Embedding excellence through fusion of education, research and professional practice
How can you help your students to understand their assessment and feedback? The Assessment and Feedback toolkit provides lots of resources on some of the tools and strategies to align your assessment and feedback practices within BU policy. And now FLIE have produced this new ‘at-a-glance’ guide to support academic staff in implementing some of… Read more » about Helping students understand assessment and feedback
Are you thinking about using online quizzes for assessment? Using the Brightspace quiz tool can bring several benefits, such as reducing the administrative burden, reaching large cohorts, and providing some basic analytics around question and response statistics. Here we answer some of the frequently asked questions around online quizzes to help get you started. Creating… Read more » about Brightspace online quizzes FAQs
As part of our case study exploring the achievements, challenges and opportunities of Covid-19 on researcher development we are recruiting participants to complete our online survey sharing their experiences during this time. Survey 1: For postgraduate researchers who have engaged in the Doctoral College: Researcher Development Programme over the past 12 months. You can read… Read more » about Implications of Covid-19 on researcher development | Survey
The Brightspace Staff Resources area, available under the Help tab on Brightspace, is full of useful guidance to support staff in the development and delivery of their units. This area continues to grow in response to the acquisition of new tools to facilitate online learning and the sharing of good practice examples. In response to your… Read more » about New look Brightspace staff resources area coming soon
This visual from the Re-engineering Assessment Practices project (www.reap.ac.uk) is designed to help students understand the many forms that feedback takes and their role in maximising feedback opportunities. It could be included in your Brightspace resources, used in assignment tutorials, to accompany assignment briefings, with formative activities and in Academic Advisor meetings. You can find… Read more » about Helping students to understand feedback
D2L, the suppliers of Brightspace, have lots of resources on how to use Brightspace tools (check out the Brightspace Tutorials YouTube channel). This December, they are also offering five 30 min training sessions specifically around online learning, covering topics such as how to structure an online course, how to gamify courses and what personalised learning… Read more » about D2L Online Learning training sessions
Did you know there is lots of analytics data available on Brightspace at unit level? Learning analytics can be key in picking up students who may be falling behind or not engaging and require an intervention, and in facilitating a personal learning experience for students through regular touch points of communication so that students know… Read more » about Monitoring engagement and performance on your units
At this point in the semester you might find these examples, from the BU Assessment & Feedback Toolkit, timely and useful. Formative assessment is a formative task/assessment which is developmental for students’ learning but does not contribute to credit marks. There are many ways in which to engage students in formative feedback activities that help… Read more » about Formative feedback activities
From the 17 November our default recommendation for Zoom sessions will include enabling authentication and using Waiting Rooms, this means students will need to sign-in to join sessions. This change brings in a number of benefits: Improved security as Zoom sessions are restricted to only allow members of the University to join Students will join… Read more » about Zoom security improvements and useful tips
Annual PGR Conference Keynote Speaker & Registration I am extremely happy to announce that our Keynote Speaker for our 12th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference is Professor Edwin van Teijlingen with his keynote talk ‘Flexibility in Research: Dealing with Adversity’. You can read Edwin’s biography and keynote abstract on the conference website. The call for abstracts… Read more » about Annual PGR Conference Keynote Speaker and Registration
