Manchester Metropolitan University

A Learning and Teaching in Science and Engineering faculty event, presented by Stephen Lynch of MMU.

Programme:

Sandwiches: 12:00pm-12:30pm
Talk: 12:30pm-1:30pm
Questions: 1:30pm-2:00pm

Location: John Dalton Lecture Theatre T03

Please contact A.Raja@mmu.ac.uk if you want to attend.

The University Special Interest Group for Support and Retention of Students (SIG-SR) is undertaking a short term project, financed by MMU’s Widening Participation Office, to identify good practice in terms of student support and retention currently occurring within MMU.

We are aware that individuals and groups, working within Faculties and Departments, are undertaking valuable and innovatory practices aimed at supporting and retaining students. We have devised a template to enable staff to detail and critically appraise the support and retention activities they undertake. I anticipate that the template should take between 10 – 20 minutes to fill in. Once we have gathered this information we aim to produce a web based resource of techniques that have been tried and tested within the institution with the originators being available to provide advice.

If you are doing work in this area and would like to contribute to this project by completing the template, please visit the Student Support and Retention SIG page.

The HEA has just announced that the National Teaching Fellowships scheme is being restructured. The individual strand will continue, but with reduced funding and as recognition for good practice rather than with the obligation to carry out a project. The three categories of ‘Experienced Staff’, ‘Learning Support Staff’ and ‘Rising Stars’ have been abolished and the scheme is now open to anyone “engaged in supporting and promoting excellence in student learning”.

In addition, a new project strand has been added. This will allow teams, of whom at least one person must have been an NTFS award holder, to bid for funds up to 200,000 pounds (sorry the keyboard I am using doesn’t have a ‘pound’ sign) on the themes of innovation in the curriculum and student support; quality management; student assessment; or quality management.

The call for nominations for the individual strand will open on 18 January, and the project strand will open in September 2006. Further details will be available from http://www.ntfs.ac.uk/ after 18 January 2006, but feel free to contact the Learning and Teaching Unit before that if you would like to discuss any aspects of this.

The current edition of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice is a ‘special’ on academic integrity. some interesting articles, particularly one doing an evaluation of students’ opinion on the use of ‘Turnitin’, which is the software used by the JISC Plagiarism Detection Service..