Improving Student Learning – For What?
The 15th Improving Student Learning Symposium, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, 3–5 September 2007.
Background
In 1993, the first Improving Student Learning Symposium was held at Warwick University in England. Since then it has become an established event on the international calendar, with up to 200 participants from over 15 countries at each conference. The major aim of the Improving Student Learning Symposia is 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, but from whichever starting point, papers are only accepted if they take a sufficiently scholarly, research-based approach.
To mark the fact that this is the fifteenth symposium, we are holding the symposium outside the UK for the second time, and have chosen the exciting cultural city of Dublin.
We hope that the theme for this symposium – ‘for what?’ – will challenge contributors to consider the purposes of mass higher education in the 21st century. And more specifically, in introducing innovations we hope will improve student learning, what are we actually trying to achieve, and what is that learning for?
Some of the issues contributors may want to address are:
Themes
- Global citizenship
- Internationalisation of the curriculum
- Widening participation
- Lifelong learning
- Employability
- Skills development
- Better practitioners
- The teaching-research nexus
- Better understanding of the discipline
- Learning for learning’s sake
