Study Skills

Event date and time: 21 May 2026, 15.00 – 16.00 Quiet Spaces, Collective Voices: Creative Pedagogies for Reflection and Renewal Educational institutions, and institutions more broadly, often overlook the value of our collective narratives and the stories of those who shaped them. This session offers an active yet meditative space for attendees to engage in and reflect on creative and liberatory practices that have been shared across our community – and in doing so to implicitly honour some of the individuals and collectives who have made contributions to education, society, and our community, whether big or small. The LD community […]

The Essay Route Map: Helping students navigate their academic writing Event date and time: 18th March 2026, 13.30 – 14.30 With Angela Kilpatrick and Andrea Evans, University of Central Lancashire The Essay Route Map is an institution-wide initiative designed to help improve students’ essay writing skills. The interactive online course guides students through the process of writing an essay and brings together the wealth of resources and tools available at the University of Lancashire. Students can feel overwhelmed due to the volume of information available and do not always know what is expected of them in HE, particularly as many […]

Beyond the S**t Sandwich: Empowering Student Learning Through Action-Oriented Feedback Event date and time: 5th March 2026, 12.00 – 13.00 With Bev Hancock-Smith, De Montfort University Bev Hancock-Smith has taught in the Further Education and Higher Education sector for over 15 years. Her role as Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Learning and Study Support (CLaSS) involves designing and delivering lectures and workshops which develop key academic skills for students across the institution. Bev’s wider portfolio includes coordinating Learning Services in-curriculum provision within the faculty of Computing, Engineering and Media; overseeing mentoring opportunities across DMU, with direct responsibility for Dare […]

Event date and time: Wednesday 11 February 2026 14.00 – 15.00 Doctoral candidates often face a complex and opaque journey towards publication. This is usually marked by structural inequalities, hidden disciplinary norms, and varying degrees of institutional support. To address this, we developed Publish Your Article!, a series of workshops designed to demystify the academic publishing process through an inclusive, scaffolded series of sessions combining input on writing for publication with collaborative writing sessions where doctoral candidates work on their own projects in a supportive environment.  Following an overview of the pedagogical principles, design features, and impact of the approach, […]

Who am I to write about this? Hello, my name is Suzanne, and I am a Registered Nurse, PhD student and Associate Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia (yes, we do have lots of sunshine). I am also a recent UniSC Alumni who remembers her student days well, and what kept me on track with my studies in three degrees. What is the problem? Student engagement and interaction in a post-COVID setting is challenging for us Course Coordinators, especially as engagement is directly related to student success. Additionally, many students miss their tutorials due to work/life […]

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 […]