Category: Learning and Teaching Festival 2022

Use It, Don’t Lose It – Three Ideas To Get Online Learning Technologies Back On Campus 

  By

Gerhard Kristandl

In the UK, the last two years since March 2020 marked nothing less than a rollercoaster ride in higher education. A series of lockdowns due to Covid-19 necessitated an initially rushed move of learning and teaching to online. A plethora of new digital learning technologies entered the professional lives of many educators that they had hitherto not been exposed to. From VLEs (virtual learning environments) to video conferencing software packages, a steep and continued acquisition of digital skills, both pedagogical and technological, triggered an accelerated cultural shift (Vigo, 2019) towards the adoption of digital technologies by many educational institutions – a shift that had started long before the pandemic hit. 

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The Challenge of Authentic Assessment

  By

Alistair Bogaars, Yan Li and Shuai Zhang

The challenge 

We were challenged to think about incorporating authentic assessment principles into the core first year project management module by our Head of Department. We would like to share our approach to this challenge in our blog.  

What is authentic assessment?  

An authentic assessment requires the completion of ‘real-world tasks’ that are designed to demonstrate how students can apply the knowledge and skills they have learned (Mueller, 2018). Authentic assessments require students to actively use the theory they have been taught in a context that is ‘actual, contemporary and practical’ (Brown, 2015). 

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A Framework To Ensure More Inclusive And Personalised Student Employability And Career Services: Learning From The Best 

  By

Duyen Chu, Qijun Zhou and Alistair Bogaars

Introduction  

Employability and career services are an integral part of any UK higher education institution (HEI). Many factors can affect and shape the employability and career services of a university, including the constantly increasing demand of the job market, legal and professional requirements and institutional strategic priorities. In this blog, we develop and propose a framework for ensuring more inclusive and personalised student employability and career services. Materials for developing this blog derive from our broader Scholarship Excellence in Business Education (SEBE) and Connected Cities Research Group (CCRG)-funded project on student employability optimisation. 

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Working Towards A Measurement Of Internship Placement Value  

  By

Ronald Gibson and Raluca Marinciu

The current neo-liberal valuation of higher education views universities as the provider of labour market resources and improved student job prospects for those undertaking a business subject (Green, Hammer and Star, 2009; Holmes, 2013; Tomlinson, 2012; Tymon, 2013). Employability literature debates the postmodern internship as the answer to prepare students for work (Gault et al., 2000), gain transferable skills (Hillman and Rotham, 2007) and improve long-term employability (Hergert, 2009). However, not all internships are created equal, or lead to graduate level employment. In this piece we are referring to an internship as being a minimum of nine months of work experience, which can also be identified as a ‘placement year’.  

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Team Based Learning (TBL): Teaching Without Boundaries? 

  By

Gabriella Cagliesi, Mahkameh Ghanei and Francesco Guidi

The silver lining of the recent pandemic experience has been the removal of physical boundaries in teaching as students are not confined to a location and now join from four corners of the world, allowing teaching without boundaries.   This acquired flexibility can be successfully used in a team-based learning (TBL) approach which was historically designed for in-class group interaction learning.  Although TBL can be offered remotely online, its steps and structure will remain the same: students are still asked in advance to prepare for the session and to demonstrate their personal understanding of the topic area before joining their teammates for group activities.  A substantial body of empirical evidence in different disciplines has shown that through TBL’s collaborative working on a real-world scenario(s), students will deepen their knowledge and understanding of the topic.  With an effort to address the issues of inclusivity and award gaps, we decided and successfully applied TBL to in-person, online and blended sessions for a core module of a final year undergraduate economics degree and a postgraduate economic course, for classes of around 40 to 50 students.  This is due to the nature of the TBL activities which enable students to engage effectively even from remote locations, for instance by using: Zoom break-out rooms; Microsoft Teams; Canvas quizzes; Kahoot competitions; and recorded videos.  

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