Dr Louise Robson, School of Biosciences
“I am a senior university teacher with over 25 years experience in learning and teaching and a National Teaching Fellow. I am known for my use of digital technologies to support student learning, particularly the use of lecture capture and online polling platforms to deliver active learning.During the pandemic one of the key things I learned was the critical importance of having a community of learning. Students (and staff) needed to feel connected as a group. I used a range of approaches to set up and develop our online learning community, e.g. using emojis in the chat box, icebreaker polling about pizza toppings, and playing student-generated Spotify playlists before the online class started. The pandemic also reinforced the value of interactive sessions, getting students to problem solve using their knowledge and understanding.
As I reflect on going back to face to face (which I am super excited about), I am going to deliver (in class) all of the active learning sessions I generated, using my asynchronous flipped lecture captures (and other resources) to deliver content. While I had already been using some active approaches pre-pandemic, my experience (and student feedback) during the pandemic has shown me that this approach is really beneficial for student learning and skills development, and I am really excited to be using even more active learning sessions in my teaching.”
Dr Dawn Fletcher, Academic Practice and Skills Development (APSD)
“I am an ex-secondary school Media Studies teacher and was a PhD student in Sociological Studies, teaching Year 1 undergraduates. I used to work in the Academic Programmes Office, supporting the Faculty of Engineering, so I was involved in the process for making changes to modules and programmes at the start of the pandemic.I joined the digital learning team last November. Since then, I have been supporting staff, individually and in departments, to develop their digital and online teaching practice. We’ve had to be pretty flexible as a team and adapt our guidance to quickly changing situations and priorities so that we can support teaching staff to cope with these changes too.
If there is one thing I am going to take forward, it’s this: the simplest tools can often be the most effective ones, and it’s better to have something that works well than something shiny that doesn’t. To break this down a bit, I mean:
- Our supported tools are often the best tools to choose, because if something goes wrong or doesn’t work, the digital learning team can help
- Often, one tool can be used across a range of modes of delivery, so that students/users only need to learn that one for whatever task - meaning time can be spent on course based learning, not how to use an unfamiliar tool
- Having said that, sometimes a bit of learning/training time up front, can really help make things more efficient in the long run