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Queen's University Belfast have a website which is provided for students to show evidence of learning and skills learnt from extra-curricular activities and achievements. "Many activities you participate in - whether you serve as a Course Rep or have a part-time job or are engaged in voluntary work - may be allowing you to acquire important employability skills such as teamwork, leadership, communication and commercial awareness.  The Degree Plus Award allows these skills and this experience to be formally recognised" The Award is awarded by the University and is a 'value added' item which students can get in addition to their formal qualification. 

President of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education argues that students fail because universities don't set up situations for them to succeed.

By this autumn, every university in England will have published a new set of information about every undergraduate course on offer. These Key Information Sets will include data on areas such as contact hours, graduate salaries and student satisfaction. But with little fanfare, one institution has already put itself ahead of the game by displaying information about its graduates in a way that could set a benchmark for the sector. The University of Oxford has created an online tool for comparing data about its graduates' careers and salaries. Tucked away on its main careers website and organised into a set of user-friendly tables, it allows immediate comparisons of the salary and employment status of its alumni from 2008-09 and 2009-10 - undergraduate and postgraduate - sorted by subject area, individual course and even constituent college.

Universities compared to Domino's pizza in terms of serving up options that are ordered online. A plug for the importance of conversation and how that provides learning - and that online conversation (e.g. twitter) is the new 'game changer'. 

"Far more important to me than all the venture-capitalized consortia of elite university MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) and the hundreds of thousands of students flocking to them is a course taught by an adjunct professor at University of Mary Washington."

"TWELVE fifth-year medical students have admitted to taking screen grabs of questions in a University of Adelaide exam."

Learning spaces - pages on university sites.

Lots of resources for students and staff. "LearnHigher - Excellence in Learning DevelopmentThe LearnHigher Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) is a partnership of 16 Universities, led by Liverpool Hope University, committed to improving student learning through providing excellent resources to support students' learning development, and through practice-led research to inform the effective use of those resources. Our resources below in 20 Learning Areas are freely available to all."

"Brown University announced Monday that it had 'Gone Google'... tools like Google Apps, ... could, in some cases, mitigate the need for a full-fledged LMS."

"The DUCKLING project - funded by JISC - at the University of Leicester develops advanced delivery, presentation and assessment processes to enhance the work-based learning experience for students studying remotely."

"TRADITIONAL textbooks will be put on the endangered list next year as the University of Adelaide's Faculty of Science becomes the first tertiary institution to embrace a new approach to online learning." Ahh you need an iPad to do elearning in science, that's the problem.

Go Apple - The University of Adelaide intends to replace undergraduate science textbooks with iPad versions from next year onwards.

"New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person." Would have been nice to cite this morning ;-)

University of Southern Queensland: all teaching staff at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) will have access to use virtual classrooms, online study groups and other innovative educational tools from semester two this year. The tools are part of the Wimba suite of educational technologies that USQ

Open University open educational resources

Open University open educational resources

Videos of a talk on knowledge mobilisation - or How to connect university research with the outside world in order to benefit society.

"Which of the following predictions about the future of libraries were made by university administrators? Within five years, libraries will focus exclusively on electronic resources Academic computing and libraries will merge. Librarians who do not produce will be reassigned or fired. The library will only house materials that are actively used. Libraries will shrink, in both collection size and staffing, and funding will be redirected from libraries to more critical and productive areas of the university." Sound familiar?

" new piece of free software to help students and universities manage academic references more easily has been developed by the Open University and its partners."

"Universities that are forced to get by on dwindling budgets will drive a revolution in information technology, the next president of Universities UK has predicted."

Spaces for Knowledge Generation is an ALTC project which was undertaken as a partnership between La Trobe University as lead institution, Charles Sturt University, Apple and Kneeler Design Architects. The context of the learning experience necessarily changes over time, with technological, economic and social developments influencing the types of learning spaces learners and teachers require to achieve their learning outcomes, and this $220,000 project was designed to inform, guide and support sustainable development of learning and teaching spaces and practices, maximising flexibility so as to be used by as many disciplines as feasible. The project was based on the philosophy that constructivist approaches to learning, as well as to research and study, should make use of technologies and approaches that students favour, and that learning spaces should therefore be organised to accommodate learner-generated aspects of learning. Spaces for Knowledge Generation provides a model for designing student learning environments that is future-focused and sustainable for the medium term.