Study Skills

By Kate Coulson – Head of Learning and Teaching Enhancement, University of Northampton “Never work with students”.W.C. Fields (plus a K. V. Coulson embellishment) In my role as Head of Learning and Teaching Enhancement at the University of Northampton, I have a bullet point on my job description that states I must: ‘Lead on the development of mechanisms to enhance student voice involvement as co-creators in learning and teaching’. I have excellent working relationships with our Students Union and their sabbatical officers and take those relationships very seriously: we meet regularly, I support them, they talk to me about concerns […]

Frantzeska Kolyda provides an overview of her article published in issue 27 of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education which aims to encourage educators and universities to explore interventions and practices that cultivate a growth mindset to reduce inequality in the academic success of students and the central role that learning development plays in achieving this. ‘I am not good at maths’, ‘I am not good at this’, ‘my classmates are smarter than me and get things quicker’, ‘I feel like an imposter’; educators may hear students saying. Students’ beliefs about their competence, intelligence, and skills play an […]

Reflecting on who we are: the evolution and growth of Manchester Met’s Learner Development team This #Take5 blog is brought to you by Avril Buchanan, Chad McDonald, and Kate Haley from the Learning Development team at Manchester Metropolitan University following their recent takeover of ALDinHE’s Twitter account.  The post can be seen as a follow up to last week’s #Take5 – which explored finding your feet as a new learning developer. This post constitutes a ‘what the learner developer did next’ – providing some musings on MMU’s LDU’s  evolution, how they currently work and why—and as they say: “recognising that […]

This #Take5 is brought to you from Joy Igiebor a Learning Development Tutor within the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London. This is especially for the newbie LDer who feels a bit lost… who thinks that everybody else knows exactly how to ‘do’ Learning Development whilst they alone are thrashing about in the dark. Joy offers very helpful guidelines on workshops and tutorials – a beginner’s guide to Learning Development. Next week we have a post from the team at MMU – what the learning developer needs to know next. A one – two – three of LD I am […]

This #Take5 is brought to you from our very own Lee Fallin. Lee has been exploring and playing with this AI technology for some time now – and we asked him to share his insights with the wider LD community. So – read on – and let us all join the conversation about what these revolutionary techs mean for our students and for us.  If it’s all about the ChatBots: What about Learning Development? This blog post will muse on the ‘rise of AI’ and what this means for Learning Development. I am not an expert, but I have spent much […]

This #Take5 is brought to you from Julia Reeve – and it is a beautifully detailed and thoughtful look at  LEGO® Serious Play®. Julia Reeve is a National Teaching Fellow based in Leicester who works in diverse educational settings including Further, Higher, prison and community education. Her practice focuses on building confidence, connection and creative thinking via imaginative, multisensory learning. If you’ve never attended a LEGO® Serious Play® session yourself – please, please read on.   Setting the scene My name is Julia Reeve, I’m an educational consultant and part-time lecturer in the Faculty of Business & Law at De Montfort University, Leicester. I’m […]

The Leicester Law School is hosting a one-day legal education conference to cover legal skills and inequality, tech and professional skills. This is a one-day conference that is taking place with funding support from the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE). It is organised by Leicester Law School and specifically: Dr Maribel Canto-Lopez, Dr Arwen Joyce, and Dr Nataly Papadopoulou. There will be three panels with the following themes: 1. Legal Skills and Socio-economic Inequality; 2. Tech Skills in the Law School; 3. Professional Skills in the Law School. The event concludes with reflections from a panel consisting […]

Ellen Spender from Swansea University was awarded ALDinHE research funding. Read more about the research below. Following the recent pandemic when students were, once again, able to return to the in-person on campus learning environment we, as educators, chose to use various teaching strategies to engage our students. The experience of delivering online had highlighted the passive method students had reverted to when the learning environment became virtual. The most common issues we experienced were the reluctance of students to attend with their cameras switched on and that students became passive attendees who listened without taking notes. The aim of […]

This month’s #Take5 is brought to you from Daisy Abbott an interdisciplinary researcher and research developer based in the School of Simulation and Visualisation at The Glasgow School of Art. Daisy experiments with game-based learning – and has created a novel approach to teaching research skills. Research: Mapping and Pathfinding My name is Daisy Abbott, I’m a researcher in game-based learning and teacher of postgraduates at the School of Simulation and Visualisation at The Glasgow School of Art. Join me on my quest to navigate the dangerous lands of teaching Research Skills… Keywords: Research skills, academic skills, higher order thinking skills, […]

In this blog post, we will be sharing the results of our research into student preferences around one-to-one academic writing appointments post-pandemic. The Writing@Liverpool scheme was launched in 2019, with all appointments taking place in-person in the university library. All the writing tutors are current PhD students at the university and are able to offer appointments at times which fit in with their studies. The service was initially popular, with over 600 appointments being attended in the first semester. However, when Covid-19 arrived in March 2020 and appointments moved online via Microsoft Teams, there was a big drop in bookings. […]