The 20/21 Small Grants Fund is now open for applications.
Apply for up to £500 to explore and embed technology-enhanced practices into your teaching.
Perhaps you have an idea for your teaching that uses technology, but need some funding to support it or maybe you know of interesting technology enhanced learning at another institution and would like to be able to explore it further.
Applications are invited for a wide range of activities which enable you to explore and disseminate ideas and practices, and share these with colleagues at Newcastle through the NUTELA network.
Applications for up to £500 are welcomed, and applications will be on a rolling basis, rather than at set points in the academic year so you can apply whenever you are ready.
Join us at this year’s learning and teaching conference for a fantastic series of online events. Hear from colleagues, students and external speakers, collaborate in workshops and watch some of the lightning talk videos during the conference week, 1-5 March 2021.
Everyone involved in learning and teaching at all Newcastle University campuses – students, academic colleagues, professional services colleagues technicians and external collaborators are all invited to attend.
Keynote speakers
We are delighted to be welcoming two keynote speakers, Prof Sue Rigby, Bath Spa University and Prof Dilly Fung, LSE to this year’s online event. Find out more about the keynote addresses and sign up using the links below.
Education for all? – Professor Sue Rigby, Vice-Chancellor, Bath Spa University, Monday 1 March 2021 12:00-13:15
Powerful Learning for a Challenging World – Professor Dilly Fung, Pro-Director for Education, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Friday 5 March 2021 12:00-13:15
The Committee for the Association of National Teaching Fellows (CANTF) shall be hosting another NTFS Roadshow, on Thursday 25th February from 13:00pm to 14:00pm.
Aspiring NTF Event: “New Year, New Network” – enhance your networking to promote your public profile
Facilitated by Professor Debbie Holley (NTF 2014) on behalf of AdvanceHE and The Association of National Teaching Fellows (ANTF)
This workshop is for those considering applying for the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) in 2022 or beyond, and will offer information that will help potential nominees consider future applications. In addition to this, the roadshow will offer insights and thoughts from an interdisciplinary panel about using existing networks. CANTF ran a session about successful networking for impact at the Association of National Teaching Fellows symposium last year and will build upon this work.
The three roadshows toward the end of last year were a great success, and very popular, and we expect this next one to be too. Please share the details of this event widely with colleagues.
Details of how to book can be found here under the “NTFS Roadshow” section.
By Raghda Zahran, Learning Enhancement and Technology Adviser
How could data enhance your learning experience?
At Newcastle University we are exploring the use of student data to help improve the student learning experience. That’s why we are running a number of Design Sprints for students which will introduce you to a collaborative analysis and design process. Your input will be key to determining some of the software students will use in the future at Newcastle.
What’s a Design Sprint?
A design sprint is a step-by-step approach to solving problems and coming up with alternative solutions. You will work together with other students during the session.
Why take part?
Great addition to your CV/resume
Certificate of Participation
Have a real impact on the approach the University takes
Develop your collaborative working skills
Sign up
So, if you’re interested in collaborating in hands-on activities to critique, analyse and design a solution to a given problem, please sign up to a workshop below.
HaSS Design Sprint: Using Data to Support Learning- Wednesday 10 February (For students in the HaSS Faculty: Law, Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Modern Languages, Arts and Cultures, English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Business School, Geography, Politics and Sociology, History, Classics and Archaeology, Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Combined Honours and Philosophical Studies)
We’ve pulled together a helpful list of new and existing resources for colleagues preparing for semester 2. There are lots of quick tips, ideas from colleagues as well as guides, courses and webinars.
Getting ready for semester 2 digest
An easily skimmable digest of ideas, resources and useful links covering Canvas, assessment, synchronous online sessions and more.
What works?
Get ideas and inspiration from colleagues who have generously shared how they redesigned and delivered teaching in Semester 1. You can read about what has worked in their short accounts on our effective practice database.
See how modules have been redesigned, how fieldtrips have gone virtual and how lots of achievable ideas have kept students engaged.
Webinars
View and book onto available webinars. We know time is short, so we are adding digests to the webinar listings to make it easy for you to pick up key messages from the sessions. New webinars include Digital Polling and NUIT will be offering some revamped Zoom sessions.
Canvas
We have an ongoing programme of Canvas webinars and have updated and extended the Canvas Orientation course. These will be vital for colleagues new to teaching this year. Remember too that all staff and students can pose questions to Canvas 24/7 support.
Flexible Learning Online Course
All colleagues also have access to the Flexible Learning 2020 Canvas course which articulates changes needed under the Education Resilience Framework.
Join a Community
Share ideas, ask questions and find out more from your colleagues
NUTELA (Newcastle University Technology Enhanced Learning Advoates) and Newcastle Educators also run regular practice sharing sessions and have Teams sites that you can join.
Visit the Digital Learning Site
We continue to improve the guides and resources on the Digital Learning Site and have noted important changes in the site’s newsfeed.
Get in touch
Let us know if there are any other resources you would find helpful or if you would like to share some of your teaching practice. You can get in touch at LTDS@ncl.ac.uk .
The Learning and Teaching Conference 2021 will showcase effective, creative and collaborative approaches to learning and teaching from across the University.
Workshops, presentations and lightning talks will be spread across the week, for our first ever fully online conference allowing you to pop along to connect with colleagues and share new ideas. We are pleased to be welcoming keynote speakers Professor Sue Rigby Vice-Chancellor, Bath Spa University and Professor Dilly Fung Pro-Director for Education, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
As the 2020 event couldn’t take place we can’t wait to see you at this year’s event. Keep a note of the date in your diaries. More information to come.
NUTELA is back, with our first online 3Ps sessions of the year (this time the 3P’s stand for Practice Practice Practice – you’ll have to bring your own pizza and pop!). Please sign up for as many sessions as you like:
Canvas Quick Wins: Refreshing your Home and Module Pages – 15 December 2020, 14:00-15:00
See how to give your Canvas home and module pages a quick make-over, and create a fresh and engaging experience for students. The session will focus on building content with ideas and examples from colleagues.
Canvas Quick Wins: Keeping Students Engaged – 16 December, 10:00-11:00
Colleagues will share how they have used course-requirement ‘tick lists’, quizzes and collaboration tools to keep students engaged. The approaches covered are all quick to implement, effective, and popular with students.
Tips and Tools for Cutting out Radio Silence: Engaging Students During Synchronous Sessions – 17 December, 14:00-15:00
In this session we will explore new and existing tools and strategies that colleagues are using to engage their students during synchronous online sessions.
Find out more about what colleagues and students have been working on in some of the Flexible Learning case studies and resources.
Social spaces for students
This online resource will provide you with examples of how to use social spaces for students in a digital virtual environment. The resource includes documents highlighting examples of practice and how to use them. As well as cases studies from our university and other institutions taking you through what has worked well and what to maybe avoid.
Canvas tips and favourite features
Hear from academic and professional services colleagues who share some of their Canvas tips, favourite features and positive feedback from students.
The team cover how they planned synchronous sessions, how they used them to build community, and what they did to keep these Zoom teaching sessions engaging and accessible.
Peer assisted learning
Carrie, a peer assisted learning leader, chats with Zoe, a student, to share the challenges and successes of moving to online learning.
In this 60-minute workshop, we will explore together ideas for how you can engage students in online learning including: • Some dos and don’ts of online learning; • Methods for setting expectations; • Alternatives to lectures; • Keeping students engaging with you and each other; • Keeping students involved week-to-week.
Considerations for teaching and studying with poor internet
Colleagues and students alike may well be affected by slow or variable internet connections which in turn will make many aspects of online teaching and learning troublesome.
We’ve just rolled out a new way you can control how your students and colleagues interact with content stored in Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365). Module and community enrolments now appear as Security Groups in Microsoft 365. You can use these groups to apply permissions to content or add members to a Microsoft Team.
The Accessibility in Practice online course is designed to provide you with some of the core skills and techniques for embedding accessibility into your teaching and learning practice, and in making your digital resources accessible to everyone.
Tom Harrison recently completed the online course. He shares the parts of the course he found most useful and how he has changed his practice resulting in real benefits to students.
Hi, I’m Tom Harrison; I work as a Student Recruitment Co-ordinator at Newcastle University and also teach English Literature. My roles involve designing lots of activities and presentations for a wide variety of students, so I was interested in using the Accessibility in Practice course to develop my awareness of how to adjust my materials to accommodate different learner needs.
One of the most revealing sections was an exercise to simulate difficulties that dyslexic students could have reading slides in lectures. The team presented a simple story (Aesop’s ‘Tortoise and the Hare’: a classic!) and changed the text a bit to give an idea of how reading speeds can differ.
Even with such a simple, familiar story I found the text difficult to read, and although I managed a couple of lines I got nowhere near finishing the full paragraph in the two minutes allotted by the presenter. The experience was confusing and frustrating, and made worse when the presenter spoke while the text was onscreen: at this point my attention was split between the audio and the visuals, which meant I wasn’t paying attention to either.
The manipulated text, the short reading time, and the over-talkative presenter were of course all part of the team’s cunning plan to show how difficult it can be for dyslexic students to read large blocks of text in a lecture setting. I have to confess that previously I’ve assumed that students can multi-task as I rattle through text-heavy lecture slides, and that highlighting key words and phrases in bold or in different colours was enough to focus students on what they need to know. Those visually-enhanced techniques work fine for some, but of course are no help at all to students who are colour blind, or who are accessing lecture materials through specialist software. I looked back over my old PowerPoints with fresh eyes and realised that, to some students, my beautifully colour-coded, quote-heavy slides would have just been a big blocky mess.
The biggest change the training has made to my practice is that I now appreciate that students need more time to process on-screen text, and that they may be accessing this text in a different way to how I’ve previously assumed. I now make a point of reading out any text that I include on slides to help keep students focused and avoid unnecessary distractions. As an added bonus, I’ve also learnt to cut down the size of my on-screen quotations: no one, not even me, wants to hear me reading out huge chunks of text!
If you are delivering information to students in any capacity I recommend having a look at this resource: the course is full of useful, practical tips that will help you modify what you already do rather than change it to something completely different. Well worth an hour of your time, I’d say, and your students will thank you for it!
