On the 26th of May 2016, our Global BU team had the opportunity to join an exciting conference organised by the Higher Education Academy (HEA). It was a fantastic occasion to celebrate the success of our Global Talent Programme, as well as learn about other successful projects from HEA’s Strategic Excellence Initiative (SEI) for Vice-Chancellors/Principals.
HEA’s Strategic Excellence Initiative
The Conference was held to recognise, share and celebrate the brilliant work conducted by 25 selected UK HE institutions, via HEA’s SEI initiative:
“The initiative is about sharing best practice for the benefit of students across higher education. In sharing best practice, we aim to support the development of high impact approaches to excellence and create tangible learning and teaching resources and case studies that we can disseminate to the sector” (The Higher Education Academy).
The Conference commenced with a networking event and a poster exhibit showcasing each of the 25 projects. The projects were selected back in May 2015 from a competitive pool of over 80 institutions by HEA, to develop innovative institutional strategies in specific areas of learning and teaching. We presented a poster on our HEA SEI-funded project – the Global Talent Programme at Bournemouth University.
Opening the Conference: A Welcome by Professor Stephanie Marshall
Professor Stephanie Marshall, HEA’s Chief Executive Officer, welcomed over 150 guests at the event highlighting that the event was a celebration of the success of forward-thinking approaches by HE institutions, who have demonstrated and developed compelling cases in transforming teaching and learning practice.
Keynote speech by Lord Willetts
Professor Stephanie Marshall followed her welcome by introducing keynote speaker Lord Willetts, the former University Minister. Lord Willetts’ speech focused on his personal reflections of the recent HE White Paper published by Government earlier this May.
The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and its wider ‘reception’ within a global context also featured in this address. Lord Willetts emphasised the need to think outside of the UK HE context in terms of metrics, and the importance of measuring the impact of current initiatives as well as introducing a range of new metrics.
He also called for harnessing the opportunities provided by big data to measure learning gain. He drew on the US HE landscape as a source of good practice, specifically their use of data to proactively track learning gain: “Big data should be taken more seriously – we haven’t sufficiently taken this opportunity up in UK HE” he stressed.
Parallel sessions
The conference programme continued with parallel sessions wherein HEIs presented their respective SEI projects, sharing their experience, learnings and impacts of having undertaken their projects.
We had the pleasure to participate in some brilliant parallel sessions around the employability agenda and find out more about the work being undertaken at other HE institutions, such as Aston University and Oxford Brookes University.
In most sessions we attended, the dominant discourse had been on measuring the impact of institutional initiatives, in line with the call made by Lord Willetts earlier in his keynote.
The Global Talent Programme at BU
Our HEA-funded project, the Global Talent Programme, is an innovative programme that aims to develop our students as future-ready global talent workforce. The Programme is specifically designed to help our students develop a range of Global Talent Attributes required by the future workforce and workplace.
The successful pilot programme concluded recently with participation of 187 BU students and input for over 50% of the sessions led by global employers and experts. We are now working closely with our staff and students to make this the basis of our institutional employability proposition for all students in the new academic year.