Over 140 staff and students from the across the university attended Shift 2015: Sparking Ideas – Sharing Educational Innovation organised by the Teaching Fellow Network. More than 30 colleagues presented two themed sessions, Lighting the fire and fanning the flames of inspiration and Integrating the personal with the professional to inform our teaching and learning.
The conference was organised by the Education Development Unit, whose head, Simon Walker, adds: “Hearing about the innovative practices that staff are employing to improve the learning outputs and experiences of our students is crucial to our understanding of how dynamic this university really is.
“For the first time we decided to involve our second-year Drama students in researching and mirroring back their experience of being a student at Greenwich. The impact of their highly professional and powerful performance will help us to take comfort in knowing that students really appreciate our practice where it is good and enable us to make improvements where needed. The conference is called Shift for good reason – it helps us to improve our practice and, though the chance to meet with, share and hear about each others’ experiences at the start of term two, enables us to become more collegiate.”
The keynote presenter, Professor Stephanie Marshall, Chief Executive of the Higher Education Academy, presented Teaching – does it really matter? Her talk focused on exploring how student feedback can be used to inform the way we teach and design the higher education experience. Using subject specific data enables staff in particular disciplines to identify specific student needs, behaviours and preferences. Her talk highlighted the ways that staff can develop empirically-informed approaches to curriculum design, teaching, learning and assessment, and provided much food for thought.
The voices of students were heard throughout the day as many were presenters or co-presenters, but most notably when nine drama students led a light-hearted but emotionally charged interactive performance session, entitled Frustrated, Frazzled, and Inspired. The piece invited staff to view the student experience from their perspective, empathise with their predicaments and help them to settle in to university life and get the most out of it.
All presentations were innovative and engaging. Among the presentations we could listen to:
- The ways academics can use Twitter to engage with their peers and students was explored in one paper, which built on a workshop held in September 2014 by the School of Law which looked at the benefits and challenges of using Twitter.
- Preliminary findings of using flipped learning and SCALE UP (Student Centered Active Learning Environment Upside Down Pedagogy) to engage students on a first year law module and Master level computing students on database administration module.
- Demonstration of an in-class web application that enables students to submit writings/drawings to be collated for live discussion and feedback, using touchscreen (and non-touchscreen) devices.
- Study Skills and Creative Writing students showed how a teddy bear – Boris, in this case – can be used as a teaching aid, outlining the original purpose of the teddy in class and how it was subsequently adapted.
- All conference presentations are available online on the Shift 2015 website.
The afternoon session included presentations about some exciting forthcoming developments including Box of Broadcasts, the university’s mobile app, Greenwich Connect Seed-funds, and the Student Engagement Framework.
Professor Marshall closed the conference by announcing the names of the 47 staff who had successfully been awarded Fellowships of the Higher Education Academy in 2014.
Original text taken from Greenwich Online.