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When I was a college student, there were times when I skipped out on buying a required textbook for a course. Finances were always tight, so I tried to balance my checkbook with buying actual books. Even then, textbooks weren’t cheap. Today, students are paying more and more for their higher education experience. If a university can find ways to make attending college more affordable, accessible, and “high-tech/high-touch”, well, it’s not really an option, it’s a necessity.
To wrap up the year, this editorial post celebrates the top ten viewed Teaching Matters blog posts in 2018. This list captures some of the prevalent teaching and learning issues that have been swirling around the general HE zeitgeist this year. Interestingly, three of these posts were written in 2016, showing that the blog’s content is continually being accessed both nationally, and internationally.
MasterCard Foundation Scholars. Photo credit: Muturi Njeri. In this post, Pete Kingsley, the Student Development Coordinator on the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program , describes how the Reflective Coaching scheme is helping support African Mastercard Scholars during their time here at the University of Edinburgh… Over the next seven years, and beginning in 2016, the Mastercard Foundation is supporting 200 African students with full scholarships to study undergraduate and postgraduate
The main image of the Nitrogen MOOC – in Hungarian. In this post, Dr Andi Móring, from the School of GeoSciences , presents the University’s first ever Hungarian MOOC… On 1 st of October, 2018 the first ever Hungarian MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) was launched by the University of Edinburgh on the EdX platform. This MOOC is the Hungarian version of the online course “Nitrogen: A Global Challenge” created at the School of GeoSciences under the lead of Prof.
Credit: pixabay, geralt, CC0 As part of its ambitious Vision 2025 strategy, the University of Edinburgh is committed to provide all students with an international experience. In this post, Dr Justine Seran, who works in Go Abroad, explains how Edinburgh Global is keen to build capacity and develop skills in virtual exchange and experiential learning to provide new, flexible opportunities for students who cannot go on traditional year-long exchanges abroad… With our university graduates e
Higher ed institutions are grappling with declining enrollment. The old ways of recruiting students that institutions used during the go-go years 15 years ago no longer work there is far more competition for a shrinking pool of traditional students, student demographics have changed, and numerous other reasons. This has resulted in deep discounting of tuition, institutions investing in climbing walls and lazy rivers on campus, and other ways to attract prospective students.
Coming back to campus after Thanksgiving may not sound like any fun. However, there is nothing like Christmas music and festive decorations to make the last couple weeks of the semester that much better. Holland, Michigan, may be well known as a beach town, but there is something so enchanting about 8th Street covered in snow and strung with lights and stockings above the Bultman Student Center fireplace.
Coming back to campus after Thanksgiving may not sound like any fun. However, there is nothing like Christmas music and festive decorations to make the last couple weeks of the semester that much better. Holland, Michigan, may be well known as a beach town, but there is something so enchanting about 8th Street covered in snow and strung with lights and stockings above the Bultman Student Center fireplace.
Educational and curricular efforts exist in context. Furthermore, residence life and education departments do not exist on an island. When developing a campus or residential curriculum, it is important to identify partners and stakeholders early on and include them in the curriculum design process. This inclusion can include stages from planning to implementation, and throughout assessment and review processes.
Photo credit: unsplash, Samson Creative, CC0 In this post, Ludovic Maguire, a Business and Economics student, discusses how the breadth of the Global Challenges in Business course – from critical thinking to business to guest lecturers – makes for a valuable experience that emphasises development in the skills of students… Global Challenges for Business is a new first semester course, which started in 2017, and has the unenviable task of introducing business school undergraduat
Credit: EPSRC Proteus In this post, Dr Helen Szoor-McElhinney, an Engagement Strategist in the Deanery of Clinical Sciences, showcases the University of Edinburgh’s first Interdisciplinary Health and Wellbeing Science Shop, Our Health. A Science Shop is a small entity that carries out “scientific research in a wide range of disciplines – usually free of charge and – on behalf of citizens and local civil society” ( www.livingknowledge.org )… The ideas and pedagogical concepts th
By DAVID MYTON. Whatever the future holds, investment in human capital is “a no-regrets policy” that prepares people for the challenges ahead, says the World Bank in its latest examination of the changing nature of work. Three types of skills, it says, are increasingly important in today’s labour markets: Advanced cognitive skills such as complex problem-solving.
Photo credit: unsplash, Piron Guillaume, CC0 In this post, Ashley Ferkol, a recent graduate of the MSc Performance Psychology programme at the University, describes the benefits of partnering with a professional body – the NHS – to collect research data for her dissertation project… Across any professional domain there are numerous qualities, skills, and experiences to consider when qualifying an individual as an expert in their field.
All photos used with permission of the people in them. Photos taken by Hamish Macleod. In this post, Dr Jen Ross, co-director of the Centre of Research in Digital Education , details an international three-day workshop on online teaching, which was delivered to a group of academics in Istanbul who had been displaced to Turkey by the Syria crisis. The visit was orchestrated by Jon Turner, Institute for Academic Development (IAD) director, and one of the University of Edinburgh’s key links with t
Students hand-printing during Welcome Week 2018. Photo credit: Ye Zhiguo. In this post, Professor Mike Shipston, Professor Sue Welburn, Dr John Menzies, and Cristina Matthews, showcase the award-winning Zhejiang University – University of Edinburgh Institute (ZJE) … It is not every day that a transformation in transnational educational programmes is realised.
Credit: unsplash, @frantic, CC0 Over the previous few weeks we’ve heard from a range of lecture recording PTAS projects. In this week’s post, Sarah Cunningham-Burley provides an overview of the other active lecture recording Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme (PTAS) projects, and gives an insight into the work of the Lecture Recording Engagement and Evaluation Group… The Engagement and Evaluation Group was set up to support wide engagement with the opportunities offered by the introdu
Without a focused strategy it can be money poorly spent. An approach relying purely on outbidding competitors through pay per click is no longer going to work.
Growing Universities with Post-Traditional Students podcast with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Carol Aslanian, a market researcher who helps colleges build strategies and new programming to increase enrollment by focusing on post-traditional students, those students who used to be called adult students. Carol began her career in higher education research in the 1980s at The College Board.
Whether it’s friends, clubs, or a major, finding your “thing” in college can be a daunting task. With about 80 different clubs and student groups at Hope College, you have plenty to choose from! Here are some tips that will hopefully help you determine what “thing” is rig ht for you. Think about your interests. Are you an athlete? You don’t have to be on a Hope varsity team to play sports here; there are many intramural options.
Because developing a residential curriculum entails refocusing your departmental efforts towards student learning, it necessarily follows that you must develop a culture of assessment. A culture of assessment is one in which decisions are data-driven and tested through the design, implementation, and review of assessment measures. As Lakos and Phipps (2004) describe it, a culture of assessment is: An organizational environment in which decisions are based on facts, research, and analysis, and wh
A photo of the Afro-West Indian Association from 1915. Credit to Margaret Busby, a relative of Clara Christian, for showing the photo to Uncovered. In this post, Hannah McGurk, a second year student studying German and English Literature, showcases a student-led, research project – UncoverEd – which aims to uncover the history of University of Edinburgh alumnae from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Americas from the 1780s to the 1980s… UncoverEd is a collaborative and decolonisi
Global Challenges for Business Poster Presentation Award Night in the Playfair Library, Dr Sarah Ivory with winning students. Photo credit: Eoin Carey. In this post, Dr Sarah Ivory, a lecturer in the Business School, reflects on why an interdisciplinary course is so important to prepare undergraduate business students for professional employment in an uncertain world… If you ask academics ‘ what is the purpose of undergraduate education ?
Collegis Education Sr. Marketing Technology Manager Dan Antonson presented on “Using Search and AI-Driven Analytics to Deliver Instant Answers to Everyone” at the Big Data Tech conference in Bloomington, Minnesota. The conference was hosted by MinneAnalytics , “a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving the data science and analytics community in Minnesota, the Upper Midwest, and beyond by providing accessible, authentic and engaging events.” Dan Antonson, Sr.
Orestis teaching the Towers project in Ghana. Photo credit: DIEM Project (E4C) This post sees Ryan Gilmour, an electrical engineering student and the ex-Engineering for Change (E4C) society president, talk about the society’s work across schools in Edinburgh on Wednesday afternoons… It seems a fitting time for a discussion around the teaching of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) one year into the Scottish Government’s five-year plan to increase STEM training and teaching,
Students in front of their posters at the Global Challenges in Business 2018 Poster Awards Ceremony In this post, Business with Marketing student, Dasha Selivanova, reports back on the Global Challenges in Business Awards Ceremony Night 2018… Most students who have just joined university are nervous, shy, don’t know how to cook, and are confused about all the academia.
Credit: unsplash, @cferdo, CC0 This month’s issue celebrates global connections in learning and teaching. As Professor James Smith highlighted in an earlier blog post on Internationalisation and Teaching , University of Edinburgh is one of the most international universities in the world. Previous blog posts have highlighted international collaborations with Shanghai College of Fashion , partnerships with African scholars in the MasterCard Foundation Scholar programme , and the impact of
Credit: Pixabay, pixelheart, CC0 At the School of Engineering, Dave Laurenson, James Hopgood and a team of students are exploring ways to enhance engagement with Media Hopper Replay. In this post, they share the findings of their comparative study, funded by a PTAS grant… The context of this study is based on the awareness that contemporary media consumption, such as on YouTube, is typically through short, focused content, presented as part of a meta-enhanced ‘channel’, which c
Our 5th international Higher Education survey to date has now launched, packed with digital marketing insights. How do you compare? What are the latest trends?
Growing Enrollment in Higher Ed with Dr. Drumm McNaughton and Dr. Dewey Clark, a very special university president. Unlike most of his contemporaries, his undergraduate degree is from the school he is now leading, and following graduation, was invited to work on staff in admissions which he did for nine years before going off for a 24-year career in business.
Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday for as long as I can remember. When I tell people this, I generally get a lot of questions asking why. No, it’s not because my favorite food is mashed potatoes (though it definitely takes a nice second to puppy chow) or because I love watching the Lions lose every year. It’s the idea of taking a specific day out of your life to be thankful.
Perspective I attended my first Institute on the Curricular Approach (then the Residential Curriculum Institute) in 2010. Since that point I have attended 8 of the 12 total Institutes and served on faculty and planning committees for 6 of them. With the most recent Institute wrapping up this past week in Chicago, I left the.
Credit: Mihaela Bodlovic September rolls in on the back of a wonderful month of festival and fringe delights. Congratulations to all those who performed at the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas – it was a huge success! This month’s theme focuses on student engagement. How students are inspired and motivated to invest in their learning, what sort of initiatives and spaces institutions create to support engaged learners, and how students can shape the direction of their learning, are all que
Credit: Pixabay, workandapix, CC0 How do you engage students in large lectures? Richard Gratwick, University Teacher in the School of Mathematics, describes how he redesigned the “skills” component of a third-year mathematics course to ensure that students in a large lecture got extensive practise in developing their presentation skills… Giving a presentation will be an unavoidable exercise for most of our graduates.
Resource constrained colleges are looking for ways to do more with less. The topic of process improvement and ways to increase efficiencies had our audience’s attention at the February 2018 Collegis Enrollment Growth Summit. Janyce B. Fadden, director of strategic engagement at University of North Alabama’s College of Business, presented on the process improvement philosophy called Lean Higher Ed.
Photo credit: India Trek students Recently, Dr Winston Kwon wrote about a student engagement initiative , which involved two dozen students from multiple disciplines trekking across India. This month, Niamh Mundy, a Product Design student at Edinburgh College of Art who took part in the India trek, reflects on her experience of exploring the production of sustainable cotton… Cotton is one of the most widely used materials in the fashion industry, yet it remains one of the most environment
Photo credit: Susan Thomson Following on from Karen and Mariana’s post , Samuel Shteinberg, a Sustainable Development student, and Nathan, a Biology student, reflect on their experiences of ‘facilitated group discussions’, which are an integral part of the Our Changing World course tutorials… Samuel I walked into my first Our Changing World (OCW) tutorial ten minutes late.
In this post, 2nd year students of Sustainable Development, Karen Fonstad and Mariana Scholzova, reflect on their involvement in the Our Changing World series. Our Changing World is now in its ninth year, and it is a credit-bearing course. The course is run by the Deanery of Biomedical Sciences but is open to all pre-honours students, and also invites the public to attend the talks alongside the students… Our Changing World is a valuable course because it encourages students to interact w
Boy and safety net, Credit: Flickr, skuds, CC0 In this post, Dr Anna Wood shares the findings emerging from the lecture recording Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme project investigating the effect of lecture recording on student learning in first-year courses in the School of Mathematics and Physics… Almost all lecture recording research is based on ‘traditional’, didactic style lectures: lecturer talking, students listening and writing notes, minimal interaction.
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