News

• Supporting Professional Standards
• Enhancing Graduate Employability
• Towards Learning Creatively
• Brookes eJournal of Learning and Teaching
• Built Environment festival of research methods
• Learning and teaching exhibition
• Improving Student Learning

Supporting Professional Standards

Hazel Peperell (left) and Rosie Phillimore (right) from the School of Technology have been seconded to OCSLD for a year to job share the PL post for Supporting Professional Standards. They will work on two new initiatives: Personal Development Planning (PDP) and Continuing Professional Development (CPD).

They will be offering support to staff who have been given some responsibility for the delivery of PDP in their department. So if that is you, please contact them on their catchy, joint new e-mail address pdp_and_cpd@brookes.ac.uk. They will also be progressing some pilot studies on Continuing Professional Development with a small group of interested academics. Again make contact with them if you have an interest in CPD within Brookes.

Enhancing Graduate Employability

An update from Sarah Graves on the Enhancing Graduate Employability project we featured last issue:

Exciting progress is being made on the Enhancing Graduate Employability project which is investigating how employability skills of hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism students can be enhanced via curriculum interventions. A key project output already generated involves the development of a curriculum audit instrument informed by existing research into employability. Initial themes are emerging around the attributes required for successful employment; we are exploring these further and will publish additional findings as they are generated.

We look forward to keeping you posted as the project progresses and will be hosting a stand during the Oxford Brookes Learning and Teaching Awareness Week. Please feel free to stop by!

If you would like to learn more about this project or get involved with the development of resources, please do not hesitate to contact Sarah Graves (Project Manager).

Towards Learning Creatively

An update from Lyn Bibbings on the Towards Learning Creatively project we featured last issue:

Towards Learning Creatively is a learning and teaching project that will support the work of lecturers (initially in tourism, hospitality, leisure and sport) in developing innovative assessment. The main aim of the project is to encourage and support lecturers in developing an increasingly diverse range of summative assessments in non-written or partly-written formats. These might include presentations, creating videos or running events and exhibitions.

A variety of research methods are being used in the development of the project. These include focus groups with staff and students and audits of current assessment practices at both institutional and course level. To date, focus groups have been undertaken with staff and students from three institutions, and demonstrate that, despite both staff and students talking about a wide variety of different assessment methods, almost all summative assessment in hospitality, leisure and tourism subjects requires solely written evidence.

The next stage of the project is to investigate what would enable lecturers to introduce more creative forms of summative assessment. If you have an example of using non-written summative assessment successfully, we would very much like to talk to you.

Please contact Lyn Bibbings by email or on 4325.

Brookes eJournal of Learning and Teaching

Issue 3 of BeJLT should be out soon ... So the editors are looking for contributions to issue 4. BeJLT is a refereed publication where Brookes staff tell each other and the world at large about their practice. Contributions are welcomed - see the BeJLT notes for contributors page for more information.

Built Environment festival of research methods

'A Guide to Successful Focus Groups', 'Quantitative Analysis – Some things you had not thought of?' These were two of the topics covered in a one day 'festival' of research methods run by the School of the Built Environment. The aim was to enhance and develop the skills of research active staff and research students through a 'festival' of half hour tasters of different tools, tips and techniques they could use in their research. Lots of positive feedback has been received and enthusiasm expressed in following up some the tasters. A lunchtime seminar on 'Discourse Analysis' is next on the agenda.

Bridget Durning

Learning and teaching exhibition

Petra Wend, Deputy Vice-Chancellor says:

The exhibition on Learning and Teaching is evidence of the many and exciting initiatives which colleagues in both academic and administrative departments are involved in. As most of these activities have attracted considerable external funding they are also proof of the University's wider recognition in this area.

Improving Student Learning Through Assessment

On 5-7 September at Imperial College, London, the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development hosted its thirteenth Improving Student Learning (ISL) conference on the theme of assessment. The conference attracted 161 participants from over 90 institutions and 13 different countries. Abstracts of the papers presented are available on our website and the proceedings will be published next year.

Highlights of the conference included:

• a stimulating keynote by Paul Black from Kings College, London, who is a renowned expert and researcher in the field of assessment
• the conference dinner, which was held in the Inner Temple Hall
• a keynote from Jude Carroll, who closed the conference with a barnstorming performance about the interaction of student plagiarism and assessment practice

The Improving Student Learning Symposia grew out of a project started in 1989 to see whether, if you took the student learning research seriously, and made principled changes to courses, it made any difference to the way students learnt and to their learning outcomes. It was the brainchild of Graham Gibbs who was then Head of OCSLD, and OCSLD have continued to organise it every year since (with the help of an invited committee). Graham was very concerned that from his experience, researchers into pedagogy only really tended to talk to other researchers and that their findings had very little, if any, impact on practice. The major aim of ISL has therefore always been to provide a forum which brings together those who are primarily researchers into learning in higher education and those who are primarily practitioners concerned more pragmatically with improving their practice.

Next year’s conference is to be held at the University of Bath, from 4-6 September 2005, and the deadline for submitting papers is 31 January 2006. The theme next year is ‘Improving Student Learning Through Teaching’ – a possibly novel idea, which interestingly has never been a theme before! Details can be found on our web site at: www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsd/1_ocsld/isl2006/