Vivian Neal

These questions are so important. I spoke with some lecturers last week who think that accreditation has gone totally overboard in the UK, and I can see where this concern is coming from - I think sometimes assessment and evaluation are so top heavy in the UK that we spend extra time making sure that we look good for the quality control process instead of genuinely enhancing our teaching.

On the other hand, several of my students in our LTHE program (who are lecturers) have said emphatically, "I wish I knew this last year when I started teaching".

It's such an interesting question - how do we have some sort of standards for enhancing the quality of teaching, but not have an over-controling regulatory framework?

The UK's Higher Education Academy (HEA) supports institutions in their professional development of HE teachers through their accreditation program and Professional Standards Framework, as well as supporting HE teachers directly by offering a variety of programs and resources. Almost all HE institutions in the UK have manditory teaching and learning programs that are accredited by the HEA.

At the University of Plymouth all new lecturers are required to take the program consisting of three "M" level modules - in Canadian language, this is three Masters level courses taken by new faculty.  At Plymouth the first module is quite broad and covers both institutional and national policies/issues as well as teaching and learning theory. The second module is an action research project where lecturers research a small peice of their own practice. For the third module, participants select between a module in Learning Technologies or Teaching Research (Linking Teaching and Discipline-Based Research). The program can be taken over a period of one, two or three years, though most people take it all in one year.

Welcome everyone to this seminar! I am very pleased to be co-facilitating over the next three weeks!  I am with the University of Plymouth, UK, for this year, teaching on their program for new lecturers, the Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. I am taking a year away from Simon Fraser University in Canada, so I have worked in both a credentialed higher education environment as well as a non-credentialed.

I will be sharing some of my insights and experiences during this seminar, and I hope to learn a lot also from everyone who contributes. Please share your thoughts - I hope we will all take away some new ideas to move this whole area forward.

For the EDC session on Friday, Alice made up and posted notes about the Teaching and Learning Centres, and guided participants to review and comment on them. These notes were also sent to the participants who joined via Elluminate. I'm attaching the posters here for others in SCoPE to review, think about, and comment on.

I'd like to thank all those who shared ideas last week in SCoPE, and at the EDC session. Please feel free to continue with the discussion in this space.

Emilio,

Thank you for your contribution. Your English is very understandable! I like your ideas about Web2.0 technologies. At our LIDC, we do use some of these tools ourselves and we have been helping instructors learn more about how to use them to help students learn more effectively. We have run a short series about the various tools and it seems that there is a great deal of interest in Facebook.

Vivian