Fine tuning your practice – getting ready for the new Academic Year

Person holding piano tuning fork and tools against open piano

September 6, 2023September 20, 2023 ~ LouiseRees ~ Leave a comment

There’s been so much to think about in the past year. At the forefront may be how you can adjust your assessment approaches to be more authentic and address concerns about potential (mis) use of Artificial Intelligence platforms.

SALT offers a range of tips and resources to help you consider carefully your engagement with students about effective use of AI, preparing them for the realities of using AI in the workplace or indeed considering changes to your assessments. There’s also the recordings of the webinars available to watch back.

We have past recordings of Effective Practice sessions for you to consider aswell as more planned for the coming academic year – check out our Eventbrite page for details and to book. And a range of resources about being an inclusive practitioner and building accessibility into your planning, delivery, learning environment and assessment approaches. Hopefully these resources give you some ideas for what might work for you in your context.

In September 2022, I wrote a blogpost providing a range of tips to get yourself ready for the new academic year. It was stimulated by the blogpost of a peer and developed further by crowdsourcing. I did that via Twitter. The changes since last year to that social media platform has caused me considerable reflection since Twitter (now ‘X’) was – still is – a major source of CPD for me. I now wonder how my links to colleagues and resources are hampered and we consider switching to alternative such as Mastodon, BlueSky or Threads. A post from an individual at LSE outlines the challenges of using social media to support the development of academic communities: Where now for academics on social media, post Twitter? | LSE Higher Education

Do reach out and find a network of supportive peers to help you develop your practice whether that’s online or in person!

The categories offered in last year’s post about preparing for the new academic year however still apply and hope you find these useful reminders as you prepare to teach/support learning using effective and inclusive practices in 2023/24!

Read on for the tips….

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[:en]Flipping classroom! Another small step to trying something new[:]

June 16, 2016 ~ LouiseRees ~ Leave a comment

[:en]

In my (hopefully) improving skills in supporting learning and teaching of staff at Swansea, I decided to try something else new this week. I had a go at recording part of my presentation for participants to review before the class so that we could discuss the topic briefly at the teaching session; this would also free up more time for the practical activity which was the whole point of the session.

In essence, I attempted to Flip the Classroom and also implement Flipped Learning (see this website for a definition of the two).

Find out how I get on my reading my blog. I challenge you to have a go yourself. Did you do what I should have done first before starting???[:]

Always Have a Plan B

October 17, 2008 ~ Chris Jobling ~ Leave a comment

In the “olden days” when I used to go to conferences, the availability of a data projector and the right version of PowerPoint could be a bit of a lottery, and so I always used to take along a set of slides printed on transparent foils so that I could fall back on the VuGraph machine. Yesterday, I found myself having to fall back on PowerPoint as my Research Techniques and Tools presentation from Flowgram failed mid lecture! Unfortunately, the PowerPoint was used to create the chapter slides so it didn’t have images of the web sites and much of the impact – and my audience – was lost.

As the point of the presentation was to extol the virtues of Internet technologies for research productivity, this rather glaring failure of Internet technology was rather embarrassing!

But at least I had a plan B and next time, it’ll be a better plan!