to share 2 tools I use to provide feedback to students – mark breakdowns and results commentary. Below is a sample email that is sent to students. Terminology note: at my institution, students are enrolled in degrees that we call Courses. Courses are made up of Subjects. There are many different names across higher education for the individual unit of study – units, course, subject. 1. Results breakdowns As a student, I

Continue reading

Team-based quizzes on no budget

Posted on by

Student learning can be facilitated in many ways. I am a big fan of collaborative learning activities, especially a quiz or test completed as a team. There are a number of different variations of this type of formative learning activity: Peer Instruction – a term coined by Eric Mazur from Harvard where students work to complete quizzes individually and then as a team. Students have multiple attempts at the question as a team to maximise discussion and learning. This is a weekly activity. Two stage exams – the first paper I can find on this is Zip (2007) where students

Continue reading