University of Brighton Pedagogic Research Conference 2011

Today I attended our annual research into teaching conference, a relaxed event, and a chance to see what colleagues around the university have been doing in the past year. The format of the conference is a keynote, four parallel sessions (with a buffet lunch after the third) and then closing plenary at 3 - a perfect model for a cold day in February as we all get to attend everything and still go home early!

Below I present my visual recordings of the sessions I attended for you to view the ones that interest you - fuller details of the speakers and their talks are linked to on the conference webpage.

1. Professor Sally Fincher gave the keynote, speaking about the characteristics of disciplinary-specific pedagogic research and some challenges for its dissemination. I has interested in Sally's comments about the way we increasingly reward research output for lecturers but fail to reward teaching - as if the researching counts more than the doing. It's important to get your priorities right!



2. Barbara Newland describing the eRes project with case studies and a group exercise to design an e-tivity. The group activity reminded me that in order to make effective use of technology, you need to know what is actually possible - as always it boils down to good communication more than fancy kit.



3. PhD student Jody Boehnert speaking about the the difference between what you believe and what you do, and how transformative learning can close this gap.



4. Bob Hughes showing the results from analysing student submission and grade data across an online module. He looks at the implications, the difficulties and the ethics of using this kind of data. I wonder if I can help produce even more data from inside the Blackboard database and how we can produce value for the student experience from this.



5. Jennie Jones & Stephanie Fleischer introduce their findings on the reasons for International students having higher rates of leaving university courses than UK students. Many of the factors that come through are common to all students, and English language issues seem to be the additional factor that makes the rate so much higher in this group. However, what comes across is how highly motivated for study International students are, they want to excel not just get by.



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For more on the techniques I used to make the videos above, please read this post on Visual Recording on the iPad.

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