Category: Student engagement

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Listening to Neurodivergent Student Voices: Shaping an Inclusive University

We have created a new resource with our students to help us create a more inclusive university experience.

Neurodivergent students are a growing and important part of our university community, yet many still encounter barriers that impact their ability to thrive. With increasing numbers of neurodivergent students enrolling each year, most colleagues will interact with them regularly—whether they realise it or not.

Many of our students struggle with traditional academic structures, unclear expectations, and inaccessible learning environments, often without formal support plans in place. By making small adjustments and genuinely listening to our neurodivergent students, we can create a more inclusive university experience that benefits everyone—not just neurodivergent students, but the entire learning community.

How the Project Started

This project emerged from recognising that student needs are evolving, and traditional academic structures do not always provide the necessary support for neurodivergent students. With funding from LTDS, we collaborated with the Student Health and Wellbeing Team to ensure that student voices remained central to this project.

Hearing Real Student Experiences

Our key focus was understanding how neurodivergent students experience university life, both academically and socially. We used a framework called Key Aspects of Student Academic Life, which helped us examine crucial areas such as learning environments, social interactions, and overall student wellbeing.

We recruited students through JobsOC, then held relaxed, open discussions where students shared their perspectives on university life—what works, what doesn’t, and what could be improved. Their insights were honest, eye-opening, and full of valuable ideas for change.

Creating a Resource for Staff

From these discussions, we developed the Understanding and Supporting Neurodivergent Students Canvas course. The course is flexible and self-guided, allowing Newcastle University colleagues to explore the sections most relevant to them. Whether it’s deadlines, adapting to university life, or common challenges, the course offers real student perspectives and practical recommendations for staff.

The course covers a range of key topics, including:

  • Introduction to Neurodiversity
  • Key Aspects of Student Life
  • Creating an Inclusive Learning Environment
  • Support and Resources

Why Student Voices Matter

One of the most powerful aspects of this project has been hearing directly from students. Many shared not just their struggles but also practical solutions, demonstrating how valuable their voices are in shaping a better university experience.

By listening to students, we have already made positive changes. For example, students told us they like using the Room Finder tool to see what a classroom looks like before attending, as unfamiliar environments can cause significant anxiety. However, many students were unaware of this tool. Thanks to their feedback, we have made it more accessible on the Student Timetables webpage. Hopefully, this is just one of many positive outcomes from this project.

What’s Next?

This project has highlighted the importance of truly listening to students. By ensuring neurodivergent voices are heard and acted upon, we are taking steps towards a more inclusive and supportive university for everyone.

If you are interested in learning more about supporting neurodivergent students, you can self-enrol in the Canvas course using the following link: https://ncl.instructure.com/enroll/B9YKFJ.

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Introducing students to Newcastle University Learning Analytics (NULA)

To introduce NULA to students Jasmine Banks, Education Officer at the Students’ Union, found out more about the system in conversation with Dr Lindsey Ferrie, Academic Lead.

They discuss:
How NULA will benefit you
What you can expect
What you need to do

Watch our Introducing NULA video featuring Jasmine and Lindsey and read Jasmine’s article on the Student Noticeboard to find out how students are being updated.

Why this is important for colleagues

Students are being reassured that NULA is there to help support their learning, not to monitor or judge them. Keeping this in mind can help you talk to students about their data in a way that feels open, positive, and focused on their success.

What’s next?

Students have been encouraged to watch Jasmine Banks’ conversation with Dr. Lindsey Ferrie to learn more about NULA, and we recommend you do the same. This will give you a deeper insight into the messages they’re receiving, enabling you to mirror this approach in your tutoring practice.

For further information on NULA and additional resources, visit Learning Analytics (NULA) | Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle | Newcastle University Or contact the team at learning.analytics@newcastle.ac.uk

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Graduate Teaching Assistants Developers Network – Summer Event 2023: A blog post

Venue/Time:    21 June 2023, University of Manchester

Network:            AdvanceHE_GTA Developers Network

Who:                    Dangeni, Professional Development Adviser, LTDS

In the ever-evolving landscape of higher education, Postgraduates who teach, including Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) play a crucial role in shaping the academic experience of countless students. These passionate educators form the backbone of university classrooms, bringing fresh perspectives and knowledge to enhance the learning environment. My role as a Professional Development Adviser at LTDS involves delivering workshops to postgraduates who teach at Newcastle University, supporting their professional development through the various modules and pathways we offer, e.g. ILTHE and ELTS.

I had the opportunity to attend the Graduate Teaching Assistants Network event at the University of Manchester in June, which brought together researchers and practitioners from different UK universities to share insights and support each other in promoting and developing GTA support. This blog post summarises the highlights and reflections from this enriching experience.

Prior to the event, the organisers facilitated the sharing of materials, resources, ideas and approaches related to GTA development from across the institutions, which can be widely disseminated to various key stakeholders working with GTAs. For example, a practical guide New to Teaching Geography, which offers a starting point for graduate teaching assistants, teaching fellows and demonstrators. Another great example is around measuring the effective teaching through designing a Teaching Observation Form based on undergraduate feedback. These resources already and will benefit GTAs by unpacking the hidden curriculum of teaching and providing practical suggestions for GTAs to take away and implement in their own contexts; it’s also valuable for practitioners like me to reflect on and embed the effective and good practice in our current provision.

What happened on the day

The session began by reflecting on our roles and perspectives, e.g. where we work centrally or in a department, in an academic contract or as professional service staff, is supporting GTAs a core element of our role or something we do in addition to our day-to-day work, understanding that institutional differences and the different roles we play in supporting PgRs with teaching responsibilities require more in-depth discussion and frequent communication to share effective practices and reflect together on potential challenges.

We had key themes running through the day-long programme, such as:

  1. Supporting GTAs within departments, faculties and disciplines across institutions.
  2. The new PSF and its implications for accredited programmes.
  3. Developments in GTA professional learning.

As our Academic Practice Team is working on the reaccreditation, the second theme provide helpful information  regarding support and guidance, such as Advance HE PSF 2023 Associate Fellowship Guidance, Calibration events and Accreditation Policy 2023 (and guidance). The key changes were highlighted regarding D1, Associate Fellow, i.e., for individuals whose practice enables them to evidence some Dimensions. Effectiveness of practice in teaching and/or support of learning is demonstrated through evidence of:

D1.1. Use of appropriate Professional Values, including at least V1 and V3

D1.2 Application of appropriate Core Knowledge, including at least K1, K2 and K3

D1.3 Effective and inclusive practice in at least two of the five Areas of Activity

Inclusion and EDI were mentioned, highlighted and discussed throughout the day, including a workshop on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion by colleagues from the University of Sheffield. This training material is a practical tool for GTAs and us to explore prejudice and discrimination and describe how it can occur in everyday teaching and learning contexts.

My presentation

I presented and shared how we support GTAs through formal programmes and a recently established informal community building event at Newcastle University. In running ILTHE and ELTS and gathering feedback from participants, we found that workshop participants wanted the opportunity to continue to engage with teaching practice and develop their teaching skills after the workshops. This online community has been created based on my teaching experiences as an international GTA and my previous research projects, which looked at GTA, peer-mentoring and researcher development.

What did I think of the day?

The day was packed with insightful, exciting and innovative presentations from colleagues and GTAs from different institutions. I also had many useful resources to take away and great discussions with colleagues to reflect on. Thank you for taking the time to read this GTA-themed blog post. Please get in touch at apt.lts@newcastle.ac.uk if you’d like to chat about our pathways and your practice!

If you are interested in finding out more about the modules and pathways we offer here at Newcastle, check out the following links:

Introduction to Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (ILTHE)

Evidencing Learning and Teaching Skills (ELTS)

Professional Development (Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle website)

Meet Dangeni!

I am a Professional Development Adviser in the Academic Practice Team at LTDS. My teaching and research focus broadly on the teaching and learning provision in the wider context of the internationalisation of higher education.

I am particularly interested in research and practices around international students’ access, engagement and success in postgraduate taught (PGT) and postgraduate research (PGR) settings.

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Vevox is the University’s Audience Interaction System

Following a period of evaluation and testing by colleagues from across the University, Vevox is replacing Ombea as the University’s centrally supported audience interaction system from 1 September 2023. Vevox was selected as the preferred replacement for Ombea as it provides additional functionality and an improved user experience.

Some of the benefits of Vevox:

  • Integration with PowerPoint or standalone web-based software – choose what works best for you
  • ‘Convert to poll’ button in the PowerPoint add-in enabling easy conversion of Ombea slides to Vevox polls
  • A wider range of question types than was possible with Ombea including pin on image and LaTeX notation polls
  • Integration with single-sign-on (SSO) technology to avoid the need for a separate username and password
  • Integrations with Canvas and Teams

From September 2023, Ombea will no longer be centrally supported by LTDS and NUIT and the software will no longer function in teaching spaces.

Training

Training is available for colleagues who are new to Vevox and audience interaction systems. Initial training sessions will be delivered by Vevox and will begin on 12th September. An additional session is also scheduled for current users of Ombea who need to convert their Ombea slides to the new Vevox format (please note: existing Ombea presentations are not compatible with Vevox). Please click on the links below to sign up to a session:

12 September – 15:00 – 16:00 Getting Started with Vevox

12 September – 11:00 – 12:00 Getting Started with Vevox for Ombea Users

If any colleagues need to use Vevox for a session during the first two weeks of September, they are asked to get in touch with LTDS to arrange additional support.

Find out more on the Vevox website, and if you are interested in hearing about the benefits of Vevox from colleagues at other institutions, please see this YouTube video.

Please contact ltds@newcastle.ac.uk with any queries.

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Enabling Students to Plan for and Reflect on Programme Level Assessment

By Levi Croom, Meg Hardiman-Smythe

In the fifth sprint of the Assessment and Feedback Sprint Series a small team of students and colleagues, from across the university, worked collaboratively for three weeks to investigate and design resources that would help answer the question:

How do we articulate a meaningful programme experience that ensures a cohesive assessment journey for all our students?

The initial discovery phase of the sprint revealed that students often struggle to see the ‘big picture’ of their programme and how their assessments relate to and are informed by one another within a modularised system. Rather than understanding their assessments as a journey that is an integral part of their learning, students chiefly viewed them as standalone, disconnected instances that are ‘tacked on’ to the end of a module with the sole purpose being to assess. Rarely were assessments recognised by students as a part of their continued learning and development of skills.

With this in mind, we have created an assessment and feedback planner. The aim of which is to provide students with a resource where they can collate all of their assessment information, across a stage of their programme, so that this can be easily visualised and stored in a single place. More importantly, however, the planner’s primary function is to encourage students to consider the skills that their assessments are designed to develop. This allows students to critically reflect on how these skills are transferable across their modules and the stages of their degree, and how to carry their feedback forward, thereby building a clearer picture of their programme as a whole.

modules

The assessment planner is operated through OneNote, a platform available to all students as part of their Microsoft package. The planner can be used to both type and handwrite information, as well as providing space to import or jot down any key notes. We have provided two links, one to a blank template, and one to a mock-up of a completed planner so you can visualise the planner in action. You can use the tabs to navigate through the planner and for more information we will be creating a ‘getting started’ video soon that offers a guide on using the planner. One of the key benefits of the planner is that it is fully editable so that students on any course can customise it to fit their specific programme’s needs and goals.

OneNote menu
Module Overview page

In the version we have created, we have decided to use a Stage One template, as student validation suggested that receiving the planner in stage one would be most useful to reinforce assessment reflection across all stages in a programme.

“This would have greatly helped me in Stage One”- Student, HaSS

Notes for SEL1003

The most important feature of the planner is the reflective output. We have included a “My Feedback” page for every module, a “Semester Reflection” to act as a bridge across semesters, and a “Thinking Back, Looking Forward” section to reflect on the stage as a whole and to feed forward into the next stage or into the post-degree future. All reflective sections offer students the opportunity to think critically on their assessment goals and knowledge, with questions such as “what assessment skills/knowledge have you developed since starting at Newcastle/since your previous years of study?” and “thinking back, how do you feel about the goals you set at the start of the year? (What progress have you made? Have your goals changed at all?)”. By having open-ended questions that require detailed answers, students can reflect on their educational assessment journey and feed this forward. A link is embedded into the last section of the planner to encourage students to create a new planner for the next year of study, if applicable.

Think back looking forward
Time to pause

We see the “My Assessment Planner” potentially being used as an active tool that students could work through with their Peer Mentor and discuss with their Personal Tutors. This is because when validating the planner with students it was suggested that they would find this most useful if they had the opportunity to review the completed planner with peers or staff.

“I would want this to be a resource facilitated in partnership with staff”- Student, HaSS

The overarching aim of the planner is to provide more cohesion across assessments to enable students to better understand the links between stages and their overall programme.

Try out the Assessment Planner

We have two versions of the assessment planner available for download. These are “packaged” versions of the workbook – simply download them and click to open them in OneNote.

If you have any questions about the ‘My Assessment Planner’ please get in contact with Levi Croom (HaSS Faculty Student Experience Administrator) Levi.Croom@newcastle.ac.uk

See our earlier blog post to view the Sprint Showcase Recording and find out more about our second “Minimum Viable Product” – Programme Assessment Journey Map.

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New to NU Reflect: structured reflective templates

Example of Templates area of NU Reflect

You told us that reflective templates would help you to make more of students’ learning. Structured reflective templates give students prompts to enable them to record their learning and add tags that will help look back and build up a portfolio of learning to demonstrate competencies, knowledge and skills that secure that next step.

Following demand from colleagues and students, and a successful pilot in academic year 2021/22, structured reflective templates will be available within NU Reflect from the 1st August 2022. The Templates area will allow you to create bespoke reflective templates or choose from predefined templates, to support structured student reflection within your programme/module contexts. 

Each template will offer guidance text to support students to write qualitative, impactful reflections in different context, e.g., for personal development, against course specific competencies, etc., providing a meaningful way to engage with reflection, leading to a developed understanding of the reflective process and more autonomy to engage with it throughout the learning journey. 

More information on the Templates area of NU Reflect is available on the Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle website. Case studies from pilot participants highlighting the positive impact the templates had on teaching and learning will be available soon.

If you would like to find out more about how you can implement reflective practice within your programmes/modules, please contact LTDS@newcastle.ac.uk  

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Learning and Teaching Conference: Review

Education for All: Learning Together

The Newcastle University Learning and Teaching Conference took place on March 31. This year’s theme was all about learning together, sharing effective practice, and exploring an education for all.

The event was opened by Professor Tom Ward, PVC Education, and was followed by a keynote presentation from Professor Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education and Head of Department for Educational Research at Lancaster University.

As a result of the fantastic response to our call for submissions we ran several parallel sessions throughout the day, including over 40 workshops, lightning talks and presentations. Video recordings of the event presentations are now available to view via ReCap.

Conference poster and video winners
A massive congratulations to Ashley Reynolds and Eleanor Gordon who won our video competition with their demonstration of how animations can be used to enhance teaching and learning, and to Anna Reid and Vicky Gilbert who won our poster competition with Learning dogs; a winning ‘pawtnership’.

Thanks also to everyone who entered and voted for our winners. All posters are still available to view and video submissions are available in a ReCap playlist.

Conference feedback needed
If you attended the conference, or if you registered but were unable to attend, we would greatly appreciate your thoughts and feedback. This will help us improve our Learning and Teaching Conferences in the future.

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Learning Communities Toolkit

Students around a table

Working alongside student interns, Newcastle University HaSS colleagues have developed a new Learning Communities toolkit – a range of accessible and reusable ice-breaker and community-building resources. Available via Canvas Commons, this toolkit is ideal for educators looking for ways to encourage and facilitate effective learning communities within their module groups.

Why is a learning community needed?
Developing a learning community amongst a group of students can be hugely beneficial. Not only does it provide students with the opportunity to come together in a safe place to share opinions and ask questions, but it also allows them to feel a sense of belonging and connection with other students (this is particularly useful where minority groups are concerned). Learning communities also provide academic benefits: encouraging attendance at lectures, active engagement, and group collaboration. This toolkit provides a range of ideas to get you started and support you along the way in the development of your learning community.

How to use this toolkit
We’ve published our Learning Communities toolkit on Canvas Commons to make it easy to find, download and reuse in your own courses. To help you find activities quickly, we have organised them into three separate categories: Icebreakers, Building Community Activities, and Maintaining Community Activities.

You can preview and download the toolkit here:

https://lor.instructure.com/resources/bb4c049eeff34e15b2091c6fd4755651?shared

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Getting the most out of Synchronous Online Sessions

Like the rest of the University, our colleagues from the Academic Practice Team in the Learning and Teaching Development Service (LTDS) have redeveloped their face to face small group teaching sessions for online delivery.   Their learners are postgraduate research students taking  the Introduction to Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (ILTHE) and academic staff new to Newcastle University who are engaging with Newcastle Educational Practice Scheme (NEPS) Units en route to UKPSF fellowship.   

“In order to make a session engaging online, you have to think about what it is that you’re trying to achieve.”

Dr Rosa Spencer, Professional Development Manager

I met up with Dr Rosa Spencer, Emma McCulloch and Chris Whiting to ask about their top tips on how they planned these 1-2 hour sessions, how they used them to build community, and what they did to keep these Zoom teaching sessions engaging and accessible.

Helpful Hints and Tips

  • Keep group sizes relatively small, 20 people max.
Continue reading “Getting the most out of Synchronous Online Sessions”
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Checking in with our students

This academic year it is more important than ever to capture how our students are doing in these first few weeks of teaching. Two tools that will help us do so are informal module check-ins and the Student Pulse Survey.

Informal Module Check-ins

As the Student Voice Schedule indicates, module leaders are asked to organise informal module check-ins in Teaching Weeks 3 or 4 of each semester. There are various ways in which you can approach these informal check-ins, which will provide you with feedback on students’ engagement and help you decide on any changes you might want to make. Q&A were organised in Teaching Week 2 and at the start of Teaching Week 3 to support you with any queries. Should you have additional queries, do not hesitate to get in touch (ltds@newcastle.ac.uk).

Student Pulse Survey

While the informal check-ins are focused at module level, the Student Pulse Survey gathers information on the student experience at University and programme level.

In Teaching Week 4, all of our taught students will be asked to undertake a short survey. This survey is run centrally from Monday 9th November until Monday 16th November, 10am.

The questions, available on Sharepoint, relate to a student’s overall experience. The survey also includes a reminder about the support available from their personal tutor and an opportunity to request to speak to someone about their broader student experience.

While the administration of the Student Pulse Survey will be managed centrally, we ask that academic units encourage their students to complete the survey, to supplement central promotion. 

The results of the survey are to provide academic units with additional feedback from students on their experience, to further reflect on what is working well and what you may want to adapt/modify for the second half of the semester. The same questions from the Student Pulse Survey will be included in the Stage/Semester Evaluations that will take place at the end of Semester 1. This way you can see whether and if so how student views have developed and changed. 

Academic units will be sent the quantitative results of the Student Pulse Survey on 16th November. Academic units will receive one PDF report of results, per programme per stage of study.