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Hi everyone and welcome to the final PgCHEP module, PHE707 Enhancing L&T in HE. I'm Dr Amanda Platt, Module Coordinator and PgCHEP Course Director.

Once you have consulted the preparatory resources, please use this Padlet to briefly introduce yourself and outline your initial project idea(s), which will form the basis for our group discussions during in Session 1 (13th Dec) and the small group tutorials taking place 14th-16th Dec.

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My name is Karen and I'm a Lecturer in Physiotherapy, currently teaching first year undergraduate students.

I am interested in patient and public involvement (PPI) in research. However, given my new role as a Lecturer, I am keen to apply my knowledge and experiences of PPI to the education setting. This is also something that has been identified as a key priority within the School of Health Sciences.

The project I'm proposing aims to develop and  pilot a standardised questionnaire that evaluates the impact of PPI on student learning. There is already some positive feedback, from previous years, on the value of PPI from the student's perspective. However, developing a standardised evaluation form would enable data to be collected in a reliable and consistent manner across the School, Faculty, and maybe even across the University and beyond! Therefore, this project will develop and subsequently pilot the form prior to it being rolled out across the School.

Looking forward to discussing projects in more detail next week!

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My name is Matias Garcia-Constantino and I'm a Lecturer in Computer Science.

I taught a Human Computer Interaction module in the summer semester and in the semester that is concluding. In the first case the lectures were online and in the second case the lectures were in person. In both cases one of the aspects that I think could have been better was student engagement.

Two initial project ideas I have to improve student engagement are:

1-Including a short video as part of the second coursework. The second coursework is a group project which consists of prototyping and evaluating an emerging user interface. The assignment is submitted in the form of a report but I think including a short video could improve their learning experience, improve their skills as working in groups, and allow them to demonstrate any interactive content that wouldn't be possible on a written report.

2-Work on a guided project during practical sessions. In addition to lectures, the Human Computer Interaction module involves practical sessions in which students work on topics related to the lecture of the corresponding week. The lab reports from the practical sessions don't contribute to the students' mark in the module and I think that could be one reason why as the semester progresses there is a decrease in participation. I think a way to mitigate the engagement decrease in practical sessions could be by presenting a guided project related to an emerging interaction technology (Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, voice assistance, etc.) in which week by week the students work on a different aspect under my guidance. By the end of the semester they would have a working prototype, which would have a mark.

I look forward to this module to keep improving my teaching skills.

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I am Saad Bhatti, Lecturer in GIS and Human Geography mainly teaching distance-learning postgraduate modules. I am also the Course Director of a newly launched (in 2020) Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems PgDip/MSc program.

I have a couple of project ideas in context of distance-learning:
1) Testing strategies for effective distance learning.
2) Developing effective student support strategies for more disparate student populations e.g. mature, international, disabled, online, part-time.

I hope the first session of PHE707 and the tutorial would be helpful in improving my understanding of the project activities, as well as to finalise and refine my project idea.

Looking forward to seeing you all!

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The module I chose to focus upon, and enhance is part of the undergraduate Biomedical Science Degree programme, BMS321 Diploma in Professional Practice (DPP) - Preparation for Placement (Level 4). Feedback from both students and placement employers in the past couple of years have commented that students were entering placement with a lack of communication, maturity and professional relationship knowledge, together with difficulties in being able to reflect on their own practice, all major components of their required registration portfolio. With this in mind I feel that a more robust preparation module needs to be assigned as part of the course.

To help enhance the preparation of our students going into placement, I propose to continue teaching my weekly sessions but also include the following:

1.     Presentations specifically targeted towards the ‘knowledge’ and ‘skills’ section of their portfolio, including using Menti software.

2.     Assessment with MCQs and reflection based on the presentations

3.     Visiting Biomedical Scientists from hospital trust laboratories to help teach current practice and expected requirements prior to placement.

After this week’s workshop I hopefully will be able to have more of a focus on which to focus on or indeed all three if possible.

Looking forward to meeting you all.

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My name is Ryan Quinn, and I am a Lecturer in Accounting with the Ulster Business School. As a result of completing the Independent Learning Materials for this learning block, I am considering an enhancement project in the area of embedding employability into the curriculum. The module for the enhancement project would be a year 1 skills module on the Accounting Pathways Programme ‘Information Skills for Business’.

1)     The project would be focused on a Business Skills Workshop delivered by the Accounting Professional Body CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants). The skills workshop’s aim is to develop skills valued by employers; namely communication, negotiating, presentation skills, data analytics, information systems awareness, problem solving etc.

2)      The Business Skills workshop was run last year. The skills workshop however was poorly attended, when benchmarked against other sessions in the module. As part of completing PHE708 and engaging with the pedagogic literature as part of PHE708, I found that there is research that suggests that summative assessment can be used increase engagement. This is one area I want to research further as part of this enhancement.

3)     As part of an innovation for coursework 2 on PHE708, I incorporated a reflection on this Business skills workshop into the summative assessment strategy of the module (worth 10% of CW2). As a result of carrying out this enhancement project, this would provide me with an opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness of this innovation from PHE708.

4)     I received feedback from the students that did attend the session last year, that they found the workshop of great benefit and really enjoyed the session. As part of this enhancement project, I would also look to collect data from the student’s post-workshop. I could also compare attendance at the session in this academic year to last academic year, and assess how engagement with the session has been impacted in this way.

5)     The Business Skills game looks to incorporate ‘active learning’, ‘collaborative learning’ and looks to develop digital literacy of students. These themes could also be incorporated and evaluated as part of the enhancement.

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My name is Bronagh, I am a Lecturer in Quantity Surveying & Commercial Management.

Upon reviewing the BBL material and reflecting on practice. I scribbled down a few enhancement project ideas which I believe would be of benefit to students & myself:

1. Improved engagement with the flipped classroom approach – in semester 1 2021/2022, only a small number of level 5 students were engaging with learning material prior to tutorials. I have the opportunity in semester 2 to work with the same cohort and investigate methods to improve engagement aligning with SLaTE priorities. I found Conor Murray’s exemplar very helpful.

2. Peer learning – I supervise 8 UG dissertation students and meet with them each approx. every 2 weeks throughout semester 1 & 2. When reflecting on S1 meetings, I have considered a monthly group meeting in addition to individual meetings as and when requested by students. To encourage collaborative learning and improve efficiency (no. of individual meetings required). A group meeting would review progress vs recommended progress, rubric, peer learning / support, encourage engagement with research and promote dialogue between students and myself. It would also add another mode of formative feedback amongst peers.

3. Enhancing the learning environment with Menti software - Level 4 QS students - 3 no. tutorials per week. Tutorial format is typically a set of questions set by the MC which students and tutor will work through together to answer. There is potential to use Menti software in lieu of a Q&A in class to overcome engagement challenges.

After this week’s workshop and tutorial, I will hopefully be able to finalise which of the three above is more appropriate.

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Hi everyone, my name is Leslie George, I am lecturer in physiotherapy.

I am planning to continue to try to enhance a post graduate prescribing module that has been moved online due to the covid-19 pandemic.  I plan to use a survey to  investigate the student experience around delivery and assessment of the module.  I have achieved some nice feedback regarding the new delivery model however some other students have found this a very difficult transition.

I look forward to meeting you all

Leslie

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Hi all,

My name is Bob and I'm a Lecturer in Remote Sensing in the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences. I teach/coordinate a number of postgraduate modules, but the module I'm working on for PHE707 is EGM722: Programming for GIS and Remote Sensing. This is a distance learning module, delivered asynchronously due to the global distribution of the students in the course.

One piece of feedback I received last year from students is that they felt a bit overwhelmed by the details of learning programming. A couple of project ideas I have to try to address this are:

1. Introducing an exercise/increasing emphasis on pre-programming and pseudocode, to help illustrate the importance of planning what a program/script will do, before starting to write the details of the code.

2. Adding some (unmarked) quizzes, so that students have additional ways to test their knowledge/understanding and get some feedback.

3. Introducing some kind of peer feedback/partner learning. Because of the short (< 6 weeks) nature of the module, and the asynchronous nature, I think this might be more difficult, but I've had success with this in another module.

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Hi all,

My name is Aftab Ali and I'm a Lecturer in the School of Computing. I teach Pervasive Computing to MSc students. For the past 3 years the teaching team on Pervasive Computing have been continually developing the practical content for the module. This content has proven to be critical to meeting the learning outcomes of the module. Until now, the content has relied on proprietary hardware (Shimmer 2R) and Software (MATLAB). Whilst this facilitated easy management of the practical sessions on campus and provided simple tools for students who had not programmed in a while, it has somewhat limited the transfer of learning to different settings. Furthermore, relying on these typically expensive platforms, with Shimmer for example costing around £270 per unit, made the remote learning situation we found ourselves in near impossible. Therefore, moving to a more open and cost-effective platform for the practical content was seen as the most suitable solution. Moreover, from the feedback last year, we now decided to deliver the module using a single programming language (i.e., Python).

This time, I will transform the MATLAB and Shimmer practicals to use more contemporary Software (Python) and Hardware (Arduino) tools to further enhance the student experience and learning on the module. This will give the students an opportunity to get experience with cutting edge Machine Learning frameworks and how to deploy created models on resource constrained devices from Arduino. Given the Open nature of these tools, this experience will allow the students greater flexibility within coursework, as they can now build solutions using a variety of sensors and are not limited to the tools provided by a propriety solution. Furthermore, the use of more open and contemporary software allows students to develop increasingly sought-after skills from industry. Moreover, I will proactively use the concept of week-0, where I will develop some videos and step-by-step tutorials for setting up the environments for the experimental work. This will help me in tackling the students with different background and learning environments.

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My name is Leane and I'm a lecturer in Food and Nutrition. I co-ordinate a couple of PG modules that are delivered fully online and are student paced. Interaction between students and with myself is challenging and I feel this could be improved through more peer to peer learning. I tried to implement this but owing to very small student numbers it didn't work very well. I therefore think I will focus on assessment for this enhancement project. This has been raised by a few students as an area that could be improved. I intend to introduce MCQs using Nearpod to assess learning as the students go along to identify anyone who is struggling and to develop a rubric to clarify how written coursework will be assessed. Hopefully this will improve marks overall but will benefit in particular those students who just scrape through with a pass.

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Hello, I’m Ardavan and I’m a Lecturer in Electronic Eng. at the School of Eng. In Semester 2, I’ll be teaching Level 6 programming in C++ (EEE507) and I would like to introduce several enhancements to its delivery, content, and assessment. This module has been traditionally taught in a computer lab, but due to COVID mitigation plans still in place, will have its delivery as a hybrid one, in which lectures will be held online (synchronous/asynchronous). The latter has been already approved by the Head and Associate Head of the School. This will bring its challenges to fully meet learning objectives (LOs) and maintain a smooth delivery of contents, as well as to provide a coherent body of knowledge on this subject. As a general multi-paradigm/disciplinary skill-based module, our engineering cohorts must gain a clear understanding of this subject, to effectively translate real-world problems into their equivalent software-based scenarios and to propose timely solutions. In this regard, I would like to provide them with extra real-time (and recorded) demonstrations of additional numerical examples in a programming-based way, in which extra contents must be developed and written from scratch, on top of existing notes and lecture slides, so our students could enhance their learning of particular topics to be covered every week. Also, as part of their assessment components, there will be a class test and a project, which should both be designed and refined for this term, to fully meet LOs, which would have been otherwise conducted differently. Hence, the above points on additional weekly examples and new design of assessment components, in which students could continue their learning journey (even during assessments) will be the focus of my intended project for PHE707. Hopefully, by appropriately conducting suggested steps, key aspects of this project could be met, and more importantly, effective and well-organized content delivery for EEE507 could be ensured, so our students could maximise their learning experience.

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Hi everyone, I'm Gillian an Assistant Economist for UUEPC. I will be supporting the teaching of Economic Policy (Level 4). After engaging in today's session I aim to improve peer and active learning within this module- this was something I noted from the previous module within PGChep to improve as informal feedback from students made me realise many students didn't know their peers due to the pandemic. We are including a variety of participatory activities in the module next term so I will aim to pick one to assess here.

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Hi folks,

my name is Ben Clements and I work in the School of Sport, mainly on the UG and PG Sports Coaching and Performance courses.

Hopefully today's session has helped funnel some of the initial ideas down to two.

I have a work based learning module with part-time UG students where I only see them for a limited time, maybe 7 x 1 hour seminar sessions. These seminars are intended to provided support, through myself and their peers, for their individual contexts. However, due to a wide range of experience within the students, often the seminars are taken over by other core content that potentially could be delivered in advance of these sessions. One idea is to explore the use of a flipped classroom approach to have this core content available in advance of sessions, thereby maximising the time available in seminars. Rationale being the cohort are part-time students (most are in relatively full-time employment or actively coaching) and this would allow them to access the learning at their own pace in advance of the seminars.

The second idea is based around a module that I am taking over from a colleague. It's a final year module for UG students that currently has 2 elements of assessment (2x written essays and a poster presentation). The way the module is timetabled means that the students are only in every other week. The two written submissions are due in between fortnightly sessions. Feedback from the previous module co-ordinator was that this was a tight turn around to allow feedback to support the learning in the module. I would therefore like to explore the use of audio feedback on one of these written submissions. This would allow me to see if the student feedback was similar to previous research on the benefits of audio feedback, while also allowing me to see if it supports speed of marking/feedback.

Cheers,
Ben

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My name is Saugat Bhattacharyya and I am lecturer in the School of Computing, Engineering & Intelligent Systems. I was teaching two modules in Semester 1, so I do not have any teaching in Semester 2. But I am supervising 7 UG students on their final year project and I will be supervising few PG students in Semester 2 on their dissertation.
So what I have realised from the past few semesters that students working on their projects do not manage their tasks well which leads to a rush to complete in the last minute and hence, poor quality of work. So my idea is to have a project management system in place which will help students manage their workload for their projects/dissertation over the course of 3-4 months.
The system in place would incorporate peer-based feedback session once every two weeks, implementation of pair programming on common elements of the project (such, as the testing phase) and use of project management tools such as Trello to keep track on the progress by both the supervisor and student. Using such tool the student can break the project down to weekly goals.

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Hi Amanda
Since writing the below the modules I'm teaching have changed, but I talked through a new idea with Sarah in the tutorial and will get approval from Head of School on that.
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Hi all,
My name's Kevin Gaffney, I'm a lecturer in Photography with Video (0.5) in the Belfast School of Art. I teach 'staged/constructed imagery' for 1st years, and 'professional practice' for 2nd and 3rd years.

My plan is to pilot a ‘careers lab’ for the 3rd Year Professional Practice module (20 credits, approx 25 students), where I implement  focused 1-on-1 tutorials to explore each  students’ individual career pathways and skills, and smaller group sessions with invited professionals where they present their work and the smaller groups can ask questions and get advice. This would align with UKPSF: A1, A2, and A5.

Currently, the class lecture sessions and seminars address a variety of different career pathways and elements of professional practice, the field of photography with video ranges widely from independent creative practice to commercial practices. If students decide to pursue a more unusual pathway (e.g. medical photography, travel photography) they don’t have the opportunity to get catered advice or one-on-one time in the current module design.

The course director has informed me that there is a budget to invite practicing professionals to speak to the students. My pilot idea for this is to identify three main career plans within the student group and to invite professionals that align to each group. The 3 professionals would present a panel on their professional practice, before splitting into 3 smaller groups for an informal advice session where students are able to ask questions. At the moment, there are no external voices coming into the module and this limits the career pathways the students are exposed to.

This is based on student feedback from both 1st and 2nd years where they were asked how modules I taught could be improved and what was particularly successful:

"This module could be improved through more group sessions, splitting the class up and discussing things with each other"/ " a scheduled one to one at the end of the semester before hand in."/ “The task in small groups helped a lot to learn about different opinions and views. I really liked that we were separated in two groups for our photo series. Like this The teacher could focus more on the students"/ “I preferred when the class was split in two for group tutorials because having a smaller group made me feel more comfortable speaking up.”

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Hi everyone, I am Jo-Anne Watson a lecturer in Management, Leadership and Marketing. Yesterday's first session was super helpful to start the process of deciding and simplifying my project options. I am keen to explore how to improve my feedback by experimenting and evaluating other approaches probably highlighting recorded voice feedback for students. The module I will choose in Semester 2 is BMG492 Business Coaching and Mentoring on the BSc Management Practice. This module has two assessments - Journal on Coaching Practice and a recorded presentation which would lend itself to a digital approach for feedback. Lots of reading is now required!

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Hello everyone,
My name is Therese Maynes and I'm a Lecturer in the School of Nursing, based in Magee Campus. I currently teach into the undergraduate degree programme. The Module that I will use to base my project idea on is a year 3 module focusing on leadership which aims to prepare 3rd year students in the transition to the qualified nurse entering the professional register. My project involves how we deliver the lecturers to very large student number 310 in total, so approx 150 per lecture, currently delivered via long dictatical classroom delivery which can reduce student engagement. I would like to hopefully try to introduce an interactive exercise to demonstrate leadership or even audience response system like Menti to interact with the class midway through and evaluate the response.
Look forward to your comments and suggestions.
Regards
Therese