Manchester Metropolitan University

Forthcoming Policy and Practice Westminster Briefing, hosted by the House Magazine.

Title: Improving Graduate Employability
Date: Wednesday, 14th September 2011
Time: 10.40am – 3.15pm
Venue: Westminster
Cost: £150 – £225 per place  

For full details please visit the Westminster Briefing Website

Programme outline

The Context:
The impending rise in tuition fees and a ferociously competitive labour market have intensified students’ focus on graduate employability. Universities will need to respond to this change of emphasis quickly, if they are to exploit forthcoming changes to public information about higher education and attract potential undergraduates. This may prove to be a tough challenge, requiring answers to difficult questions. Should HEIs incorporate employability as part of the core curriculum? What can universities do to help students develop a broader set of skills? How can institutions build successful relationships with employers, to provide the kind of contacts and work experience opportunities that will help graduates find jobs?

The Issues: 
Engaging with the panel, key issues to be addressed at this Policy and Practice Briefing include:

• HE policy: outcomes from the ‘Public information about higher education’ consultation
• Promoting the importance of employability: securing buy-in from across your university
• Skills for the workplace: meeting the needs of a diverse range of employers
• Employer ties: developing relationships to provide better opportunities for students
• Work experience: getting the most from internships and industry placements 
• Extra-curricular activities: early engagement with students to help build CVs
• Accreditation: how can employability be recognised and rewarded?
• Marketing higher education to UK & international students: the role of employability
• Cost-effective strategies: improving employability in a tougher financial climate
• Getting it right for post-graduates: meeting heightened expectations 
• Best practice case studies: successful employability strategies pursued by leading HEIs
• View Full Agenda

Objectives & Outcomes:
The morning ‘Current and Future Policy’ session will provide delegates with an opportunity to examine the latest thinking on a range of strategic issues, including: the ‘Public information about higher education’ consultation, management buy-in, employer requirements & work experience programmes. 

The afternoon ‘Policy into Practice’ session will allow participants to examine case studies of how leading HEIs are improving graduate and post-graduate employability. Delegates will leave with practical tips to take back to their organisation.

Register | Booking form | Website |
Agenda

2 nd Annual Quality Assurance and Quality Enhancement in e-Learning Conference ‘Unsolved problems & Unknown issues’

14 th June 2011

Fielder Centre, University of Hertfordshire

This free one-day conference will explore challenges facing the sector in relation to assuring quality whilst also enabling quality enhancement and innovation through technology enhanced learning (TEL). We will be exploring the unsolved problems and trying to identify some of the unknown issues.

Technologies impact on all aspects of the learning process, including teaching, assessment and communication. In light of changes in technologies and the changing role of e-learning within higher education, guidance and policies associated with quality assurance and quality enhancement of technology enhanced learning (TEL) need to be considered and reviewed.

The day will include; a keynote address from Ingeborg Bø, a member of the Board of Directors of European Foundation for Quality in E-learning (EFQUEL); presentations from project teams who have been evaluating the QAQE toolkit (‘A Toolkit for Harnessing Quality Assurance Processes for Technology Enhanced Learning’), and a presentation from members of the University of Hertfordshire who will guide delegates through the development of their law course from face-to-face to distance learning.  The day will conclude with a panel debate on future agendas.

Actively seeking your contributions to the QAQE debate, the day will include networking opportunities and participatory sessions and to explore practitioner needs.

[The conference is being held the day before, and at the same venue as, the International Blended Learning Conference (IBLC) so if delegates attending the IBLC would like to attend the QAQE conference, they would be most welcome.]

Booking details and programme

The SOLSTICE & CLTR 2011 Conference will take place on Wednesday 8th & Thursday 9th June 2011 at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, this well established conference offers:

• a two day event, with day one focussing on elearning and day two focussing on learning and teaching practice
• over 60 sessions covering topics from ‘The Roots of Attrition’ to ‘Enhancing Learning, Teaching and Student Success in Virtual Worlds’
• four excellent keynote speakers; Professor Phil Race, Professor Tony Cook, Dr Mark Childs & Becka Colley
• speakers from all over the UK and international speakers from Hong Kong, South Africa, USA and Pakistan
• an excellent opportunity for networking with UK and international colleagues
• exhibitor & poster area

Complete conference programme

Session abstracts

Registration:

To book your place please complete the online registration form

Colleagues are able to select to attend all of the conference or book on to individual days as appropriate.

Conference Website

Twitter stream

Location: Council Room, 170 Queens Gate, Imperial College, LONDON

Confirmed Guest Speakers:
Dr. Cath Ellis, University of Huddersfield – GradeMark

David Hilton, Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College – PeerMark

Date: 29th June 2011
Time 13:00 – 15:30
Refreshments will be supplied

Turnitin would like to invite you to attend this free event to learn more about Turnitin’s GradeMark and PeerMark features. It is aimed at institutional Turnitin administrators and instructors who would like to learn more about GradeMark and PeerMark.
 
This event will allow you to discuss GradeMark and PeerMark with colleagues from other institutions who have successfully used these features to enhance their teaching practice. We also want to present the new exciting features and plans for Turnitin in 2011.

If you are interested in attending this event, please indicate this via the online registration form.

Representatives of Turnitin will be on hand to offer their guidance and expertise.

The deadline for registrations is Friday 24th June 2011.

A one day ALT event on 16 June in London at Queen Mary’s University Many organisations are turning to recording lectures and other kinds of teaching session, and publishing these internally or externally so that students and others can access the recordings at their leisure. “Lecture Capture” is the awkward name for the family of technologies that support the making of such recordings. The aim of this ALT event is to help participants get to grips with the human, organisational, pedagogic, quality and technical challenges of doing lecture capture well and at scale. A draft programme is now available on the ALT web site, along with an expression of interest form. Bookings will open very soon.

8th of June 2011, 11:00-16:00,
GCU London, 40 Fashion Street, Spitalfields, London, E1 6PX

Keynote speaker: Dr Stefanie Lindstaedt
Knowledge Management Institute, Graz University of Technology (TUG), Austria

The event is free of charge. Places are limited and will be booked on first-come basis.

To register fill in your details here

Abstract
Knowledge-intensive work is changing dramatically due to immense growth of information and digital (mobile) devices, advent of Web 2.0, linked open data, and other technological innovations. . The individual knowledge worker faces challenges such as judging information quality quickly, applying knowledge in new work situations, and being recognised in growing social networks.

This talk will focus on tools that support knowledge work (e.g. through context-aware recommendations), continuous professional competency development (e.g. by increasing awareness about learning opportunities), and organisational knowledge structure evolution (e.g. by discovering process models). Knowledge workers are enabled to effortlessly assemble their personalised knowledge workplaces and to seamlessly interlink them with enterprise knowledge spaces as well as with the web. The creation of such knowledge services requires translating web approaches to local organisational settings. I will present our research results of combining ‘soft computing approaches’ with semantic technologies and illustrate how I have translated them together with partner companies into value-adding products and services. The resulting knowledge services enable seamless integration of individual, community, and organisational learning.

Keynote Speaker:
Dr Stefanie Lindstaedt is Assistant Professor at the Knowledge Management Institute of Graz University of Technology (TUG) and head of the Knowledge Services division at the Know-Center in Graz (Austria). She is scientific coordinator of the MIRROR IP and is scientific co-ordinator of the EU APOSDLE IP, and is partner in a range of other EU-funded projects, including the MATURE IP, the STELLAR NoE, OrganicLingua, etc. Stefanie has published more than 100 scientific papers in conferences and journals and co-supervised 11 PhD theses. Stefanie is co-chair of the I-Know conference and part of the organizing team of the EC-TEL conference. In addition, she is a co-founder of and leads the SIG in Professional Learning.  Stefanie has been awarded her Habilitation in Computer Science from Graz University of Technology (Austria) and holds a PhD and a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU, USA). She was member of the Center for LifeLongLearning and Design and the Institute of Cognitive Science at CU prior to joining the Know-Center. Stefanie leads knowledge management projects with Daimler (Chrysler) Research in Ulm (Germany), and has been product manager for web-globalization services at GlobalSight in Boulder (USA).

The event is free of charge. Places will be booked on first come basis.

To register fill in your details here

More information about the event and TEPL SIG can be found on our Ning platform