In September I gave a Cafe Scientifique talk at the Leeds City Museum on the evolution of mimicry and camouflage. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, Cafe Scientifique offers an opportunity for scientists to give short (or long, depending on how it is run) talks on their research to a general audience and then take questions in an informal setting. I have always been a fan of this kind of outreach, and when Clare Brown, the curator of Natural History at Leeds Museum asked if I wanted to give a talk I jumped at the opportunity. I spent a bit of time pulling resources together for the talk and I thought I would post them here in case anybody else could find a use for them. I have outlined the talk I gave below:Read More »
It’s a pretty exciting time to be teaching in higher education. There has been a wave of critical evaluation (mostly by the teachers themselves) which has led to a great deal of progress over the past couple of years. This has led to a recognition that lecture-based courses are not the “be all and end all” of university teaching, and that there are better ways to do things. Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs for short) are playing quite a large role in redefining how university teachers engage with their students and how we think about delivering the student experience.
The new MOOC from the University of Leeds is called “Fairness and Nature: When Worlds Collide”, and is being run by Professor Jon Lovett in the School of Geography. Jon is a charismatic and passionate guy with a wide range of experiences in the interaction between people and the nature world, and it is these themes that are explored in the course. If you want to find out more, head over to the FutureLearn site and sign up (it’s free!). Here’s a taster:
There are some key characteristics of MOOCs that make them different from conventional university courses:
Variable length – MOOCs can be anything from 1 week to 12 weeks, with the breadth and depth of content varying accordingly.
Entirely online – with no need to rely on built infrastructure, MOOCs can (and, indeed, do!) cater for tens of thousands of students, rather than the usual hundred or so.
Flexible study – because of the online nature, students can participate whenever is convenient for them. Sometimes this means that students drop-off entirely (completion rates are relatively low) but that isn’t really the point of MOOCs. MOOCs are frequently designed to provide access to education for as many people as want it, and any learning is a bonus.
Flexible structure – the online platform allows a wide variety of multimedia, interactive, connected resources to form the backbone of a course. These make for a very engaging learning experience.
All these factors combine to make a new and interested way of teaching and engaging a wider range of students, and I look forward to seeing where the MOOC movement goes.
A graduate student yesterday told me that they were despondent over not having published more during their PhD. I was just pleased that they were considering it at all, because the British PhD culture is still (to a certain extent) fixated on the production of a thesis (which nobody will read) rather than academic journal articles. I thought I would take a few minutes to lay out the reasons that I think you should be trying to publish whatever you can whenever you can:Read More »
So I had a pretty interesting little exchange with the organisers of a new university lecturer-rating website today… We’re in a peculiar place with university education these days. There are a lot more universities these days and students are being a lot more picky over places of study now that they are (in the UK, at least) paying £9k per year to study. This has put an increasing emphasis on league tables and metrics of quality. I thought I would share a few thoughts on these developments because I am both personally interested and professionally invested in the success of my institution in the great scramble to adapt to a new way of “doing university”.
Rate Your Lecturer
It started with this:
The "rate your lecturers" people are on Twitter, if anyone wants to share their views with them! @RYLecturers (via @davemomo)
We had a bit of an exchange after that, and Twitter isn’t really the place for reasoned discourse. Most of the issues that I wanted to raise are fairly well documented at the Rate My Professor Wikipedia page. Still, I’m always willing to try new things, so I did this:
@katatrepsis We have just recieved your first rating, not a bad start! Enlarging the league tables to top 100 soon. Good luck #teaching1st
..and then to the heady heights of number five on what must a very sparse league table! I stand by my concerns. People might think that academics are all unfeeling researchers who only teach when they have to, but I can’t think of anyone among my colleagues who thinks like that. We all put our hearts into our teaching and find it very rewarding (most of the time, anyway!). More than that, we have lots of ways in which we can see what the students think of our teaching:
We have staff-student committees where student representatives let us know what we can do better and liaise directly with the staff who make the decisions about teaching provision.
We have module feedback forms (which aren’t used by the students as much as we would like) on which we collect objective and longterm, comparable data on student satisfaction and teacher performance. This is extremely important to us.
Finally, we ASK THE STUDENTS. I like to think that I maintain a fairly informal teaching environment, and I always ask the students if they find things useful/irrelevant, interesting/boring, and what else they would like to do.
This is not even including the Key Information Set that already contains data comparing student satisfaction with teaching in particular programs. My main concern is that students will be presented with too much information to use to make these decisions and that they will not be sufficiently aware of the limitations of different datasets to make good use of them all. Ironically, this is what we teach them once they get to university!
The final point about the Rate Your Lecturer movement is that it seems to miss the point of universities. They are very much emphasising the teaching role, which ignores the fact that academics have a tripartite job (some would say we have three jobs) as (i) administrators who run the departments and faculties, (ii) researchers who generate ground-breaking research, and (iii) teachers who educate the next generation of citizens. ALL academics do this. We are not “teachers”, “researchers” or “administrators”. We are all three. Which would you value above the others? With a funding crisis brought on by small falls in student enrollment, perhaps we should be focusing on teaching. But where does that leave research? And what about making sure that there is a well-run department in which we can teach and research?
League tables, generally
In general, universities are under a great deal of pressure to perform, and by “perform” I mean increase our rankings in league tables. The Research Excellence Framework is the UK’s main method for judging research outputs and impact, and that is coming to a head in a few months time. The National Student Survey is the other important metric by which we judge ourselves. This covers the teaching aspect, but from the students’ perspective. These vast number of different league tables that are constructed out of these combinations of metrics are extremely confusing for staff, so they must be confusing for students… On the plus side, if an institution isn’t doing well on one table, they’re probably doing well somewhere else! You’ll probably see “ranked in the top 10 in the country” on far more than 10 universities’ websites…
So what do we do?
To be honest, I don’t have a plan. We are in a time of change, and I can’t help but feel that the successful universities will be those that are able to enact transformative policies (i.e. those that change their way of doing things in a BIG way, rather than incrementally). Whether the bigger, older universities have that kind of manouverability remains to be seen, but I’ve seen some really important steps forward in the few months that I have been at my institution and that makes me really excited for where these new challenges are going to push us!
One of the biggest problems that teachers face is providing prompt and useful feedback to students. When 200 students all hand in a piece of work at the same time, it can take over a week of solid marking time (9-5 for 5 days) to adequately assess all of those assignments. Meanwhile the students would like to know what they have done wrong and how they can improve, and in an era of immediate communication over a week can feel like a long time! What I will advocate here is a style of feedback that does not replace that in-depth marking, but can be a useful, complementary tool. I suggest that teachers try to use audio or video recording as a way to provide general feedback immediately following an assessment. This doesn’t have to be based on an overview of all the work that has been handed in, but can be indicative of some of the patterns that emerge as teacher works through the assignments.Read More »
At a time when student : staff ratios are relatively high, it can be difficult to provide the one-to-one attention that students might need in order to get the most out of their time at university, school or college. Office hours are one way in which we as teachers can set aside some of our time to deal with pressing issues. However, the regular format of these office hours tends to be a long queue of students in the hall outside a teacher’s office, and limited contact with individual students who might all have the same question. There are a number of ways in which this process can be improved, and I’ll discuss two of those here.
Scientists have always been very good at jargon-filled articles, to the point that the academic literature itself can be almost completely inaccessible to non-specialists. In more recent times, there has been a big push for scientists to complement those articles with simpler pieces that communicate that research to the general public. In a similar way, we make a point of encouraging science students to adopt the more formal, technical aspect of science writing, but we tend not to focus on providing the skills that the students need to communicate science outside of academia. Web logs (better known as “blogs”) can be a useful medium through which to develop these skills.
I was looking around for an alternative to “clickers” (Who-Wants-to-be-a-Millionaire-style audience response technology) for use in a classroom. These tools really do help with classroom engagement, and the students seem to appreciate the opportunity to interact with the material while the teacher is present (rather than having to wait until the exam!). This also allows anonymous recording of results, banishing the fear that many students have of putting their hand up in the middle of a crowded lecture theatre. There are a few options, such as www.polleverywhere.com, www.qidiq.com, and www.soapbox.com. All of these sites use a web-based approach through an app or website to feed student responses back into a webpage or Powerpoint slide. They work reasonably well, but are limited by either (i) not being free (a problem in this time of university cost-cutting), or (ii) being a tiny bit complicated to use at first (a major issue that reduces the adoption of new technology in teaching). I went looking for an alternative and found Google Forms to be quite a useful little tool.Read More »
A group of UK universities (mine included) have embarked upon a new initiative called “FutureLearn” which seeks to take the raw success of MOOC providers like Udacity, EdX and Coursera (almost exclusively North American) and build them into a diverse and viable teaching framework. This is a really exciting opportunity for the UK universities involved, and I am looking forward to seeing how it turns out. I also have a vested interest, as I am (as of a couple of weeks ago) chairing a Faculty committee on the integration of technology into student learning. However, I have been reading a lot of material about MOOCs that has been less than positive and so I think it is probably worth pointing out some important benefits of MOOCs to help balance the debate:Read More »
I feel that I should demote myself from “blogger” to “occasional blogger”… But I have an excuse! Exciting things are happening, and I have been involved in some new projects which have taken up a considerable amount of time. Aside from a massive EU grant application (which has taken an inordinate amount of time to produce 25,000 words), I have also been finalising the launch of the West Yorkshire Ponds Project (WYPP, click the image to go to the page):
WYPP is the beginning of a new research project that I have had in the pipeline for some time. The aim is to spread knowledge about the value of urban wetlands (focusing on the West Yorkshire region for now) while seeking collaborations with which to advance that knowledge. Feel free to browse around the www.wypp.org site to find out more about the value of ponds (flood prevention, pollution reduction, biodiversity enhancement), and how school ponds can bring nature within reach of the most inner-city of schools.
I’d appreciate feedback or comments on the site, and I’d love to hear from anyone in the West Yorkshire area who might be interested in working with me on this project. It is going to be very community-oriented so the more the merrier!
I was looking around for an alternative to “clickers” (Who-Wants-to-be-a-Millionaire-style audience response technology) for use in a classroom. These tools really do help with classroom engagement, and the students seem to appreciate the opportunity to interact with the material while the teacher is present (rather than having to wait until the exam!). This also allows anonymous recording of results, banishing the fear that many students have of putting their hand up in the middle of a crowded lecture theatre. There are a few options, such as 
A group of UK universities (mine included) have embarked upon a new initiative called “
Katatrepsis 