Led by Dr Jennifer O'Brien PFHEA NTF, Academic Lead for Sustainability Teaching and Learning and Honorary ITL Fellow

Thursday 07th december 2023, 14:00-15:00, Online - book via the University Training Catalogue  

 Our University Living Lab  links applied research framed around the Sustainable Development Goals between organisations and students who can tailor it for their degree assessment. This is accessible, flexible, assessment that enhances student experience and employability as part of students’ usual assessment.

Over 1000 students have worked with a huge range of partner organisations, including international consultants,

governments, health bodies, charities and local businesses. Impacts range from work on urban resilience that was

presented to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, to consultancy that shaped council carbon policy, via

educational access in rural Uganda and women’s rights in Tanzania. Two students have been employed by

organisations they did their research for many more attribute employability to this experience. Our approach can

be used as assessment within a module as individual or team (interdisciplinary) assessment or students can use our

project database as a source of inspiration for existing assessment. The University Living Lab platform returns

marked, quality work back to the organisation who set it. In time we will return any evidence of sustainable

development impact created by the organisation using the student’s research. The scale of opportunity huge. By

rough calculations, if just half of UoM’s 43,000 students offered us a quarter of their assessment time, we could

harness 7.5 million hours of research time, annually. Imagine the global potential.

Intended Learning Outcomes

· A critical understanding of how a socially responsible curriculum can make a difference

· An insight into how you could contribute to the University Living Lab

· An appreciation of the power of students to affect change through their taught degree programme

· An opportunity to share the University Living Lab going forward.

Led by Dr Jen McBride SFHEA, University Academic Lead for Teaching Excellence and Quality and Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, School of Biological Sciences

This introductory session is aimed at teaching staff who looking for a new, simple, evidence-based approach to enhance students’ communication, learning, and sense of community and belonging in the classroom using digital chatboxes. The session will provide an overview of the findings from ITL Project ‘Watch with me – Blending the synchronous with the asynchronous’ and subsequent work, along with tips and tricks to embed this in your own teaching.

Intended learning outcomes

By the end of the workshop, you will be able to:

• How can we enhance students’ engagement, communication, and harness social environment to optimise learning
• Understand the empirical evidence supporting the use of chatboxes in teaching – what advantages might it provide, for which students, and what is the evidence?
• See how this connects to established pedagogical literature and well-known learning theories
• How to get started creating and presenting a chatbox for use in your own classes
• Understand the advantages and current restrictions of different platforms

This session will be delivered online via Zoom. 

• Book to attend `An evidence-based method to improve student engagement, community, and attainment, in your teaching session`

Find out more about Jen's ITL fellowship project, the outcomes and outputs of Jen's research:

• ITL Fellowship report - Watch with me: Blending the synchronous with the asynchronous (by Dr Jen McBride SFHEA)
• StaffNet article

Led by:

• Dr Stephanie Baines, Associate Dean (Quality Assurance), Senior Lecturer (Education) in Psychology, Brunel University London
• Dr Pauldy Otermans, Senior Lecturer (Education) in Psychology, Director of the Education Hub, Brunel University London

We explored whether AI technologies can aid learning by offering more effective and dynamic ways for students to interact with learning material. Providing one-on-one support to large cohorts is challenging, yet emerging AI technologies show promise in bridging the gap between the support students want and what educators can provide. They offer students a way to engage with their course material in a way that feels fluent and instinctive. A mixture of a survey and focus groups assessed how students perceive and use AI tools, their impressions of its importance to their future careers, and their awareness of AI policies within their universities as well as their AI literacy. Results show mixed responses in terms of students’ familiarity with the tools and what they believe the AI tools could and should not be used for. The results also indicated that students have a thirst to know more about AI tools and their applications.

Based on these results, we designed customised teaching sessions to teach students those skills that they highlighted as important in the survey. These teaching sessions could be rolled out at university-level as they are not subject-specific. This session will share the design and delivery of the AI-specific teaching sessions and how these were perceived by students. In addition, we designed a L4 assessment where students need to demonstrate their abilities of critiquing a ChatGPT output. The session will demonstrate the design of the L4 assessment with the AI element and how students performed on this. Finally, we audited all UG assessments to determine how AI-resistant they were and worked with individual module leads to improve the assessments. The session will cover our approach and what enhancements were made to the assessments for 2023-24 and 2024-25.

• Book to attend