Getting the Context Right for Quality Teaching and Learning

This is the story of top-down, middle-out, and bottom-up change to promote learning and teaching at a regional university in Australia. The case study documents a whole-of-university change process designed to get the context right to enhance university learning and teaching. It describes the baseline for action, the planning processes, and implementation strategies that adapted a project management approach. The chapter explores contestable issues associated with centralised university change processes versus devolved, faculty initiatives, and it shows how these might be combined. It also outlines the guiding principles of the change process, which was informed by a concern to develop coherent student learning journeys, cross-institutional planning, and a community development approach to engage the hearts and minds of staff. It also featured a systems approach designed to make it difficult for staff to get things wrong.

Assembling the Global University

This chapter examines the emergence of the global artistic-entrepreneurial university, the increasing importance of interdisciplinary and innovative pedagogies, and how these new emphases are shaping institutional change. The first section analyzes the global university as an “assemblage,” a process that gathers ideas, materialities, digitized platforms, and human beings into a new form of higher education. Because of the impacts on higher education of the flows of capital, technology, people, and cultural practices in both the “East” and the “West,” this form of the university transcends regional and national boundaries as it builds networks of learning around the world. The second section of the chapter focuses on the increasing importance of interdisciplinarity and developing active and integrative pedagogies organized around fundamental skills and questions. In order to ground the discussion in particular sites, the authors use examples from the University of Hong Kong’s new Core Curriculum and from the University of Washington Bothell’s Discovery Core for first-year students. In the final section, the chapter addresses what the next steps might look like as institutions change themselves to fit a globalized context. This section returns to the idea of the global university as a “hub of an ecology of studio-labs” (Parks, 2005, p. 57) and suggest that the “managerial” university is transitioning into a more flexible model of the “artistic-entrepreneurial” university in order to prosper in an extremely competitive and generative global environment.

The Single Most Consequential Thing We Do in Universities

Assessing students (including giving feedback and making decisions based on assessments) is arguably the single most important thing done in universities in terms of tangible impacts on people’s lives, but assessment is hard to do. Academics are seldom trained in assessment, and for many it is the most worrying aspect of the job. The University of Manchester operates a New Academics Programme for its probationary lecturers, running over three years and encompassing research, teaching, and administrative aspects of academic careers, culminating in a reflective portfolio. This case study describes the introduction of an assessment component into this programme, including its motivation, content, implementation, and evolution, and its reception by the new academics. The assessment component of the New Academics Programme is now delivered in two sessions at different times of the year. The first covers the importance of assessment and gives guidance for designing good assessments and giving feedback. The second session goes more deeply into constructive alignment and learning outcomes, leading on to decision making in exam boards, and ending with a focus on cultivating academic judgement.

Achieving Excellence in Teaching

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the challenges of achieving systemic change in the teaching culture of a research-intensive university. The chapter makes use of a teaching improvement case study to identify both the challenges and the solutions to engaging academics in a research-intensive university with educational professional development. Ongoing issues are identified and future research directions are presented.

Motivating Teaching Excellence

Despite the widespread use of teaching awards in the United States, little is known about whether such awards influence faculty attitudes or behaviors on teaching. Similarly, there is a lack of systematic evidence to understand what motivates faculty beliefs and actions on teaching. This chapter explores what motivates U.S. faculty toward innovation and excellence in teaching. Drawing from a national study of faculty across twenty colleges and universities, the authors find that, like other professionals, U.S. faculty highly value the support of their colleagues, particularly as it applies to innovating in the classroom and pursuing engaged learning practices. They argue there is compelling evidence to suggest that the presence of intrinsic rewards for innovation in teaching (e.g. opportunities to discuss pedagogy with colleagues and building a campus culture supportive of teaching) has greater impact on critical faculty outcomes, such as job satisfaction and commitment, than extrinsic rewards like teaching awards and even stipends.

Research-Inspired Teaching and Teaching-Inspired Research

A shift from pure neuroscience research to research into innovative approaches to teaching and learning has afforded an opportunity to consider ways to develop and integrate technology to improve student learning. Using the authors’ teaching of histology at University College London (UCL), they describe how student learning and engagement in the subject has been advanced through the integration of a Web-based platform for students to view microscope slides. The opportunity to explore these innovations has been facilitated by a recent increase in recognition of teaching at UCL and the consequent expansion of the teaching grant program to explore new technological solutions for learning. In addition, there is now increased incentive to consider new approaches to teaching as a provision has been made for staff promotions to be given primarily on teaching prowess, as opposed to the historical research focus only.

Reflections on the Role of Self-Paced, Online Resources in Higher Education or How YouTube is Teaching Me How to Knit

In higher education sectors around the world, lecturing remains the mainstay of teaching and learning practice (see Bligh, 1998; Jones, 2007). This is despite the fact that countless high-profile and widely read scholars have shown that the pedagogic value of lecturing is questionable (see Bligh, 1998; Gibbs, 1981; Laurillard, 2002). How it has come to be that lecturing persists remains the focus of much speculation (see Jones, 2007). It may be the case, however, that lectures have finally met their match in the form of online, self-paced, on-demand resources. As the availability and number of these resources grows, the viability of face-to-face lecturing as a teaching and learning strategy becomes increasingly tenuous. In this chapter, the authors outline the impact that these resources are having on pedagogy and curriculum design in general and in higher education in particular. They offer a case study of the use of this strategy in a higher education context within an English Literature module. The authors conclude by offering some reflections on their own experiences as on-demand learners and offer some suggestions as to how university teachers and the institutions for which they work may need to rethink the way they operate.

Pedagogical Action Research

In this chapter, the authors consider the dominance of the managerial discourse in higher education today related to staff development in learning and teaching, often perceived as a “top down” policy with which individuals are forced to comply (sometimes their successful completion of probation depends on it). Furthermore, there is an implication of a “deficit” approach to externally imposed staff development in learning and teaching where the assumption is that something in the teacher’s practice needs to be improved (Biggs, 1993). Such an approach does not take account of disciplinary and subject alliances; nor does it intrinsically motivate the individual academic, so it is unlikely to engender any real conceptual change. In light of these issues, the authors put forward a case for establishing strong communities of practice in teaching and learning where professional academics themselves can continue to influence policy and practice within their departments, their institutions, and ultimately, across the sector. In so doing, they draw on an example at one UK university of a community of practice in learning and teaching that evolved as a grass roots Pedagogical Action Research (PAR) group in 2001. Pedagogical action research has been proposed as an effective means of encouraging academics to engage with learning and teaching driven by their own need to know (Breslow, Drew, Healey, Matthew, & Norton, 2004; Norton, 2009). The authors conclude by analysing the effect of this initiative on the individual, the institution, and the wider learning and teaching community.

White Coat Warm heART

In this chapter, the authors explore the concept of excellence in teaching by considering both what has been published in the literature as well as case examples of learner-centered, art-based approaches to medical education. Five issues that relate to using art in medical education discussed include: (1) Learning to Look: visual literacy and its role in developing diagnostic abilities; (2) Building Bridges: the role of art in encouraging inter-disciplinarity; (3) To Cope or Not to Cope: the role of art as a stress-reduction strategy;(4) Death by PowerPoint: transmediation for learning the science of medicine; and (5) Doctor as Artist: the role of art and art-making during professional (medical) identity formation. The authors utilize three case studies to demonstrate 2, 4, and 5.

Quality Teaching Quality Learning

The aim of this chapter is to outline the results of over 20 years’ research into university teaching from a student-learning perspective, how teaching from this perspective relates to student learning (its processes and outcomes), and the implications of this research for supporting quality assurance of, quality enhancement of, and the recognition and reward of teaching and learning in higher education. These results have important implications for how we develop and implement quality assurance and enhancement processes in teaching and learning and how we recognise and reward quality teaching in higher education. If the outcomes of good teaching are quality student learning, then quality assurance, quality enhancement, and the recognition and reward for good teaching needs to focus on the students and their learning. This is a student-focused view of quality teaching. Some of these implications are described by examining some recent developments in quality assurance, enhancement, and recognition and reward at the University of Hong Kong.