Study Skills
#Take5 #82 What does AI mean for Learning Development?
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 …
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#Take5 #79 Bricks behind bars: lessons from LEGO® Serious Play® workshops in prison
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 …
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Legal Skills for Citizens of Change
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 …

Manual notetaking and its effect on increasing student engagement and knowledge retention
Ellen Spender from Swansea University was awarded ALDinHE research funding. Read more about the research below.

#Take5 #73 Teaching research skills – my epic adventure…
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, …
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Research into student preferences around one-to-one academic writing appointments post-pandemic
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. …

LD@3: Study Skills Diagnostic: a multi-stakeholder approach
February 22 @ 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm Workshop content and aims We will present an overview of our process of involving students as partners in the development of our academic and study skills service. Alongside course tutors, library colleagues, and e-learning developers, we designed and implemented an online diagnostic tool for students to complete which assessed their competence in a range of Academic Writing skills (critical writing, structure, and using evidence) and Harvard Referencing. Upon completion of this diagnostic, students were directed to select which workshops they would attend in a mini-conference format; options available depended on how students performed in the diagnostic …
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LD@3 Assessing the impact of study skills sessions
Session abstract: In an attempt to evaluate the impact of study skills sessions on students’ marks a descriptive statistics approach was developed in 2017. This approach focusses on subject-specific study skills sessions embedded in the curriculum that are related directly to individual assessment tasks. The descriptive statistics analysis is based on establishing mark categories, and exploring chronological changes in the proportion for each category. Over the past three academic years, this approach has been used to analyse data on students’ attainment at all levels of study and across various academic subjects. Colleagues from academic schools welcome the change from discussing …
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LD@3 Essay Writing Activity Cards for Creative Disciplines
Session abstract: The Study Skills team at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) in collaboration with a Graphic Design staff and students have developed a set of activity cards to help scaffold students’ essay writing from planning through to editing. These are evidence-based activities drawn from in-course subject-specific and open, cross-disciplinary workshops undertaken at AUB and are translated into principles-based activities. They are designed to provide frameworks for academic research, writing and style based specifically in creative disciplines. Students work in pairs or small groups by following a set of prompts within a selected stage of the writing process. The activity cards …
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#Take5 #58 From ‘Text’ to ‘Teapot’ to ‘Tinkerbell’ – Supporting Students in their Subjects
This #Take5 post is brought to you from Kendall Richards and Nick Pilcher of Edinburgh Napier University – who presented on this topic at the fabulous ScotHELD Winter 2021 Conference. Who we are – and why we wrote this blog We are Kendall Richards and Nick Pilcher. We are lecturers at Edinburgh Napier University. Kendall is in the School of Computing and Nick is in the Business School. Kendall has worked in Australia and the UK in Academic Advice roles, Nick has worked in Scotland in EAP and support roles. We have a recent paper entitled ‘Study Skills: neoliberalism’s perfect Tinkerbell’ which …
