Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching

"Exploring how technology can support the assessment lifecycle, from the electronic submission of assignments to marking and feedback."

"We're becoming increasingly used to dealing with the routine business of our daily lives online - from paying bills to buying groceries - so we might imagine that the days of students trudging to campus to hand in assignments, or trying to decipher a tutor's scrawled comments are long gone."

"Since 2006, academics at the University of Surrey have been using a 'clicker' based Electronic Voting System (EVS) to engage students and promote interaction in their classrooms. Although the system has served the University well its reliance on proprietary hardware has limited wider adoption. An issue for students was the need to book clickers out from library services and carry additional electronic devices around (not to mention the prospect of incurring a fine if they lost them). For staff, getting the USB 'dongles' (receivers) to pick up the signal from the clickers at the beginning of the lecture was a concern. The time and resources required to manage and distribute clickers and dongles were a further consideration, as were long-term maintenance costs for the institution."

"Lecture Capture - Sometimes it's better to be heard…and not seen"

"A new state-of-the-art lecture capture system has been successfully rolled out at the University of Leeds following the new start of term"

"Contract cheating is the process whereby students auction off the opportunity for others to complete assignments for them. It is an apparently widespread yet under-researched problem. One suggested strategy to prevent contract cheating is to shorten the turnaround time between the release of assignment details and the submission date, thus making it difficult for students to make arrangements with contractors. Here, we outline some characteristics of the current market for contract cheating and demonstrate that short turnaround times are unlikely to prevent contract cheating because requested turnaround times for university-level assignments completed via contract cheating are already short (average 5 days). In addition, for every contractor awarded a job, there are an average of 10 others offering to complete it within the specified time suggesting that there is abundant excess capacity in the market."

""If I have to sit through YET ANOTHER freaking 'professional development' session based on these cockamamie theories, I am going to pluck my eyeballs out and throw them at whatever charlatan the administration hired to conduct said session."- professor on an online academic forum discussing learning myths, including the pyramid."

"Research published today suggests that widely believed myths about neuroscience are being used to justify classroom practice that has "no educational value" "

"Neuromyths in education: Prevalence and predictors of misconceptions among teachers"

"The present research assessed the potential effects of expecting to teach on learning. In two experiments, participants studied passages either in preparation for a later test or in preparation for teaching the passage to another student who would then be tested. In reality, all participants were tested, and no one actually engaged in teaching. Participants expecting to teach produced more complete and better organized free recall of the passage (Experiment 1) and, in general, correctly answered more questions about the passage than did participants expecting a test (Experiment 1), particularly questions covering main points (Experiment 2), consistent with their having engaged in more effective learning strategies. Instilling an expectation to teach thus seems to be a simple, inexpensive intervention with the potential to increase learning efficiency at home and in the classroom"

"Applications are invited for the next Leading Transformation in Learning and Teaching (LTLT) programme which will start in March 2015. LTLT is the leadership programme to transform programmes and courses in higher education to meet new needs and expectations. It has been jointly designed by the HEA and the Leadership Foundation to help participants develop the skills, approaches and insights needed to lead course and programme teams through processes of transformation and innovation in curriculum development"

"The UK Change Agents Network is pleased to announce a call for papers for the inaugural edition of the Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership & Change. The journal will support research into partnerships between staff and students that identify, lead and deliver change in education across all disciplines. This edition will share and celebrate the outcomes of staff and students working in partnership on innovation and change projects. The project is co-funded by Jisc and the University of Greenwich."

"Pushing the laziest student in class to work a little bit harder can be an infuriating task for lecturers. However, where one-to-one mentoring and encouraging words have failed, peer pressure might just work, according to a study on how to motivate so-called "shirkers"."

"CSEDU 2015, the International Conference on Computer Supported Education, aims at becoming a yearly meeting place for presenting and discussing new educational environments, best practices and case studies on innovative technology-based learning strategies, institutional policies on computer supported education including open and distance education, using computers. In particular, the Web is currently a preferred medium for distance learning and the learning practice in this context is usually referred to as e-learning. CSEDU 2014 is expected to give an overview of the state of the art as well as upcoming trends, and to promote discussion about the pedagogical potential of new learning and educational technologies in the academic and corporate world."