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Faculty
of Science Learning,
Teaching and Assessment Information and Resources |
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21/06/16 Faculty of Science Learning, Teaching and Assessment (LTA) Update |
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Teaching Excellence Framework: Technical
Consultation for Year 2 LJMU
will respond to the
consultation document from the Department for Business Innovation and
Skills. A University meeting will be
held in early July to formulate an institutional view. The document represents proposals at this
stage and your answers to the questions posed on page 54 in Annex E are of
particular interest. Please send your
responses to me on/by Friday 1st July. |
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Higher Education
Academy: Outcomes of Faculty of Science consultation Thanks to the 25 staff who responded to a request
for staff views around the HEA. These views are summarised in a report
and have been fed back to the University.
There are no developments to report at present but all staff views
will be considered when the University reviews its subscription to the HEA for 2016/17. |
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Virtual Learning
Environment (VLE) Review The University has invited Programme and Subject
Leaders to participate in a review of the Blackboard VLE. The rationale for this review is that: ·
Blackboard will
eventually require us to move to a new VLE, ‘Learn Ultra’. ·
There has been
no previous review of provision. ·
Moving from
self- to cloud-hosting could make a significant difference to downtime. ·
There has been
little change to Blackboard in recent years. ·
There are more
alternatives to Blackboard compared to when it was originally selected. The focus of the review will be on enhancing our VLE
and providing better support for academic staff. The move to Learn Ultra, or to a
non-Blackboard VLE, would not occur until September 2017 at the
earliest. A migration strategy will be
in place to ensure that as much content as possible can be transferred from
the old VLE to the new. |
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University IT developments A
brief summary of some institutional IT Projects of interest to academic
staff: ·
Learning
Analytics pilot.
Work is currently going on to set up a 2016/17 pilot of this system
within the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences (SPS)
and 3 other non-Science Schools. The anticipation is that SPS personal tutors will be able to access dashboards of
information for their tutees, summarising each student’s engagement with
their studies using a range of measures (attendance, logins, library use
etc.). The system compares each
student to average data ensuring that any disengaged students are readily
identifiable. ·
Office
365 should be available to academic staff for next year. The main feature of interest is likely to
be the dropbox-type facility. Any information saved to this cloud system
will be stored within the EU and would comply with institutional policies
around data protection. ·
LJMU now has a site licence for Matlab. This program is available via the app player and this 5
minute video is designed for new users. In summary, Matlab
provides sophisticated data analysis and visualisation. ·
The plan is for student PC clients across LJMU to be upgraded to Windows
10/Office 2016 over the summer. This will include all Byrom St PCs in
318-321b, CB IT Suite and TRB 146.
A beta version of the Windows 10 client for staff PCs is expected to
be available over the summer. Initial
queries suggest that staff using Office 2010/2013 should not have any issues
when accessing student work produced in Office 2016. |
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New University Personal Tutoring Policy The
University recently agreed a new Personal Tutoring Policy and it is now on
the Policy Centre on the staff webpages here. Of particular note is that the policy
covers both UG and PGT
students. The new Personal Tutoring
Policy was considered at the Programme Leader awayday
last week and includes activities directly referred to in the existing
Faculty tutorial procedure.
Consequently, the Faculty procedure will be revised and a slimmed-down
version will subsequently be uploaded to the LTA website after consideration
by FMT. |
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New additions to the Faculty LTA Website The
following resources have recently been added to the website. ·
Academic
Conduct Tutorial This resource
covers email etiquette, classroom behaviour, cheating, plagiarism and
collusion. Programme teams may elect
to incorporate the resource within tutorial schemes and tweak as required. |
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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 1st July to express an interest. You would be invited to submit a short
report upon your return for dissemination. Bioscience
Education Summit, University of Bath, 8-9th Sept 2016 Enhancing
Fieldwork Learning, University of Reading, 12-13th Sept 2016 |
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Dr Philip Denton BSc PhD PGCE PGCert SFHEA |
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Maintained by Philip Denton. Last Update: 02/09/2016