LTEA conference-Day 2

Some highlights:

I came in right at the end of Nadine Wills' presentation about widening the university expectation of 'enquiring' academics and students to include enquiring academic-related and administrative staff. Really compelling stuff, and she'll be writing some of it up over the next couple of months.

Phil Askham gave a strikingly candid talk about being charged with the task of 'embedding' good Enquiry-based Learning practice so that it penetrates throughout Sheffield Hallam University's Faculty of Development and Society.

After this, Norman Powell from the Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-based Learning ( CEEBL) at the University of Manchester spoke about the challenges of evaluating Enquiry-based elements that are introduced to modules. He's written a nice document on CEEBL's evaluation strategy, which you can download here.

The presentation just before my talk was a report on some of the goings-on at Sheffield Hallam University's Centre for Promotion of Learner Autonomy (CPLA). There's some SERIOUSLY cool stuff going on here - an 'eco-house' that students built on the roof of a university building, for example. Also, next year they're planning to replace their presentations with a twenty-minute shot (and translated into Spanish) by students.

Daniel Wilding and Paul Taylor from Warwick's Reinvention Centre gave a really good talk about students being part of a research community, in which they pointed out that no less a figure than President Barack Obama has called for research to be an integral part of the undergraduate curriculum. He brought it up in his speech to the National Academy of Sciences, and here's what he said:

The Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation will be launching a joint initiative to inspire tens of thousands of American students to pursue careers in science, engineering and entrepreneurship related to clean energy.

It will support an educational campaign to capture the imagination of young people who can help us meet the energy challenge. It will create research opportunities for undergraduates and educational opportunities for women and minorities who too often have been underrepresented in scientific and technological fields – but are no less capable of inventing the solutions that will help us grow our economy and save our planet. And it will support fellowships, interdisciplinary graduate programs, and partnerships between academic institutions and innovative companies to prepare a generation of Americans to meet this generational challenge. [full text]

Needless to say, there was a lot more to Danny and Paul's presentation than that, but that's pretty cool in itself.

The last paper I saw was John Creighton's absolutely fascinating analysis of research-teaching links, testing for correlation between departmental RAE results and the results of a Student Survey carried out by Reading, which is itself an extremely interesting evaluation instrument. John is the head of Reading's CeTL in Applied Undergraduate Research Skills (CeTL-AURS), who, by the way, hosted the conference. His findings call into question many of the assumption of Hattie and Marsh's often-mentioned (but perhaps seldom read) paper, 'The Relationship Between Research and Teaching: A Meta-Analysis' (Review of Educational Research, Vol. 66, No. 4, 507-542 (1996)).