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Faculty
of Science Learning,
Teaching and Assessment Information and Resources |
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06/05/16 Faculty of Science Learning, Teaching and Assessment (LTA) Update |
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LJMU Teaching and Learning Conference 2016 This year’s event takes place within the Redmonds
Building on Wed 15th and Thu 16th June 2016.
The venue
is on Clarence St, a 15 minute walk from Byrom St, 10 minutes from the
Camdem St car park and 5 minutes from Lime St station. Colleagues who have attended previously will agree
that this is always a friendly conference and a great place for networking
around both teaching and research.
Science staff from all three Schools
are included within the programme and would welcome your support. As well as the posters that will be
displayed by Faculty colleagues, the list below highlights the presentations
that SCS staff will contribute to this year: ·
Constructing
the assessment self-efficacy toolkit (NSP) ·
Student
assessment literacy: one element of successful transition? (PBS) ·
Flip lectures +
lecture capture: student perceptions and recommendations for staff (SPS) ·
“Am I a
student?” A meta-ethnography of students experiences of transition into higher
education (NSP) ·
Self-efficacy:
a framework to inspire engagement, transition and growth (NSP) ·
One hundred and
twenty credit module: masterstroke or madness? Learnings, difficulties and
benefits (PBS) ·
The development
of novel game-based learning applications for delivery of pharmacy education
(PBS) ·
“So long as it
is grounded in pragmatism”: addressing the “but” in the principle of
co-creation (SPS) ·
Purposeful
reading skills and note-taking: student led development of an interactive
Blackboard resource (SPS) The event is organised by the PVC (Education) and LJMU’s
Teaching and Learning Academy (TLA).
Registration details and the full programme can be found here. |
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LiverpoolSU
Assessment and Feedback Report (Thanks to Jamie Bennett, LiverpoolSU) The Students’ Union have surveyed students around
LJMU assessment and feedback practices and have compiled a summary, available
here. The report was considered by the Faculty
Education Committee and an action plan is being developed. Here are some example recommendations from
the report that provide insights into contemporary UG views. Students would like, •
“Greater use of effective forms of group feedback
being used, such as peer assessment, use of model answers, or engagement with
the marking criteria in a small group seminar. •
Face-to-face feedback being offered to all students
who request this form of feedback on all summative assessments. •
Study skills support provided by Student Advice and
Wellbeing (SAW) being advertised through students’ lecturers and personal tutors,
especially during busy assessment periods.” In respect of the last point, here
is a useful summary of University provision relating to Study Skills Support. |
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Curriculum
Enhancement Projects 2016 Overview (Thanks to Virendra Mistry, TLA) The Teaching and Learning Academy (TLA) have
produced a Curriculum
Enhancement Projects Overview that neatly showcases activity funded by
the institution. This includes one
project that is currently underway within the School of Natural Sciences and
Psychology (NSP). |
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UKES and PTES (Thanks to Clare Milsom &
Elena Zaitseva, TLA) With the recent closure of the 2016 NSS and LJMU
module evaluation, the UK Engagement Survey (UKES) and Postgraduate Taught Experience
Survey (PTES) are the only surveys that are currently active. UKES is open to all Level 3, 4,and 5
students, PTES to PGT students. All
relevant students have been invited by email to participate and the
University is administering a £100 (per Faculty) prize draw for each
survey. For PTES, the Faculty is
funding an additional £100 prize draw in an effort to improve upon last
year’s response rate (33%). Here is a
reminder of how students can complete them: •
UKES will
remain open until 16th June 2016. All
students can access the survey via a generic link: https://ljmu.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/uk-engagement-survey-ukes-2016-ljmu-2
by using their 6 digit student number as the username and voice as the password. •
PTES will
remain open until 16th June 2016. All
students can access the survey via a generic link:https://ljmu.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/postgraduate-taught-experience-survey-ptes-2016-ljmu-3
by using their 6 digit student number as username, and pgvoice as password. Both surveys have provided useful information in the
past, summarised below. • UKES is now in its third year and
the survey has brought some useful insights into the dynamics of student
learning and engagement in our institution.
This academic year, the TLA undertook additional research into
historical data. Findings have shown
that student engagement scores correlate strongly and significantly with
retention and student performance.
Staff and student focus group participants were very positive about
the survey. Academics felt that the
engagement data shone a new/different light on the curriculum, revealing
hidden course strengths and areas for improvement. For students the data
enabled them to reflect on their study approaches and see the learning
opportunities of the entire curriculum. This
year, in addition to engagement questions, students are being asked NSS
Question 22 (overall satisfaction with the programme). This will give programme teams an
indication of how students feel generally about their course and provide an
evidence base to facilitate further discussions related to their course
experience. Questions relating to
skills development have also been selected for inclusion in this year’s LJMU
UKES survey. •
PTES: All the
mandatory question areas (scales) below have been incorporated. o
Quality of
Teaching and Learning o
Engagement o
Assessment and
Feedback o
Dissertation or
Major Project o
Organisation
and Management o
Resources and
Services o
Skills
Development o
Information o
Overall
Satisfaction As the survey is already very comprehensive, no additional
institutional questions have been included.
In the 2015 PTES, SCS students’ satisfaction matched or
exceeded the institutional average in all of the nine categories above. Overall satisfaction improved noticeably
from 2014 to 2015 (80% to 93%). Last
year’s survey showed that the main reason for choosing a PGT course for SCS
students was its content, followed by reputation of the subject
area/department. A relatively high
proportion of students (compared to the rest of LJMU) chose their particular
programme because of the reputation of the course tutors. |
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Referral coursework submission deadline
(thanks to Mark Power, SAS) Student
& Academic Services (SAS) reminds staff that, in line with a centrally scheduled
referral exam week, a single referral coursework submission deadline date has
been agreed for students on programmes following the standard academic
calendar: Friday August 12th 2016.
Coursework submitted via Blackboard must be received by midnight, work
submitted at Student Admin Centres must be presented by 4pm. This date will be added to the published
academic calendar. Please
note that this default deadline date will be communicated to relevant
students unless an assessment board determines that an earlier due date
should apply, in which case this will be communicated via Result Statements
within the constraints of the academic calendar and the Academic
Framework. Any due date set beyond
this deadline (other than where re-attendance is a requirement of
re-assessment) requires the prior approval of Mark Power, Registrar and
Deputy Chief Executive. |
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Professional Services Excellence Awards You
are invited to nominate LJMU staff for these inaugural awards and these
nominations may include Faculty colleagues.
Details of the nomination criteria and the submission form are here. The deadline is Friday 20th May. |
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Faculty of Science Online Pre-placement Module The
Faculty has secured funding from the University for two student interns to
develop Blackboard resources that could be used to prepare Science students
for placements from 2016/17. The work
is being coordinated by members of the Science Placements
and Employability Panel. The
interns will be appointed later this month and it is planned that the
developed resources will be linked to the Placement Database administered by
the Placement
Learning Support Unit. |
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Teaching Observation
2015/16 Many thanks to all colleagues involved in this year’s
round of Teaching Observation. The
Faculty set a target of 75% of observations to be undertaken, lowered to
reflect the fact that the scheme was new and required all observers to be
trained. The final completion rate was
76% (once PGCert staff are included) and all Schools contributed to this
outcome:
All deferred and pending observations will be rolled over
to the next academic year. Further training
will be offered in September 2016 and will be informed by staff feedback from
this year’s events. Staff allocated an
observee role in 2015/16 will attend this training and will then act as an
observer next year. This ensures that
all staff contribute equitably to the scheme.
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Pedagogic conferences
of interest to colleagues In line with other pedagogic conferences that are
not specific to a single programme, Faculty funding would be available to
support attendance at the following events. Please contact p.denton@ljmu.ac.uk by Friday 13th
May to express an interest. You would
be invited to submit a short report upon your return for dissemination. Digital
learning and assessment in the Biosciences: approaches, successes &
future horizons, University of Glasgow, Tuesday 21st June 2016 (Thanks to
Janice Harland, PBS) |
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Notifications and
anatomy of a Tweet (Thanks to Chris Gillies and Ruth Nagus, EHC) Blackboard Notifications:
Emailed notifications from Blackboard are great for getting
information out to students without putting an additional load on your
time. However, getting the right
balance between too much information and too little can be a problem. Because
of this, some changes to Blackboard have been made recently that mean that
students will now only receive notifications when new announcements,
assignments and tests are added.
Making content items available, such as PowerPoints and PDFs will, for
example, no longer cause notifications to be sent out. With the above in mind it’s worth highlighting that
you can take much greater control of the notifications that you receive and
indeed, so can your students. This Blackboard
video takes you through the quick process of turning notifications on and
off and demonstrates how comprehensive and flexible notifications can
be. For example, your students may want
to setup and personalise due date warnings whilst you might like to receive
warnings when blogs, journals or tests need grading. As well as tweaking individual module or
community notifications, you can also batch edit the types and frequency of
notifications you receive across multiple modules as well. Finally, separate controls for the
Blackboard Mobile app notifications also exist, which Phil Rothwell (TLA) has
helpfully covered in detail here. Anatomy of a Tweet: This section will be of interest to staff interested in
using Twitter for academic purposes, but have no experience of using this
application. In the example below, an image of Childwall
Fiveways roundabout in Liverpool has been posted.
We will now dissect this tweet and look at each
component in turn.
The author
is Robin Ireland, his Twitter user name is @robinHEG
(all Twitter usernames begin with @).
All tweets written by Robin begin with the avatar shown above. Some people use a real photograph of
themselves as an avatar but many use another icon to represent themselves as
has Robin in this example. To find
out more about any author, place your mouse over their avatar and a pop up
with their profile description appears:
When Robin
originally posted this tweet it was automatically pushed to all his
followers’ Twitter feeds, all 1905 of them.
The tweet can then be further pushed by these 1905 people to their own
followers, a process known as retweeting. Retweets are identified by the
green icon above the avatar:
The only
other piece of information in the standard heading of a tweet is when this
tweet was posted. On the first screen
shot at the start of this Twitter article, you can see ‘22h’. This means that
the screen shot was taken 22 hours after the tweet was posted. After 24 hours, this time stamp changes to
the date. If you want to know exactly
when the tweet was posted, hovering the mouse over the date shows the time
and the date of the posting, as shown above. Childwall Fiveways
roundabout #Liverpool. But not generally how you see it The rest
of the post consists of the text of the tweet and or an image, video or poll
etc. This post has two hashtags in their usual blue font: #Liverpool and
#lovelydaytocycle. Think of these as metadata or tags but read the sentence
as if the words were there without the hashtag. Hashtags
provide a means of searching Twitter.
For example if you wanted to see all the tweets about Liverpool that
have been recently posted by anyone (not just by the people you follow) there
is a search box on Twitter.com that will return all those results whether you
personally have a Twitter account or not. |
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Dr Philip Denton BSc PhD PGCE PGCert SFHEA |
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